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Transcript

Staying Isn't Choosing · The Lagging Team

0:00
Devon Morris: You didn't win the retention war; the war was
0:04
called off. This is The Lagging Team. Falling behind is a
0:10
position, not a verdict. Every week, we work to change that
0:16
outcome. Somebody's got a slide up talking about turnover. The
0:26
line is going down. That's good news. And the question in that
0:30
room is always the same question: How do we keep our
0:35
people? How do we hold our talent? How do we improve our
0:41
retention. What's our retention plan? Do we need to look at some
0:45
comps? The whole industry is built around that question. The
0:51
stay interviews, the engagement surveys, retention bonuses, post
0:54
checks. Somebody, somebody got a dashboard, and I want to be
1:00
really careful here because that's a good question to ask by
1:04
people who care about the answer. I've been paid to help
1:09
answer it, but I think it's the wrong argument now, and I think
1:14
the reason is that you already got the answer by something that
1:21
had nothing to do with any of us whatsoever, this is The Lagging
1:26
Team. Falling behind is a position, not a verdict. I'm Dr.
1:31
Devon Morris, and this is a sidebar. Tuesdays I sit down
1:35
with somebody, and on Thursday I take one thing from that
1:38
conversation and go all the way in on it. Today, I'm taking one
1:44
thing from something I said because I got it wrong. Here's
1:47
what actually is true: nothing I was trained to do actually
1:53
worked, and there's a difference between those sentences, and the
1:58
difference is the reason I wanted to do this episode second
2:02
instead of 10th. Something did work, and I didn't count it
2:09
because I was measuring the wrong thing. I was measuring
2:13
whether he changed, and he didn't. He was never going to.
2:19
He wasn't the variable. What changed was a condition. In a
2:26
building where nobody said a true thing out loud, he ended up
2:32
with one person he could say something true to. Man, that
2:38
that that's small. It isn't a program. It didn't show up in a
2:44
single system anywhere in that company, but it's a change to
2:50
the situation, not to the man. And the situation was the only
2:57
thing that was ever available to change. Here's my problem with
3:03
the retention conversation, and I don't want to mean that the
3:11
people having it are wrong. I don't. I'm not. It's not what
3:15
I'm trying to do here. I mean, it's the argument. The situation
3:19
was built to start. It's the loudest thing in the room, and
3:22
is standing directly in front of the most important thing in the
3:26
room. See, survey work over the last year keeps landing in the
3:31
same exact place. More than half of American workers now describe
3:35
themselves as staying put; they're holding on. The year
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before that, under half answered that way. The number's moving
3:45
fast and it's moving in one direction. So look at what that
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means for the meeting. You're optimizing for retention in a
3:54
market that has already handed you retention. They're not going
4:00
anywhere. The question is closed. You didn't win the
4:04
retention war; the war was called off. And here's what it
4:11
costs to keep fighting a war that's ended: every single
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dollar, every red cent, every hour, every second, every
4:20
leadership conversation aimed at keeping people is aimed from
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what actually is happening inside the building because the
4:28
people are actually staying, so that part is handled. The
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question is what they're doing while they stay, and nothing on
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your board is pointed at that. So here's the part I actually
4:45
want to give you: We use two words like they mean the same
4:50
thing, and they don't. Stayed and chose. Stayed is a fact
4:58
about the exit. It really means that on the last day of the
5:06
quarter, this person's badge still worked. That's all it
5:10
means. That's the wrong claim. Choice is a fact about the work.
5:17
It means somebody looked at what else is available to them, and
5:21
decided this was the better thing. Two different words, two
5:27
different jobs, and every retention number that you have
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only knows about the first one. Every organization I've worked
5:39
with treats those as the same number. Retention goes
5:43
up. The story is that people wanted to be here. Celebration
5:48
happened, right? Retention goes down. The story is something's
5:52
broken. That inference only holds if leaving was a live
6:00
option.
