It’s not a new word, of course, but it was made golden as the title of Angela Duckworth’s 2016 bestseller. I bought the book early and have resurrected it many times since, tossing it into my travel bag for business trips. Duckworth, now a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, opens with a story about her father – far from flattering – who repeatedly told young Angela that she was “no genius.” Years later, as he neared the end of his life, she replied, “In the long run, Dad, grit may matter more than talent.”

GRIT Beats Talent

Duckworth defines grit as the power of passion and perseverance. Take her “How Gritty Are You?” assessment on page 55 and you may find it humbling. Her opening story about West Point’s rigorous admissions standards and startling drop-out rate is even more revealing. It’s where she demonstrated to West Point leadership that the single best predictor of cadet success was not talent, test scores, or intelligence – it was GRIT. The willingness to push, persist, and stay the course.

——

Further Reading: Young Workers, “Grit”, and New-Hire Turnover

——

Grit, Generations, and the Workforce Crisis Ahead

In my new book, Targeting Turnover, I explore how GRIT shows up differently across generations – especially as 30 million baby boomers, a cohort known for their grit, exit the workforce. Some of the facts include:

• Gallup’s reporting that employee engagement has reached an 11-year low, and the drop has been particularly acute among remote, hybrid and younger workers.^[i]
• That younger workers are more likely to ghost job interviews and first days or work.
• Terms like “quiet quitting” and “work your wage” are new to our daily lexicon.
• That fewer young workers want the additional responsibilities that come with promotions^[ii]
• The American Psychiatric Association reporting that over half of young professional workers said they needed mental health help in the past year.^[iii]
• That record numbers of young adults are living with their parents^[iv].
• And the pandemic’s impact on school children has been devastating as test scores are substantially down^[v] and absenteeism has nearly doubled.^[vi]

And perhaps most consequential: scientists link America’s sharply declining birthrate to the rise of smartphones beginning in 2011. As especially young people turned inward – toward apps, content, and digital connection – both romantic relationships and marriages declined, and with them the number of children being born.

—–

Further Reading: The Workforce Crisis Just Got Worse: Immigration, Retention & The Future of Work

—–

The Bottom Line of Young Worker Wanderlust

Baby boomers are taking with them their “just a few jobs for life” mindset – and history makes clear that younger generations have always stayed with employers for far shorter periods of time. This reality predicts continued pressure on retention for years to come.^[vii]

Average Length of Employment by Generation

Source: Permission to reproduce. Career Builder published data.

Our Targeting Turnover weekly newsletter and same-named book share a deliberately focused intention: to help you improve employee retention and, by extension, your organization’s bottom line. All the data above leads to one undeniable conclusion:

It is far more cost-effective to retain the good workers you already have than to lose them and start again.

Why GRIT May Matter More Than Talent in 2026

To dive deeper into how GRIT, trust, generational shifts, and manager accountability intersect to shape today’s retention crisis, explore Targeting Turnover: Make Managers Accountable to Win the Workforce Crisis. It is a research-backed, action-ready guide for leaders who want better retention, stronger teams, and measurable results.

Get your copy of Targeting Turnover and equip your managers with the tools to win the workforce crisis. Available in e-book, audio, and paperback wherever books are sold – including Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and BookPal for group sales.

[i] Jim Harter, “US Engagement Hits 11-Year Low,”, Gallup, April 10, 2024 https://www.gallup.com/workplace/643286/engagement-hits-11-year-low.aspx#:~:text=In%20the%20latest%20reading%2C%20from,than%202020’s%20high%20of%2036%25.

[ii] Tim Paradis, “Gen Zers Are Saying ‘No Thanks’ to Promotions For Reasons That Go Beyond Money,” Business Insider, November 8, 2023: https://www.businessinsider.com/gen-z-rejects-promotions-management-roles-traditional-corporate-ladder-2023-11

[iii] Jean M. Twenge, “Have Smart Phones Destroyed A Generation, The Atlantic, September 2017; https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/has-the-smartphone-destroyed-a-generation/534198/

[iv] Jean Sahadi, “Many parents say they are still financially subsidizing their adult children,” CNN Business, January 25, 2024; https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/25/success/parenting-adult-children-living-home/index.html

[v] Tom Swiderski and Sarah Crittenden Fuller, “Student GPA and test score gaps are growing – and could be slowing pandemic recovery,” Brookings, November 6, 2023; https://www.brookings.edu/articles/student-gpa-and-test-score-gaps-are-growing-and-could-be-slowing-pandemic-recovery/#:~:text=At%20every%20letter%20grade%2C%20post,peers%20who%20earned%20an%20A.

[vi] Alec MacGillis, ”Skipping School: America’s Hidden Education Crisis,” ProPublica, January 8, 2024;

[vii] “Millennials or Gen Z: who’s doing the most job-hopping,” Career Builder blog for job-seekers; https://www.careerbuilder.com/advice/blog/how-long-should-you-stay-in-a-job

The post The GRIT Gap: How Generational Shifts Are Reshaping Employee Retention appeared first on C-Suite Analytics.

