Angela Duckworth’s research on GRIT reveals why passion and perseverance – not talent –predict workplace success. As baby boomers retire and younger workers enter with lower grit, engagement drops, and retention challenges intensify. Learn why retaining your best employees matters more than ever.
Forbes’ Targeting Turnover Review: “Important Information for Both Senior Executives and Line Managers”
My thanks to Bill Conerly, writing for Forbes, who recently published his thoughts about my new book, Targeting Turnover: Making Managers Accountable to Win the Workforce Crisis.
The quote above was drawn from his Amazon review, where the book has received all five-star ratings so far.
What’s most important about Bill’s comment is that he makes the same shift that Targeting Turnover demands:
Executives and managers must own full responsibility for retention and engagement.
HR will always play an important role – but ownership has to sit with those who directly lead people every day.
The Real Driver of Retention and Engagement: Trust in the Boss
That belief is built on rock-solid research that says the top reason employees stay or leave, and engage or disengage, is how much they trust their immediate, first-line supervisor.
Study after study confirms this link. Leadership quality is the single strongest predictor of whether people feel valued, aligned, and motivated – or disconnected and ready to walk.
Gallup’s data brings this home in unambiguous fashion:
“Of all the codes Gallup has been asked to crack dating back 80 years to our founder George Gallup, the single most profound, distinct, and clarifying finding – EVER – is probably this one:
70 percent of the variance in team engagement is determined solely by the manager.”
That means no initiative, benefit, or cultural campaign can outweigh the impact of the leader employees experience every day.
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Further Reading: The Workforce Crisis Solution: 4 Ways to Turn Engagement into Retention
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Why Engagement Hasn’t Improved in 25 Years
Gallup has reported for decades that employee engagement has barely moved – hovering near one-third of U.S. employees engaged since the late 1990s.
Their reasons?
- Lack of job clarity
- Unskilled managers
- Survey burnout
All true, but there’s a deeper reason:
First-line leaders are almost never held accountable for improving engagement or retention.
Instead, HR teams are asked to “fix” engagement through programs and perks – employee-appreciation weeks, CEO videos, pet insurance, onboarding improvements.
But employees don’t stay longer or work harder because of those interventions. They stay, and they give more, when their direct manager builds trust, sets clear expectations, develops them, and holds everyone to standards that feel fair.
The Accountability Gap
This is where Targeting Turnover takes Gallup’s data and applies it to daily management.
If 70 percent of engagement depends on the manager, then measurement and accountability must start there.
The book presents a research-based system for doing exactly that: holding first-line leaders responsible for the results of their teams, supported by HR but not replaced by HR.
It’s a practical shift from “program ownership” to leadership accountability, and the payoff is measurable – clients routinely see turnover reductions of 40 to 60 percent when accountability systems are implemented.
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Further Reading: Stop Chasing “Fuzzy” Engagement Scores – Start Driving Accountability
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The Bigger Picture: The Workforce Is Shrinking
This matters now more than ever because our available workforce is shrinking fast.
As Targeting Turnover details in Chapter 1, 30 million Baby Boomers are retiring while birth rates continue to fall.
Every employee who quits isn’t just a vacancy – it’s a labor-market loss that may never be refilled.
The countries and companies that retain talent will win. Those that don’t will fall behind economically.
Fresh Thinking That’s Decades Overdue
I’m grateful to Forbes and to Bill Conerly for recognizing the urgency of this message.
Our workforce crisis will not be solved by perks or slogans – it will be solved when leaders at every level are held accountable for the experience they create for their people.
Read Bill Conerly’s full Forbes review here:
Maximize Productivity: Why Employee Retention Is Game-Changing
Connect engagement, retention, and accountability in your organization.
Read Targeting Turnover: Making Managers Accountable to Win the Workforce Crisis. It connects the dots from workforce math to line-leader accountability, with the how-to for embedding Stay Interviews and Finnegan’s Arrow. Available in e-book, audio, and paperback wherever books are sold – including Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and BookPal for group sales.
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