People leave due to bad management

In almost every global survey on culture when asked why they left their previous job, most respondents will cite bad management practices.

Yet when senior leaders recognise that something has to change, they very rarely address this root cause.

When it comes to affecting culture change the first two steps are the most important.

Senior leaders need to role-model the behaviours they expect to see of others. Then managers need to be provided with the skills to build it. 

The daily micro-experiences that make a place feel the way it does happen at the team level, with the manager, not in the boardroom.

Which makes one number quite alarming. Shane Hatton - in his great book Let’s Talk Culture - found that just 3% of managers said they had the skills to build a great team culture. With over half feeling burnt out by what was expected of them anyway.

This is where organisations misspend and end up losing the people they need to keep. Development money is often poured into ineffective leadership programmes while the manager closest to the daily experience of culture gets almost nothing and consequently the daily lived experience of employees never changes or worse, degrades.

What moves the needle on middle management effectiveness is practical, human skills such as communicating across personalities, setting expectations, having the courageous conversations most people avoid, and building trust.

Employee experience doesn't drift because managers don't care. It drifts because no one taught them how to build a great place to work and help people to feel motivated within it. That is a gap you can close.

I’ve written about this in my new guide on how to make culture change stick. You can download it for free at www.colindellis.com/culture-papers