Are You a Bad Boss?
Your people are flying out the door left and right. Blame it on recruiters if you like, but you're the problem.
Sat, April 01, 2000
CIO — Not long ago, a thriving young manager we'll call Paul was happily ensconced in the IT department of a large manufacturing company. Paul loved his work, found his team members stimulating and had a great boss. One day Paul went to his boss, an IT director, asking for help. Paul was in the middle of a heated conflict with a coworker and hoped his boss could intervene in some way. Paul was so distressed about the problem, he wondered out loud whether he should look for work elsewhere. The boss scratched his head and came up with what he thought was a supportive answer. "Paul, you do what you feel is best for you." Wrong answer, boss.
What was best for Paul was not best for his boss or the company. A few weeks later, Paul got a call from a headhunter and for the first time in the five years he'd worked at the company, returned it. Soon after, Paul left for a lucrative job at Cisco Systems. Sharon Jordan-Evans, a retention expert and executive coach in Woodland Hills, Calif., who promised Paul confidentiality, says the boss never figured out what he did wrong. The case is a chilling revelation for CIOs and IT managers today: You don't have to be the Boss from Hell to lose good people. All it takes is one critical mistake. What Paul's boss should have said is, "Don't even think about going," and then arranged a meeting with the coworker to discuss the problem.
Most people have had a lousy boss at some point in their career, and Paul's case is a relatively mild example. Think you have a retention problem at your company? (Who doesn't in this industry?) Throw away the HR manuals and take a good hard look at yourself and your management team. You and the managers who work for you—not the hot job market—might very well be the number-one cause of attrition in your organization. Retention studies show that 70 to 80 percent of the reasons why people leave companies are related to bosses, according to John Sullivan, a professor of human resources at San Francisco State University who is currently working for Agilent Technologies as chief talent officer. Sullivan, author of the e-book The Manager's Retention Toolkit (revised May 1999), consults high-tech companies on retention and says money is not one of the top reasons people switch jobs in the industry. "People either say my boss was a jerk, or I wasn't challenged," he says.
