Your People Are Leaving Because Your Feedback System Is Broken
One of the most important things you can do in your organization and for your people is provide feedback. Surprisingly this this is mostly done incorrectly or not done at all. While simple, it is not easy. Feedback is a skill, it’s hard, and it takes practice.
The main reason people leave organizations is because of broken feedback systems.
Feedback must be offered or sought, heard, and actioned. Seeking feedback without action is the worst since trust is broken, and you will fail to get good (or any) future feedback. All of these must be taken on a timescale that is important to the one giving feedback. Feedback must be at all levels of an organization. If any one of these fails to happen, your feedback system is broken.
People Leave Managers Not Organizations
This often quoted cliché, is just that:
Cliché: an expression or idea which has been used and overused because it is or was once considered meaningful.
Yes people do leave managers, but mostly because the feedback system is broken. It can be broken between the person and the manager, or also broken between the manager and the organization.
This doesn’t rule out bad managers, which are a problem. A great manager who is not heard or empowered to act by the organization will frustrate people just as much.
People do leave organizations, it may only look like they are leaving a manager.
Weak Signals and Interventions
A lot of important feedback from your people comes via weak signals. Weak signals aren’t the glaringly obvious things that people tell you about, even though those are important too. They are called weak because they are the day to day frustrations you won’t hear about unless you listen carefully and ask repeatedly. Regardless they are very important.
Instead of focusing on these weak signals, a typical organization bases it’s actions on large and slow actions and an intervention model. In an intervention model you wait for something to happen to intervene, usually when it’s too late. Organizations rarely learn using an intervention model.
An example of an intervention model is HR exit interviews, which are driven by recency bias and selection bias. Deciding to leave a company is rarely due to one thing, but is typically a collection of things built up over time. In an exit interview a lot of the day to day frustrations are lost and the focus is on the last recent events: review, raise, etc.
If your organizational feedback system is based on an intervention model, your organization isn’t learning and improving. Good people eventually get frustrated and leave this type of system.
Time to Up Your Game
If your first reaction is to deny or be defensive about your feedback system: you are part of the problem. It’s time to up your game.
Start asking and listening to weak signals from your people. A problem with weak signals is that there is a lot of them, so “be careful what you ask for” is the hard problem you’ll have to solve. Involving your people to help solve those problems is the next step to help distill and focus what to improve and create a plan. Last is the most important part: actually executing on that plan and getting things done.
Focus on your feedback system. Focus on the weak signals. Focus on things that make improvements in the day to day of the people who work for you. This means doing the things for your people that provide an environment with minimal frustrations where your people can thrive.
For learning about feedback, Daniel Terhorst-North does one of the best jobs describing what, why, and how in his presentation How to make a sandwich.
For learning from events, Sidney Dekker’s The Field Guide To Understanding ‘Human Error’, is an enlightening read.