6:01
If it wasn't, your retention number isn't measuring
6:05
commitment. It's measuring the door. See, same survey work I
6:11
mentioned. Fewer than one in five people staying in a job
6:16
right now say they're staying because they want to be there.
6:19
The rest are doing the math, mortgage, insurance, a spouse's
6:25
job, the kids finishing school, a market that looks scary from
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the inside. Every one of those is completely rational reasons
6:37
to stay. None of them is a reason to even go out and try,
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and this isn't new. We ran this exact experiment 15 years ago,
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and we got the same results. Deloitte surveyed people right
6:54
in the middle of the last freeze. Eight out of 10 people
6:58
said they plan to stay with their employer, three out of 10
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said they were unhappy in their job. Two numbers, same page,
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same report. And I bet real money, most of the companies who
7:15
read it, look at it, look at the eight, and then push the deck
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away. The gap is the entire subject of this episode. It's
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not the contradiction, and nobody was lying here. Eight out
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of 10 meant I'm gonna, I'm not going anywhere. Three out of
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five meant I'm not happy about it. Both are true at the same
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time. One of them ever got reported to anybody else, ever
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made it to the news. A second pair of words, and this is where
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it stops being about a recession, trapped and frozen.
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Back in 2010, at the bottom of it, there were six people out
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there looking for a job for every one job open in this
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country. That's a six-to-one ratio. That's not a hard market.
8:15
That's a room with absolutely no doors for you to walk through.
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People were trapped. Everybody knew it, and they at least was
8:26
being honest about it. Right now, there are more than 7
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million open jobs in this country. The doors are standing
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wide open, and people are leaving those jobs at almost
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exactly the rate they left them when there was nowhere to go.
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That's not a trap, y'all. That's the other word. That's frozen,
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and it is a completely different problem. See, trapped is a fact
9:05
about the world. There's no door. Nothing you do inside your
9:12
building changes that. You can see that from this particular
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vantage point. Frozen is a fact about the person. The door is
9:24
open, and they're not moving because moving costs something
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they didn't think they actually had: confidence, recent skills,
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a story about themselves they can tell in an interview, the
9:39
willingness to be new at something at 51, and here's why
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that should worry you more than 2010 did. When people were
9:52
trapped, a stuck team looked stuck. You could tell; it's easy
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to see. Now a stuck team looks exactly like a team that
10:04
chose to be there, because on paper they have the same
10:09
options. They're still there. That's the whole trapped. See,
10:14
trapped was visible. Frozen is flattering. One more thing, it's
10:22
the reason to wait this out. Last time, it took the better
10:27
part of a decade to thaw. Whatever's happening now, the
10:32
honest expectation is years, not quarters, and you don't get to
10:36
manage around it until it passes. Third pair, and it's the
10:42
diagnosis: stable and stuck. Here's what stable looks like on
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a report: low turnover, tenure going up, head count flat,
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engagement scores-they're fine, no fires to put out. Now, if you
11:00
write that list down and read it back, because it's the perfect
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description of stuck, identical, same numbers, opposite
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conditions. A stable team has people who could could go and
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don't. A stuck team has people who can't go and don't see from
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the report. There is no difference at all, which means
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the only way to tell them apart is to inquire, is to ask.
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There's no dashboard for this. I mean, I've looked. There isn't
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one. And if somebody sells you one, what they've sold you is
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the stayed number in a nicer font. All right, three things
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that you need to do before Monday. Not going to cost you
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any money, and you don't really need permission for them. One,
12:02
ask the offer question, not why do you stay. You'll get the
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polished corporate answer. Anybody who's been at any place
12:11
for a while has built a reason to be there. They have to.
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Nobody can spend years somewhere and then they didn't choose and
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believe it means nothing. Ask this instead: If you got an
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offer tomorrow, same money, what would make you turn it down?
