Managers Want To Know Why Their Team Members Will Leave

Managers need to understand the things that make team members leave
Managers need to understand the things that make team members leave
Image Credit: Photo by Michael Jasmund on Unsplash

As though you didn’t have enough else to worry about as a manager, it turns out that using your manager skills to keep your team together is an important part of what the company has hired you to do. We all understand that the people who make up your team are always getting calls from headhunters, suggestions from friends, and emails talking about great new jobs. None of this matters if they are happy where they currently are. However, if they start to become irritated with their job, then the chances that they’ll leave become greater. Do you know what could cause the members of your team to leave?

The Members Of Your Team Don’t Trust You

As a manager, can you really expect your team members to stay with you if they don’t trust you? That trust thing is a tricky beast – it can be very hard to create; however, you can lose it overnight. Studies that have been done that show that millennial workers’ belief in their company’s allegiance to business ethics is currently down 17% from last year. What you need to keep in mind is that when a company does something wrong the question is not if it will show up in the newspapers, but rather will it show up on social media?

Your responsibility as a manager is to be the one who both “walks the walk and talks the talk”. Sorry, there is no manager training for how to do this correctly. The problem that managers are currently facing is that too many of their team members believe that their company makes its decisions based solely on profits and not on its people. As a manager, you need to listen to what your team is telling you and you need to be seen making your decisions based on principals not profits.

Your Team Is Old

It’s all too easy for a work environment to start to get stale. The question that a manager always has to be asking is what do my team members think when they come to work? What your workers want is a modern work environment. Does your place of work look this way or is it stuck in the past? Workers are also seeking flexibility. This means that as a manager you need to be the one who is open to alternative work arrangements.

Another key way to show your workers that the company that they work for is progressive is by creating a diverse team. As a manager you need to take a look at the company’s hiring practices. Are they hiring people that all look the same, think the same, and have the same ideas? Your team needs to represent your customers and your community. Make sure that underrepresented groups become members of your team and once they are there, take the time to listen to them and include them in your team building.

There Is No Training

A good feature of today’s team members is that they are smart. What this means is that they are aware that things are always changing and that the job that they have today is not the job that they will have tomorrow. In order to prepare for that next job, everyone knows that they are going to need additional training. If you can’t offer that to them, then they will start to look elsewhere for their next opportunity.

In order to get the members of your team to stay at your company, you are going to have to find ways to provide them with training. Keep in mind that training can take on a number of different identities. One of the simplest is books. Making sure that the members of your team have access to books with the knowledge that they need is a good first step. Next comes peer-to-peer mentoring because this helps with self-learning among members of your team. Finally, there are key conferences and off-line courses that you can send your team members to.

What All Of This Means For You

The job of a manager is to manage your team so that they can accomplish great things for the company. However, you are only going to be able to do this if you can find a way to keep your team together. They will always be presented with other employment opportunities, you need to find a way to make sure that they don’t leave. If they become irritated with their current job, then they may leave. You need to make sure that you understand what could cause this.

Trust is a key factor for why somebody will stay at a job. As a manager you need to both walk the walk and talk the talk. Remember that if your company behaves unethically, they may get called out on social media over it. You need to listen to what your team tells you and make good decisions. If your work environment looks old then people will leave. You have to be flexible with work arrangements and make sure that you hire diverse people to be part of your team. Workers understand that things change and so they want to be trained. Make sure that you have plenty of different ways that your workers can get the new skills that they will need in the future.

If you can keep your team together, then you’ll be able to accomplish more as a manager. No, the members of your team probably won’t spend their entire career at your company. However, you’d like them to spend enough so that they can accomplish great things as a part of your team. This is why you need to take action and stop giving them reasons to quit and start giving them reasons to stay.


– Dr. Jim Anderson Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Management Skills™


Question For You: How do you think that you could tell if you were providing your team with enough training resources?


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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

We all know what is asked of mangers: go out there and get the best team that you can. We do this – we try very hard to both attract and retain the best people to become members of our team. However, it turns out that that is not all that we need to be doing. Getting our team members to communicate is key to making the team successful. As a manager, you need to take a look at your team and if communication is not happening, then you need to make some changes.