Today’s workforce challenge isn’t mass quitting. It’s something more complicated, and, in many ways, more dangerous. It’s a blend of stubborn labor shortages, historically low birth rates, lower immigration, declining engagement, and what I call The Great Detachment: employees who may not quit, but who are mentally checked out.

And one of the quietest but most meaningful indicators of this shift is how few people are being fired.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that U.S. discharges remain at historic lows, consistently under 1%. In some recent months, the rate dipped near the record set during The Great Resignation. That means 99% of workers were deemed “good enough” to keep…even though our experience as consumers clearly suggests otherwise.

Restaurants, retail stores, service centers, you’ve seen it. Skills aren’t always there. Interest isn’t always there. Dedication is hit-or-miss. Yet employees aren’t being removed. Why? Because managers are scared. Scared that if they fire a poor performer, the job will sit open for months. Scared the next hire may be worse. Scared they won’t get any candidates at all.

So they muscle through it. They tolerate mediocrity. They quietly lower the bar.

But here’s the real danger, one that gets far less attention than it should.

The Hidden Cost of Keeping Poor Performers

Keeping poor performers doesn’t just hurt customers.
It drives away your best employees.

In Targeting Turnover, I present decades of research showing that top performers out-produce average performers by four to one. One long-running academic analysis found that the top 5% generated 26% of total company output across industries. Your top people are literally doing the work of five employees. They’re your informal leaders. They set the pace. They keep you competitive.

And nothing demoralizes them faster than working alongside someone who doesn’t carry their weight.

—–

Further Reading: Pay or Disrespect – What Drives High Performer Turnover?

—–

What Your Employees Really Talk About Over Dinner

If you want to know what your employees really feel, ask yourself one simple question: What are they talking about over dinner?

Because it’s not survey questions.
It’s not mission statements.
It’s not the new PTO policy.

They talk about their bosses.
They talk about their colleagues.
And they talk about the daily frustrations that accumulate, quietly and relentlessly.

Every team has that one person. And every time your top performers go home and complain about that person, you’ve lost a little more of their commitment.

When you keep a low performer, you tell your top performers something they hear loud and clear:

“We won’t protect you.”

And when your best employees stop feeling supported, they stop staying loyal.

What Happens When You Keep the Wrong People

Yes, retaining poor performers puts you at risk of retaining only poor performers.

Far too many organizations today treat accountability as optional in a tight labor market. But accountability isn’t optional. It’s foundational. And companies that hold onto substandard workers eventually stall, through slower service, weaker culture, and the loss of their strongest contributors.

—–

Further Reading: From Resignation to Detachment: The Workforce Crisis Has Evolved

—–

The Real Fix: Reduce Turnover First

The solution is not firing more employees.
The solution is reducing turnover so managers can hold employees accountable again.

This is the core argument in Targeting Turnover: you restore accountability by first restoring stability.

When employees trust their supervisors, the #1 reason people stay or leave, turnover falls. When turnover falls, your open-jobs list shrinks. And when that list shrinks, managers finally gain the confidence to act on poor performance instead of avoiding it.

This is what gives organizations the leverage they’ve lost.

Additional Steps That Strengthen Accountability

1. Keep hiring standards high, even when someone says “I just need a body.”
2. Give new hires the skill training they need to succeed.
3. Hold managers accountable for retaining poor performers, and coach or remove the managers who refuse to manage.

Because the risk of letting poor performers slide is always the same:

You end up with a workforce full of people who can’t or won’t do the job.

Ready to Rebuild Accountability on Your Teams?

If you want the research, strategies, and practical steps to rebuild accountability, and dramatically reduce employee turnover, explore my new book, Targeting Turnover: Making Managers Accountable to Win the Workforce Crisis. Available in e-book, audio, and paperback wherever books are sold – including Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and BookPal for group sales.

It shows how leaders across industries are cutting turnover by 30% or more, even in a labor market defined by scarcity. And more importantly, it shows how you can apply the same principles to restore performance, retention, and results in your organization.

The post Dilemma: Should You Fire Poor Performers in Today’s Talent Crisis? appeared first on C-Suite Analytics.

My interest isn’t academic. It’s tied directly to a core challenge we address with clients every day: how to retain employees who come from tough, disadvantaged backgrounds, especially in a labor market where the workforce is shrinking and turnover hits harder than ever.

A Personal Starting Point

I grew up in a run-down neighborhood on the north side of Pittsburgh. We weren’t poor; we were lower middle class with parents who made sure we had what we needed. Like most kids, we assumed our world was normal.

But it wasn’t poverty.

In Bridges Out of Poverty, authors Payne, DeVol, and Smith define poverty as “the extent to which an individual does without resources.” And they list nine resource categories that go far beyond money: emotional, mental, spiritual, physical, support systems, relationships/role models, knowledge of hidden rules, and coping strategies.

These are the resources that determine whether someone can show up to work consistently – not because they lack commitment, but because they lack stability.

The Reality Many Employers Miss

In my early management years, I clung to a naïve equation:
work = money = a way out of poverty
Therefore, I assumed employees battling poverty would protect their jobs at all costs.

