How to Keep Your Best Team Members During Uncertain Times

When someone quits your team, if you are caught off guard, if you are blindsided, you have no excuse. I’ve got to say that again. If you’re blindsided when someone quits and you’re thinking, they never said anything, oh my God, this is crazy, I would have done something. You have no excuse because Gallup has reported that 42% of voluntary turnover is preventable, meaning people have said when they’re leaving teams, well, yeah, if my manager talked to me, I would have maybe stayed.

And the rest of that, of voluntary turnover, this is people that have said, my manager wasn’t trained and skilled, all the stuff we’re talking about today, I didn’t get feedback, I didn’t have clear career goals, right? So it’s all, all of this is stuff that’s completely preventable. And that’s what we’re gonna talk about today. I’m Leah Garvin, and this is The New Manager Playbook, where I share tools, stories, strategies to make managing your team the easiest part of your job, because I mean, dealing with people is hard enough, right?

So turnover, right, we should never be blindsided by it. And I think what happens is, we get busy, we get in our groove, we’re thinking, oh my gosh, yes, okay, everyone’s good, no one’s complaining to me, okay, I can like focus on stuff, I can go to the meetings. We’re barely keeping our head above the water, that when someone is not raising flags or kind of always bothering us with things, we think that person’s fine, I don’t have to worry about them.

Now, the problem there is that usually, it’s the high performers, the ones that you really wanna keep, who are the ones that aren’t making a lot of noise. And those are the people you have to check in with the most. So I had a client that worked in a sales team, and she was managing a large group of sales managers. And her sales managers kept coming to her and saying, this was a VP on the sales team.

And they kept saying, I’m losing my best performers, I don’t know what to do. And the managers were freaking out because they can’t oversee their teams and they can’t hit their goals. And she said, hey, what do I tell my managers for how they reduce turnover? Because these people, they’re hitting, they’re actually, some of them are hitting their numbers, the individual contributors, and we’re not seeing any flags. And the managers are being blindsided, and they’re freaking out because they’re losing some of their best people, I need your help.

And we started to talk about, well, okay. So what conversations is that sales manager having with their teams, and what feedback are they giving them, and what course correcting, and how are they coming together? And that VP didn’t know, she didn’t think there was much going on, but she asked me to check in with the managers themselves. And I checked in with managers, and I heard exactly what I just told you. That because so many people were hitting their goals, and they weren’t complaining, and they were working long hours, they were making the calls, they were traveling and doing all the right things, the managers weren’t checking in with them, it didn’t seem like they had to.

And so they started losing great team members, and it started to tank the productivity of the whole team. And obviously, they weren’t hitting their numbers as groups. So it became a really big issue. And this is something that I see not only on sales team, not only on tech teams, not only on design teams, on any kind of team. Because when we aren’t checking with our people because they’re not making a fuss, we are losing people that are looking for other jobs.

When we aren’t happy, we’re not saying anything, what are we probably doing? Well, I know what I was doing when I wasn’t happy as an individual contributor. I felt like, well, I guess it’s kind of hopeless, or I’d rather just find another job, frankly. I mean, what’s the point? If my manager wasn’t checking in with me, it didn’t really seem like they cared, right? That is what your team members are doing when you’re not checking in with them.

They’re going on fine. And when they hit a bump in the road, maybe there’s someone that wants to talk to you about it, but maybe they’re not. And if they’re not, if they’re not, there’s someone that you could lose just because you didn’t check in. So I want to talk about what happens, right? How do we re-engage talent before they walk out the door? Because there is nothing more expensive than turnover. US-based businesses spend a trillion dollars annually on turnover, okay?

And replacing a salary employee costs between 50% and 200% of that salary. So if a team member is making 100 grand, you are going to lose, with that employee, not only all this training and upskilling and institutional knowledge, you’re going to lose between $50,000 and $200,000 on that employee walking out the door. And if they’re a high performer, they’re on the end of that 200%, right? Because they’re amplifying and they’re elevating others, and they’re probably doing the two jobs for the price of one, which is what all of us high performers do.

This is why it has to be solved right now. You’ve got to train your managers, and as managers, you’ve got to do these things so that you are not letting great people walk out the door. So first thing we do, right, we start to see the signs. We read between the lines, okay? And this is where you start to not just look at what people are saying on face value. One signal, right, are people demonstrating they’re kind of less excited about work?

Did they used to volunteer for stuff that they aren’t doing now, right? They used to always raise their hand for things. Did they used to always show up for the team lunch or the different events that were happening? And they’re not anymore. Do they always want to speak up in team meetings? They had a fun story to share, but they’re kind of pulling back. This is a first sign that someone is disengaging, and they’re starting to mentally kind of like, no, I’m not going to be here for a long time, so I don’t need to do that.

That is a huge sign. If and when you see that, you have no excuse again, right, than to say something and say, hey, hey, Joe, you know, you used to be at all the lunches or at all the team meetings, you share all these awesome stories, like, I want to just make sure everything’s good. Like, what’s up? How you been? Check in, open-ended questions, give someone space to share, and here’s the kicker. Joe might say, oh, everything’s fine.

