Staying Isn't Choosing

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