But stories like this corrected that thinking:

“Like many individuals who live in poverty, Sally doesn’t know the middle-class rules about not missing work or being late. She has brought her poverty-culture rules to work…The supervisor, operating from a middle-class orientation, is baffled by Sally’s chaotic lifestyle, unreliable childcare, and lack of consistent transportation.”

Sally wasn’t lazy. She was operating with scarce emotional and practical resources. And in today’s labor market – one defined by low population growth, low immigration, and persistent shortages in frontline roles – Sally is not rare. She is increasingly the backbone of the U.S. workforce.

Workforce Realities Have Shifted – Turnover Has Not

In Targeting Turnover, I make the point that the top reason employees stay or quit is the same today as it was 30 years ago: trust in their immediate supervisor. That hasn’t changed.

But the context around attendance has.

Employers today take bigger chances on imperfect candidates because they must. Retention has become an economic imperative, and one absence-prone employee can cost far more than their paycheck.

So the question becomes:
How can we hire and retain candidates who may not have the resources or “hidden rules” of middle-class work culture?

Here are proven strategies.

Before Hire: Set Clear Expectations and Screen for Realities

Clarity saves everyone disappointment. Here’s what works:

• Make your attendance policy painfully clear. Don’t bury it. Say it out loud. Put it in writing.
• Tell a true story about an ex-employee who didn’t make it because of attendance – no names, full context.
• Explain your call-out procedure and make clear that communication is required.
• Ask directly about transportation and childcare, then probe for reliability.
• Ask for a confidence rating (1–10) on meeting your attendance expectations for the first 90 days.
• Invite the candidate to opt out if they can’t commit.

These steps don’t eliminate risk – but they help candidates make an honest assessment before you hire them.

After Hire: Coach to the Real Issues

Once on board, you can ask more specific questions – always with supportive tone, not interrogation:

• What’s your back-up childcare plan?
• What’s your back-up transportation plan?
• What happens on mornings when things go wrong?
• What do you wish you had in place that would make it easier to get here consistently?

Talk through options. Solutions that seem obvious to you may not be visible to someone navigating daily instability.

This coaching builds trust – and trust builds retention.

—–

Further Reading: From Resignation to Detachment: The Workforce Crisis Has Evolved

——

Accountability Matters: Change “Attendance” to “Attendance/Bad Hire”

One of the central themes in Targeting Turnover is that retention improves when managers own accountability.

If a new hire washes out in the first 90 days because of attendance and we mark the exit reason simply as “attendance,” we learn nothing. The category provides no solutions and no responsibility for hiring decisions.

Changing the exit reason to “attendance/bad hire” signals this:

• We controlled the selection process.
• We took the risk.
• We need to improve how we assess attendance reliability.

Sometimes HR screens more carefully; sometimes hiring managers do. What matters is shifting from “the employee failed us” to “we chose the wrong candidate based on the information we had.”

Accountability raises decision quality. Decision quality raises retention.

—–

Further Reading: Stop Chasing “Fuzzy” Engagement Scores – Start Driving Accountability

——

The Bigger Message

As the U.S. workforce continues to shrink and competition intensifies, organizations cannot afford to ignore the realities of poverty – or to hope attendance challenges solve themselves.

We can’t fix every challenge in a new hire’s life.
But we can control:

• How clearly we set expectations
• How we screen for reliability
• How we coach early
• How we hold ourselves accountable for hiring decisions

And those levers move retention.

Want to Cut Turnover in Your Frontline Roles?

If you’re struggling with attendance, early exits, or frontline retention, let’s talk.

Email me at dfinnegan@c-suiteanalytics.com to schedule a free strategy session. I’ll listen, probe deeply, and work with you to identify the exact levers that will reduce turnover and strengthen your workforce.

Connect engagement, retention, and accountability in your organization.
Read Targeting Turnover: Making Managers Accountable to Win the Workforce Crisis.
Available in e-book, audio, and paperback wherever books are sold – including Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and BookPal for group sales.

The post Poverty, Attendance, Hidden Rules, and the Truth About Retention appeared first on C-Suite Analytics.

Today we’ll look at who it matters to most, drawing from an excerpt of my new book, Targeting Turnover. This is thoughtful, research-driven work, and I think you’ll find it fascinating.

A Job, a Career, or a Calling?

Yale professor Dr. Amy Wrzesniewski has studied how individuals identify with their work and found three distinct mindsets: job, career, and calling. Each one shapes how much compensation matters.

• JOB: A job provides pay, benefits, and perhaps some social perks. It’s primarily about earning a paycheck. People in this category are more invested in their lives outside of work; the job funds what they love to do beyond it.
• CAREER: A job is something you do for others; a career is what you build for yourself. Career professionals still work for the paycheck, but they’re also motivated by advancement and recognition.
• CALLING: People who see their work as a calling feel a deep alignment between what they do and who they are. They find meaning and personal fulfillment in their work itself.[i]

You likely know people who fit each category. Dr. Wrzesniewski emphasizes that all three are honorable – dissonance arises only when we find ourselves misaligned. If you simply want to do good work and go home, the “job” mindset can bring satisfaction. But if you crave deeper purpose and find yourself in a purely transactional environment, frustration follows.