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Then be quiet. That's the whole technique. A person who chose
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gives you a fast and specific set of answers, a name, a
12:45
project, a thing that they're in the middle of, a person who
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stayed, paused, and then tells you about their commute or their
12:54
benefits or their vesting schedule. Both answers are
12:59
useful. Only one of them is what you thought you had. Two. Count
13:08
who hasn't been developed. Find out when each person last got
13:14
trained, sent anywhere, given something genuinely new. Not a
13:20
compliance module. Not that's that's not real development,
13:22
right? But but something is going to be real for them.
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Anybody in the past you two years, flag it, right? Anybody
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past five years, flag it. That's probably an oversight. That's a
13:35
pattern, right? Two, count who hasn't been developed. Find out
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when each person last got trained, sent somewhere, given
13:45
something truly new to do-not a compliance module, some real
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development stuff. Anybody past about two years, you you just
13:55
flag that one. Anybody past five, that's not an oversight,
14:00
that's a pattern. It started somewhere and nobody noticed
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because they never complain. The person who's been quietly fine
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the longest is usually the person who's been invested in
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the least. Quiet reads is low maintenance. It's the same
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signal that's forgotten. Three, change one condition, just one.
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This is the one from my correction, the smallest of the
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three, really, and the only one that actually moved anything I
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told you in the story. Fix and face it with them are two
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different moves. Fixing means changing a person. If they're
14:41
frozen, you can't change them. And pushing harder just adds one
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more thing for them to fail at, or somebody look and say they're
14:50
complacent. Facing it means changing something about the
14:53
situation they're standing in. One thing: give them a piece of
14:58
work that would look good on their resume, and hope that they never
15:02
leave. Send them to training, something that's valuable for
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them. Tell them the truth about where they stand out out loud,
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which almost nobody has done in years. You're not trying to make
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them stay. You're trying to make staying a choice for them. Those
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produce very different behaviors, and only one of them
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is worth having. Here's what would make me wrong about this,
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because I'd rather you check than just take my word. Go run
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the offer on five people. Three, hopefully, come back. One fast,
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specific about the work, a project, a person, something
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they're building. Then your team chose you. This episode isn't
15:53
about you. Go look at something else. Clean finding, no problem.
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Two, a pause. It's about logistics, commute, benefits,
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timing. That this right here-that's what we've been
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describing. Three, and I didn't expect this one until I started
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asking. Everybody names the same single thing: a manager, a
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project, one person. That isn't commitment either. That's a
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single point of failure wearing commitments clothing, and when
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that one thing leaves or ends, you'll find out how much of your
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retention number is being held up by that person or by what
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they said. Three answers, three findings. The point isn't that
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your team is frozen. The point is that you can't tell from
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here, and it costs you nothing to find out. Falling behind is a
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position, not a verdict. And one of the quietest ways a team ends
17:00
up behind is that everybody stayed and nobody chose, and the
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number on the report looks healthy every single time. You
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don't fix that with a retention play because then they already
17:16
retained. You don't fix it with a survey because surveys ask
17:20
people to describe the decision that they never got to make. You
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fix it by asking one question you don't already know the
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answer to, and then believing what came back. They stayed.
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That's not the same as choosing you. And if it isn't a choice,
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it isn't loyalty. It's just the math working out in your favor
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for now. If you want to talk about what this looks like on
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your team, go to thelaggingteam.com/start. That's
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thelaggingteam.com/start. Before Thursday, I got one job for you.
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Ask one person on your team what would make them turn down an
18:05
offer. That's it.
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One person, one question. Then notice whether you got an answer
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or a pause, and come tell me which one you got. Comments, you
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know, wherever you're listening, or find me on LinkedIn. We can
18:24
have a conversation. And if you've got more time today, the
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third episode is already up. That's my conversation with
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Brandon Raines, and it's about what happens when a leader has a
18:38
theory about why the team is behind? And here's the deal: the
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theory is wrong. That's the sidebar, y'all. Now you know
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where to look. Thank you for joining us. Where every Tuesday
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and Thursday we work toward bridging the gap for teams that
19:00
are behind.