Recently, a senior exec in Human Capital was telling me about her journey through the ranks. It had the usual twists and turns, but one thing she said stood out. She was telling me about the person she had learned the most from.
“He would unsettle me,” she said, “After working in a job for a year or so, he’d suddenly move me to some other area without any consultation. If I knew nothing about that job, he’d just tell me to learn fast.”
“So what was it like?” I asked
“It was terrible,” she said, “I became a bunch of nerves, my anxiety went through the roof. He was so difficult.”
“Wow, its incredible that you stayed”
“Oh no, I didn’t stay,” she corrected me, “After a few years of that I just melted down and left.”
Even while stretching her skills (and by all accounts growing her career) the opportunities she was given were not enough compensation to work for an unpredictable, emotionally erratic manager. The company lost good talent. The manager continued to be difficult and grumpy with his team, and for years into the future, the company continued to lose good people.
Well, it doesn’t have to be that way. I trawled through thousands of records from our Automated Exit System, ran the numbers, and discovered that on average companies lose somewhere between 20% and 30% of their staff directly because of the person they were reporting to. If the leaving staff members could have changed their manager, they would have stayed. So: Loved their role, loved their company, loathed their boss.
It is often very tricky to get good information on the toxic managers in a company. They can present as benign and well-intentioned to their colleagues and seniors, but their subordinates are walking on eggshells.
Fortunately, our Automatic Exit Interview system provides the data at the push of a button. It aggregates the data of multiple people leaving a company and highlights those managers who have been cited as the reason for the person leaving. The system will present the percentage of staff who have suggested that the manger was the problem. It also gives equal weight to those managers who are celebrated as having had a positive effect.
Excerpt from our Manager Risk Report
The Manager Risk Report comes with special permissions to ensure that only the appropriate users can access this delicate information. Of course the idea of the report is not to punish or reprimand, but to help educate mangers on how to entice good people to stay rather than leave.
This is but one feature of our highly-regarded Automatic Exit Interview system. For more on automated exit interview solutions, visit our page here.