Compensation, of course, plays a role in all three. But it’s more central for some than others. Those with a career mindset often chase higher pay and promotions, while those with a calling are driven by meaning and impact.

For instance, social service agencies might seek people motivated by a sense of purpose, while investment banks may thrive by attracting career-driven employees who compete for higher earnings.

So ask yourself: which of these three work contexts best fits your organization’s highest-turnover roles?

—–

Further Reading: Are You Hiring for a Calling or a Job? It Impacts Retention

——

The Impact on Minimum-Wage Workers

We often classify U.S. workers as exempt vs. non-exempt, or white collar vs. blue collar, but minimum-wage jobs stand apart. Many of these roles offer limited advancement opportunity and are assumed to be “just for the money.”

But that assumption misses something vital.

UCLA professor Mike Rose, in his book The Mind at Work, explored the intelligence and craft of America’s working class, from waitresses to welders. His research challenges the idea that manual jobs are low-skill.

Here’s how one hair stylist, Sharon, described her approach to cutting hair:

“You’ve got to add up all these pieces of the puzzle, and then at the end you’ve got to come up with a thought, OK, it’s gotta be this length, it’s gotta be layered here, it’s got to be textured there, it can have a fringe, it can’t have a fringe, you know, so the thought process goes…It’s not like we just start cutting. By the time I take my client to the shampoo bowl, after the consultation, I already have a little road map as to how I’m going to cut this haircut.”[ii]

It’s hard not to see Sharon’s work as a calling.

——

Further Reading: Why Stay Interviews Q2 is Deceptively Simple – and Powerful

——

Dr. Wrzesniewski found the same potential among hospital custodians.
One, named Luke, cleaned a patient’s room a second time so the patient’s father, who had missed the first cleaning, could see it done. Another, Carlotta, changed the artwork on the walls of comatose patients’ rooms so that when they woke, they would see something new.

Carlotta explained:

“I enjoy entertaining patients. That’s what I enjoy the most. And that is not really part of my job description. But I like putting on a show for them, per se. Dancing if there is a certain song on, I get to dance and if a talk show is on, I get to talk about that talk show or whatever. That’s what I enjoy most. I enjoy making people laugh.”[iii]

Their stories remind us that meaning and pride can exist at any pay level. Even among minimum-wage workers, pay alone rarely drives engagement or retention.

The Metrics That Matter Most

I wrote my book, Targeting Turnover: Making Managers Accountable to Win the Workforce Crisis, after years of waiting to see what challenge would define our post-pandemic workforce. What I found had little to do with COVID-19. It was demographic.

Economists have long warned about the twin forces of mass baby-boomer retirements and declining birthrates – but the numbers hadn’t been fully translated into real workforce math. After months of digging and direct conversations with the U.S. Census Bureau, I uncovered the full picture.

Here it is in one sentence:

The U.S. will add only one-fifth as many working-age adults going forward as it has in the past.

That shift begins now, in 2025.

Every employee who quits today isn’t just a vacancy – it’s a labor-market loss that may never be replaced. The countries and companies that retain talent will win. Those that don’t will fall behind economically.

Perks won’t fix this. Slogans won’t either.

The only sustainable solution is leadership accountability – holding managers responsible for the experiences they create and the trust they build.

That’s where Targeting Turnover comes in: connecting engagement, retention, and accountability into one actionable model for leaders at every level.

Connect engagement, retention, and accountability in your organization.
Read Targeting Turnover: Making Managers Accountable to Win the Workforce Crisis.
Available in e-book, audio, and paperback wherever books are sold – including Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and BookPal for group sales.

[i] Katharine Brooks, “Job, Career, Calling: Key to Happiness and Meaning at Work?” Psychology Today, June 29, 2012; https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/career-transitions/201206/job-career-calling-key-happiness-and-meaning-work

[ii] Mike Rose, The Mind At Work, New York: Penguin Books, 2004

[iii] Barry Schwartz, Why We Work. New York: Simon & Schuster, TED Books, 2015

The post Does Pay Matter More for Some Jobs Than Others? appeared first on C-Suite Analytics.

Fewer people are quitting now, but more are quietly checking out. U.S. engagement has dropped to its lowest level in a decade, with only 31 percent of employees engaged and 17 percent actively disengaged.[i] And though monthly quits have fallen to around 3.2 million[ii], half of employees still say they are watching or actively seeking new jobs.[iii]

The resignation wave may have crested, but the detachment tide is still rising. To lead through it, managers must understand why this is happening and how to take ownership. Here are ten forces that turned a short-term labor shock into a long-term mindset shift.

1. Cultural Shifts That Rewired Worker Expectations

Movements like #MeToo and racial-justice protests permanently changed how people expect to be treated at work. Employees no longer tolerate toxic leaders or inequitable systems. They want psychological safety and transparency, and will quietly disengage if they don’t get it.

2. Pandemic Aftershocks and the Meaning-of-Work Reckoning

The pandemic caused millions to rethink priorities. Even as routines returned, the existential question, “What am I working for?”, remains. That question didn’t vanish with vaccines; it’s now woven into every retention challenge.