Joe might say that after you asked him once. Joe might say that after you asked him twice. Joe might say that after you asked him three times. But on the fourth time, you’re like, hey, Joe, again, you know, always here, have an open door. Anytime you’re on chat, he might say, you know, yeah, I have been feeling a little less motivated lately, and then here’s what’s going on. Boom, okay, here is your opening to save Joe.

Joe wants to stay. He’s telling you what’s going on. Save Joe. Okay, and that’s the second tip, a little bit of persistence, right, without kind of being breathing down people’s necks, like you get what I mean. Check in again. Someone says everything’s fine, say, hey, anything, Joe, that I can do to just show up better for you as a leader, right? He says no, because it’s a closed-ended question, trick question. No, you want to say, hey, Joe, what’s something that would make your job more enjoyable?

What’s something you’re excited about? What’s a way that I can show up better for you as a manager? Open-ended questions, give your team members opportunities to answer them, and ask them again and again and again. And maybe you never hear anything’s wrong, and that person stays. Maybe it’s that micro percent of people that actually aren’t going to tell you, and then they leave. Okay, fine, but you are going to solve so much of your voluntary turnover by asking those questions, I assure you, okay?

The third thing that we do to keep, keep, keep our high performers, and keep people from walking out of the door unexpectedly, is to have career conversations and understand like, what are their motivations? What are your goals? What are you interested in? What kinds of things do you want to work on? What are you excited about? And again, open-ended questions, because we’re going to start to see like, Joe’s not really interested in being here long term.

Joe likes this today, but he actually has a vision of opening a pet store and won’t like, we don’t run a pet store. So this is going to help you. You may not keep Joe, but it’s not going to be blindsiding when he leaves. Now you can actually help Joe figure out his transition plan. You can help Joe find his next job and show him that you’re helping support him there. You can start offloading Joe’s responsibilities or open that wreck before you lose that basketball and you can’t put anybody in that role.

Knowing when someone isn’t quite feeling it, that is going to save you again for being blindsided. So like I said, it’s not that we can prevent all turnover. It’s that we can prevent being blindsided. That’s the part that’s on us. We should never be surprised when someone leaves, because if we have been looking for the signals, talking to them proactively, right, checking in with them, asking these open-ended questions, and have a good pulse on what are they interested in, what are their career goals, what are their passions, where do they really want to be going?

Well now none of it’s a surprise. And the last thing is if we show people that I’m invested in you as a person, whether you’re in this company or in somewhere else, like I’m here for you, I’m on the Joe train, he can work here, he can work at Petco, whatever, it doesn’t matter. That person’s going to be more open and upfront with you, right? A big fallacy I think a lot of us subscribe to is that we can’t ask our team members about their goals because if they say they don’t want to work here, then we got to like, now we got to deal with that nightmare of having to fill that role and deal with that 200% loss when that person walks out the door.

They’re going to leave either way, come on. It’s way better to know with some notice if someone isn’t really feeling it. And what’s so ironic and why it’s such a fallacy is that when people feel invested in, they actually become more loyal even if they didn’t think the job was for them. You will get more time out of them and their high performance because they feel like, well, you know what, while I’m here, I’m going to give it my all because this manager is really here helping to grow what I’m doing.

And I experienced that firsthand. I had been wanting to go off on my own and build my consulting business while I worked at Google for several big years before I left. But because I had an awesome manager that was so invested in me and was helping me build skills and putting me in opportunities and giving me visibility, things that I really valued, I stayed a lot longer and I did great work while I was there and it was truly a win-win.

And so even if someone’s not going to be with you long-term, you’re going to get the best out of them by doing this. And you’re also not blindsided because you knew that that wasn’t their vision, okay? So again, no excuse if we feel blindsided, no excuse if it’s a shock because there are things that we can do that’s going to prevent it. And that’s what we talked through today. And if you’re struggling with this and you’re like, I keep losing people, I don’t know how to do this.

I don’t know what questions to ask. Don’t figure it out alone because that’s costing you 200 grand a person. Don’t do it alone, please, no. Get some support, okay? Reach out at helloatleahgarver.com if this is an issue or anything else that we’re talking about the show is an issue. Because each of these little things that show up that we don’t address, not only is it that cost for the company, which is significant, it’s a cost on you.

Having team members always leaving and you just feel like you don’t quite know what’s going on, that weighs on you as a manager. It starts to make you question what you’re doing. And it’s always very simple shifts. It’s all simple things that we can do. When someone works with you to help you figure out bringing it to life, what it is, someone from the outside in, it becomes super clear. We can figure it out with crystal clear pinpoint precision.

There I was going with that, to what it is and completely clear it up. So don’t figure it out alone. Don’t muscle through it alone. If you’re feeling stuck on this, send me an email, helloatleahgarver.com and you’ve got support right there.