3. Women and Caregivers Still Demand Flexibility

Women left the workforce in record numbers in 2021, and while many returned, flexibility has become a permanent expectation. Organizations that treat flexibility as a perk instead of a core policy are watching women, and their discretionary effort, drift away.

4. Entrepreneurship and the Freedom Factor

Entrepreneurship surged by 24 percent during the Great Resignation[iv], and the spirit hasn’t faded. Side hustles and independent work continue to redefine what “job security” means. Detachment thrives when employees feel trapped by bureaucracy rather than inspired by purpose.

5. Retirements Reshaped the Labor Market

More than 2 million excess retirements during and after the pandemic created permanent knowledge gaps.[v] Younger employees have stepped in, but without the mentoring and trust networks retirees once provided, many feel untethered from institutional purpose.

6. A Shrinking Labor Pool

America’s population growth has slowed to historic lows. The labor force participation rate remains about 1 percentage point below pre-pandemic levels[vi], and immigration shortfalls have compounded the strain. Fewer workers mean higher pressure on the ones who remain, and higher burnout risk.

——

Further Reading: The Workforce Crisis Just Got Worse: Immigration, Retention & The Future of Work

——

7. Global Talent Declines and “Toxic Politics”

The United States still struggles to attract global talent at pre-2016 levels. High-skilled visas have not rebounded, and international researchers and clinicians continue to cite political and cultural polarization as reasons to work elsewhere. Detachment isn’t only emotional, it’s demographic.

8. The Lingering Human Toll of the Pandemic

Beyond the tragic loss of life, the pandemic altered how workers view health, risk, and loyalty. “Workplace safety” now means both physical and psychological safety. When leaders ignore that evolution, employees disengage, not necessarily out of defiance, but self-preservation.

——

Further Reading: Young Worker Safety Perceptions and Supervisor Trust

——

9. An Overabundance of Options

Even today, over 8 million job openings remain across the U.S. economy.[vii] Hybrid and remote work expanded the map of opportunity. Detachment accelerates when employees feel they always have somewhere else to go, without ever having to leave home.

10. Generational Power and the Detachment Mindset

Millennials and Gen Z now make up more than half of the workforce, with millennials alone reaching 75 percent by 2025.[viii] These workers are redefining success around fulfillment and flexibility, not loyalty. Their power in the labor market has created a new normal: people don’t quit because of bad companies, they detach because of bad leadership.

The Permanent Shift: From Turnover to Trust

The Wall Street Journal once warned that labor shortages might be “permanent.”[ix] Three years later, we see the deeper permanence: employees’ expectations of leadership have changed forever. The Great Detachment is less about people leaving jobs and more about them losing faith in leaders.

Workforce clouds will stay dark until organizations rebuild trust one manager at a time. Those who measure and manage that trust will out-recruit, out-retain, and out-perform everyone else.

Let’s make The Great Detachment our wake-up call – not our new normal.

The Bottom Line

That’s why the core principle of my new book, Targeting Turnover: Making Managers Accountable to Win the Workforce Crisis, is simple but urgent: Retention is a manager-accountability issue.

Turnover doesn’t start in the boardroom, it starts in the relationship between an employee and their leader. The antidote to detachment isn’t another perk or pay bump. It’s trust, conversation, and connection.

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.

[i] HR Dive. (2024, June). U.S. employee engagement falls to 10-year low. https://www.hrdive.com/news/us-employee-engagement-falls-to-10-year-low/737270

[ii] Bureau of Labor Statistics. (2025, May). Job openings and labor turnover summary. U.S. Department of Labor. https://www.bls.gov/news.release/jolts.nr0.htm

[iii] Gallup. (2024, August). Employee turnover: Preventable but often ignored. Gallup Workplace. https://www.gallup.com/workplace/646538/employee-turnover-preventable-often-ignored.aspx

[iv] U.S. Census Bureau. (2024). Business formation statistics (BFS). https://www.census.gov/econ/bfs/

[v] Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. (2023, March). Excess retirements during the pandemic era. https://research.stlouisfed.org/publications

[vi] Pew Research Center. (2024). Trends in U.S. labor force participation and demographics. https://www.pewresearch.org

[vii] Bureau of Labor Statistics. (2025, May). Job openings and labor turnover summary. U.S. Department of Labor. https://www.bls.gov/news.release/jolts.nr0.htm

[viii] EY. (2024). Workforce demographic report 2024. Ernst & Young Global Limited. https://www.ey.com

[ix] Wall Street Journal. (2022, November). Economists warn labor shortage may be permanent. https://www.wsj.com

The post From Resignation to Detachment: The Workforce Crisis Has Evolved appeared first on C-Suite Analytics.

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.

——

Further Reading: The Workforce Crisis Solution: 4 Ways to Turn Engagement into Retention

——

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?

1. Lack of job clarity
2. Unskilled managers
3. 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.

——

Further Reading: Stop Chasing “Fuzzy” Engagement Scores – Start Driving Accountability

——

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.

The post Forbes’ Targeting Turnover Review: “Important Information for Both Senior Executives and Line Managers” appeared first on C-Suite Analytics.

If we’re honest, that stagnation tells us something powerful: our traditional engagement strategies don’t work. And until we fix how leaders connect with people, no new survey or benefit will move the needle.

Why Engagement Stays Flat

The reasons are simple – and frustratingly familiar.

1. Reliance on anonymous surveys.
By design, engagement surveys treat every response equally – your top performer’s insight counts the same as your next termination. Surveys tell you “what” is happening, not “why” or “how to fix it.” They create data, not solutions.

2. Benchmarking against mediocrity.
Many organizations are happy to land in the middle of the pack. But imagine a CEO settling for “average” in sales or service. When HR leaders accept “average” engagement, they send the message that engagement can’t improve. It can. It must.

The CFO Connection

In Targeting Turnover, I argue that CFOs – not just HR – should own employee retention and engagement. Engagement impacts productivity and profitability as directly as any operational metric.

When CFOs track turnover and engagement alongside margin and revenue, accountability follows. When they don’t, people metrics stay second-class, even though people drive every other number on the balance sheet.

It’s time to treat engagement as a business issue, not a culture perk.

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Further Reading: Imagine If CFOs Measured the Cost of Turnover

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The Manager Multiplier

Gallup’s data continues to prove what we see every day: managers make or break engagement.

Engaged employees overwhelmingly report strong relationships with their bosses. Actively disengaged employees – those who sabotage culture and performance – report the opposite.

If engagement rises or falls at the team level, it follows that the solution must happen there too – one conversation, one manager, one employee at a time.

The Real Fix: Stay Interviews

Here’s the truth: no one stays longer or works harder because of pizza parties or pet insurance. They stay because they trust their boss.

Stay Interviews remain the single most powerful way to build that trust. They aren’t surveys. They’re structured, one-on-one conversations where managers learn what each employee needs most to stay and thrive.

Our clients who commit to Stay Interviews see average turnover reductions of 30% or more. Even during the pandemic, those results held steady because conversations continued – even virtually.

When managers ask, listen, and act, engagement follows. When they don’t, it stalls.

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Further Reading: Stop Chasing “Fuzzy” Engagement Scores – Start Driving Accountability

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From Engagement to Accountability

Employee engagement will never improve until leaders are held accountable for it. That’s the thesis behind Targeting Turnover: Making Managers Accountable to Win the Workforce Crisis.

The book shows how to connect engagement, retention, and business results so that every manager understands: your team’s engagement is your number. Not HR’s, not corporate’s – yours.

And when managers are measured, coached, and rewarded for engagement the same way they are for productivity or safety, everything changes.

Where to Start

If you want to move engagement from stagnation to success:

1. Stop hiding behind surveys. Start talking directly to employees.
2. Reframe engagement as a financial opportunity. Get your CFO involved.
3. Hold managers accountable. They control the outcome.

You can cut turnover by 30% or more – no matter your industry. And that’s not theory; it’s proven data from our clients across healthcare, manufacturing, and service sectors.

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.

The post Stop Measuring Engagement. Start Owning It. appeared first on C-Suite Analytics.

Turkey #1: Employee Exit Surveys

If five is the maximum number of turkey icons we would use as a rating metric, exit surveys would win all five of those gobblers. The often-applied medical metaphor is that exit surveys are autopsies, meaning they provide the real reasons employees quit so management can fix those reasons and turnover then falls. But to keep up the medical jargon, let’s call exit surveys toe tags instead.

Too harsh? Many times I’ve polled HR audiences on their use of exit surveys by asking these two probes:

1. Please raise your hand if your company does employee exit surveys in any form…to which 90%-plus raise their hands.
2. Now please raise your hand again if you can think of one good outcome for your company as a result of your conducting exit surveys…and less than 5% raise their hands a second time.

On the surface, exit surveys should become strong tools to improve employee retention as long as…

• Surveys are designed to elicit the real reasons employees leave.
• Employees tell the truth.
• And organizations address these newly-discovered leave reasons by solving the problems at their roots.

But none of those things happen and here’s why.

“Better Opportunity”

Some time ago I went on a google quest to learn the supposed #1 reason employees quit their jobs…and better opportunity was the winner. And it’s the winner because nearly every exit interview questionnaire contains this response, whether the questionnaire is delivered by a person, by an online program, or by a third-person interviewer.

Since we associate opportunity with pay or career, the resulting assumption is that some other company swooped in and made our employee an offer…and that offer was financially enticing or included an exciting, higher-level job. So there’s absolutely nothing we could have done to stop that. Especially the assumed much-higher-pay part.

The truth is that “better opportunity” could have also meant a shorter commute, working with nicer people, or abandoning a jerk boss. Accepting that phrase as a leave reason is mush.

But the greater point beyond “better opportunity” being misleading is that it also implies that a new job just appeared.  And those who are leaving us know this is a safe answer because any short explanation that they provide for accepting their “better opportunity” ends the discussion.

The outcome is that “better opportunity” avoids the more deeply-rooted, drill-down discussions that come from asking questions like “Why did you look?”

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Further Reading: Exit Interviews – More Like Autopsies or Toe Tags?

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Most job changes today require the job-changer to go online and click. That first click is the first step toward changing jobs. For a very select few this first step is instead a direct inquiry from another company pitching a job that your employee didn’t know was available and had never considered. But for the great majority of job-changers, the first step is that proactive click. So much better exit interview questions become…

• When did you initiate your job search?
• Why did you initially decide to leave us?
• Was there one trigger event that caused you to seek out other jobs?
• What’s the single-best thing we could have done to keep you?

The one overlap between exit interviews and Stay Interviews is that qualified interviewers must bring great probing skills. They must recognize which broad responses contain juicy behind-the-scenes details that lead to solutions, and then probe their ways down that cookie-crumb trail to learn deep-seated truths…regardless of whether that interview’s objective is to learn why an employee is leaving or how to better help an employee to stay.

So conducting exit interviews in a way that will actually help your company is not, let’s say, an entry-level job, but instead one that requires training, practice, and feedback on how effectively that exit interviewer can seek out the real reason each employee has chosen to look and then to leave.

Little Truth-Telling

While the above section addresses a common exit survey design flaw, employees still have little reason to tell their real-life-story full truths…especially when inputting data into a computer or talking to a stranger.

Let’s make a safe assumption here that employees’ greatest frustration with employee engagement surveys…that I told you and you didn’t address my complaint…applies to employee exit surveys as well. Then why would an employee who has already checked out of her job believe that re-canting her story will make things better, for her or the person who replaces here? Besides, she’s already told her story to a few work peers and outside friends and she’s ready to move on with her life.

The survey design flaws combined with many employees’ reluctancy to be open make for an easy way out. If they can get by with “better opportunity” or by clicking just a few keys during an online survey, then telling abbreviated stories or misleading ones becomes easy and OK.

Provide Real Solutions

In most companies, exit survey results are tabulated into a report that is delivered upstream monthly or quarterly depending on turnover volume. That report rank-orders the reasons employees leave, often placing “better opportunity”, pay, or career at the top. Next steps are usually to build a few one-size-fits-all programs or to do nothing at all.

The contrast here is that the number one reason employees stay or leave is how much they trust their managers…and rarely are exit survey results delivered to that employee’s supervisor. And if they are, the results are left to that supervisor to read, interpret, and decide what if any future changes he should make to his supervisor style, with little or no coaching coming from above.

So while exit surveys bring a concept that at first glance should be helpful to our overall retention quest, the combination of poor survey design, minimal truth-telling, and the absence of constructive follow-up all dilute their value.

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Further Reading: Requiem: The End of Exit Interviews

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The Best Exit Solution I Know

Years ago, I was speaking at the Chicago University Club to about a hundred senior managers who were attending a conference there. The topic of exit surveys came up and after extensive group discussion a man in the back right corner raised his arm, stood up and spoke…with great wisdom.

This man explained that he was CEO of a 400-employee consulting firm in Portland, Oregon, and that he needed and cherished every talented employee for his firm to successfully win over and retain top clients. So when an employee quit, he had established a protocol which was widely known throughout his management ranks. No re-hire could begin until he as CEO signed the new-hire requisition order, and his managers understood he wouldn’t sign that order until they had scheduled an in-person meeting with him to discuss why that employee had left and what that manager could have done to retain that employee.

This CEO’s method worked because (1) he was skilled such that he would ask tough questions regarding why each employee left, (2) he was immediately following-up at the likely root cause, and (3) his managers knew that any exit led to an uncomfortable interaction with the CEO, so they were motivated to build trusting relationships with each employee in order to keep them.

If you’re still using exit surveys, it’s time for a better playbook.

In 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.

The post From Targeting Turnover: Never Do Exit Surveys Again appeared first on C-Suite Analytics.

Business is essentially about money, and chief financial officers, or CFOs, are the money people. They count it, they record it, they lead the charge to set budgetary goals for it, and most importantly they are the voice that CEOs hear the loudest.

Why are CFOs Missing When it Comes to Turnover Reporting?

So CFOs turn their screens on each morning with one objective which is to find the coins in the couch. How can we squeeze out another cost reduction for another gain in profits? They then follow the training they received in business school so they all essentially track their business blueprints the same way.

In my new book, Targeting Turnover, I report on the complete absence of CFOs participating in turnover reporting in this way:

Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) are standards that public companies in the United States must follow when reporting their financial information. Googling “GAAP and employee turnover” yields a few studies on the cost of losing a CEO or CFO, but nothing on the impact of total employee turnover on other key business metrics. It’s as though turnover doesn’t really exist in our organizations, that there is no presence for it on accounting’s screens. Yet Gallup estimates the cost of voluntary turnover to American businesses is a staggering one trillion dollars…every year.^[i]

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Further reading: When Non-HR Executives Ask About Turnover (Again)

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Full Participation Ensures Agreement on Cost of Losing One Employee

Our first step with new clients is to apply our proprietary turnover algorithm to identify dollar costs for turnover for important jobs…and we require finance to participate. The resulting number will never be 100% accurate because there are too many variables, too many moving parts…but we will ultimately agree to a number that represents the cost of losing one employee in a particular job. Here are a few examples:

• Nurse: $42,131
• Truck loader/unloader: $4,955
• Call center representative: $29,447
• Physician: $225,808
• Truck driver: $21,221
• Software engineer: $131,290
• Forklift driver: $10,742
• Manufacturing entry-level: $5,518

These costs are based in part on company-specific data including revenue-per-employee, the days these jobs remain open, and the ramp-up time for each new hire, so these companies’ costs that as indicated above might not the be same as for your company.

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Further reading: Turnover’s Biggest Price Tag Isn’t Recruiting – It’s Lost Productivity

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There are Many Reasons to Calculate Your Cost of Turnover

This is just one of the reasons why you should calculate your own cost of turnover, and another reason is to include your executives so they actually act on the results. An aerospace company’s CFO’s reaction was like no other. He reluctantly joined in to participate in the calculation and ultimately agreed to the cost for losing an engineer to be $121,500. He called me the next morning to say he couldn’t sleep, went to work very early, and with some extrapolation discovered that his company’s turnover cost was their second-highest cost…placing that cost ahead of the properties and materials required for his company to build rockets.

My book also details how to determine turnover’s cost for all jobs, such that your company can develop reporting month-to-month for not only employee retention’s performance against goals but also against a pre-determined standard to reduce the full costs associated with employee turnover.

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Check out our free Turnover Cost Calculator

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The Cost of Turnover Playbook for CFOs

If you need a playbook for costing your turnover, see my new book 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.

[i] Shane McFeely and Ben Wigert, “This Fixable Problem Costs US Businesses $1 Trillion,” Gallup Press, March 13, 2019; https://www.gallup.com/workplace/247391/fixable-problem-costs-businesses-trillion.aspx

The post Imagine If CFOs Measured the Cost of Turnover appeared first on C-Suite Analytics.

Engagement Scores vs. Real Productivity

There’s no question that engagement matters. In fact, employee engagement impacts productivity more than pay, benefits, or other tangible perks. Gallup has long called the link between engagement and performance “substantial and highly generalizable,” showing top-quartile organizations consistently outperform those at the bottom on productivity, safety, quality, and retention. MIT Sloan found that companies with consistent profit growth had more engaged employees, while disengaged workforces correlated directly with flat or negative growth.

These correlations should make CFOs salivate. After all, employees don’t work harder because companies are profitable – companies are profitable because employees are engaged. Yet too often, organizations spend more time debating survey scores than implementing strategies that improve trust, performance, and retention.

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Further Reading: The Workforce Crisis Solution: 4 Ways to Turn Engagement into Retention

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Why Engagement Surveys Fail Leaders

Engagement surveys, when used well, can point to areas for improvement. But here’s where most organizations go wrong:

1. Data without accountability. Leaders receive their team’s survey results, but no one holds them responsible for acting on them.
2. Questions that miss the mark. Surveys don’t ask enough about trust in the immediate supervisor – the single biggest driver of engagement.
3. Dangerous comparisons. Benchmarking against other companies lowers ambition and excuses poor performance.
4. Activity over outcomes. Engagement plans filled with events and perks don’t move the needle on productivity or retention.

The result? Leadership teams comfort themselves with “middle of the pack” scores instead of demanding improvement.

What Works: Engagement + Accountability

In Targeting Turnover, I make the case that surveys alone will never solve disengagement. The missing link is accountability. Leaders must be measured and held responsible for improving engagement, just as they are for sales, service, or safety.

That means:

• Every leader, at every level, receives their team’s engagement data.
• At least one-third of survey questions focus on trust, recognition, communication, and coaching.
• Leaders create improvement plans centered on relationships, not just events or free food.
• Performance is tracked across surveys. Leaders who don’t improve are coached – and if they still can’t deliver, they’re replaced.

No CEO would tolerate a manager who consistently misses sales goals. Engagement, which drives productivity and retention, should be treated the same way.

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Further Reading: Two Ways to Cut Turnover. Only One Will Always Work.

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Beyond Surveys: Stay Interviews

The most effective way to link engagement with retention is through Stay Interviews. Instead of guessing at what employees need, managers ask them directly: What will keep you here? What might cause you to leave? What can I do to make your job better?

When paired with accountability, Stay Interviews as part of Finnegan’s Arrow with goals, forecasts, and consequences, is proven to transform leaders. They stop managing by assumption and start managing by listening. And when executives enforce accountability for engagement and retention – backed by the undeniable data linking both to productivity – they finally move from fuzzy metrics to real outcomes.

Final Word: The Workforce Crisis Won’t Wait

The U.S. is running out of workers. Thirty million Americans are reaching retirement age this decade, and the only lever companies truly control is retention. Engagement surveys are only useful if they lead to accountability and action. Without that, they’re just another fuzzy metric in a world that now demands hard results.

The Playbook for Making Managers Accountable

If you need a playbook for making managers accountable – not just aware – see my new book 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.

The post Stop Chasing “Fuzzy” Engagement Scores – Start Driving Accountability appeared first on C-Suite Analytics.