One of my former students is becoming an attrition statistic, moving from one large Fortune 500 corporation to another. The former employer may find this surprising: the employee had just been placed on a new project so things were going well and settling down, right? But the actions leading up to this point, the ones the corporation tried to bury, were the seeds of departure.
The employee’s new position on a new team was the result of his prior team having its budget cut. He’d been put into the euphemistically-described “redeployment pool” and given a few weeks to find a new position or be forced out of the company entirely. There are two fundamental problems baked into this organizational anti-pattern:
- it exposes the volatility of the entirely political nature of program funding such that no project is actually safe or demonstrably worthy of employee dedication, and
- this is compounded by the individualized threat to the employee’s livelihood.
Thus, while the employee’s primary goal while in the redeployment pool is to get out of the redeployment pool, the employee is nether going to limit their options to staying within the corporation nor have substantial loyalty to a team within the corporation that does pick them up. Noting that external hiring processes can run longer than internal transfers, the employee’s attrition risk remains (or is lagging) their being picked up by their new team. Hence an employee like my former student whose previous project was cut to save money can subsequently join another internal team and then abruptly depart from it causing a major second-degree disruption to that team’s ability to meet its projected commitments from the previous project’s cancellation.
While it is possible that our company’s previous engagement in illegal collusion with other companies to prevent employee attrition (Roberts, 2015) has resulted in a trained incapacity for cultivating employee loyalty in a proactive, positive, and legal way, it also suggests that our company knows how much attrition really costs the organization and therefore how much the organization should be willing to spend on preventing it.
Buckingham and Goodall’s Nine Lies About Work (2019) implicitly explains how forcing employees into crisis through opaque structural changes severs the bonds they have connecting them to the company. Buckingham and Goodall developed an 8 question survey that they recount in Chapter 1 to confirm or deny attachment from the employee to their contributions, to their team, and to the company. Making a decision to wipe out a project team that was meeting its commitments instantly turns 6 of those 8 questions to a “No”: the 2 elements of team alignment are gone, the 3 elements of active contribution at work are gone, and the 1 element of being aligned to the company mission is gone. It is also likely that confidence in the future of the company is undermined, which was another 1 of the key survey points, such that the only thing preserving a redeployed employee’s loyalty to their employer is that they are “challenged to grow”—and that’s the one thing the intrinsically-motivated self-starters that every employer is trying to hire doesn’t need from their employer. So unless there are outside factors pinning a redeployed employee in place, a hiring manager should anticipate a lack of loyalty when hiring from the pool.
It is also worth noting that any sufficiently disruptive reorganization will also set at least 4 of those 8 questions to an immediate “No” as well as undermine the individual autonomy that is a precondition for intrinsically-motivated self-starters. So while every reorganization is intended to improve alignment and performance manageability, the first thing it does is disrupts alignment and performance manageability. Yet when the decline in employee performance is revealed, it is seen as a flaw in how the reorganization was implemented rather than a consequence of implementing a reorganization. After all, the thing that’s missing-ergo-not-missed when upper management is looking at organizational charts is the employees’ momentum which is the grave irony of a management-improving re-organization: the actual value an organizational model has does not show up in an organizational diagram.
None of this is to say that reorganizations are never necessary or that all projects should be funded to completion lest employees be disrupted. But it is to say that the damage of failures of leadership and management that result in project cancellations and reorganizations needs to be recognized and balanced by actively investing in keeping employees focused on how they can contribute to the mission and future of the company while new interpersonal bonds are formed, as well as investing heavily in forming new interpersonal bonds.
Lopp (2010) tells the story of how he failed to ensure the loyalty of somebody he’d recruited to his team. He advocates that managers be actively engaged with filling their requisitions because “Your daily hands-on management of your hiring isn’t just going to improve your hiring process, it’s going to improve your career because you’ll demonstrate from the first moment you interact with your future employee that you care.” He also tells the counter-point story to his failure, about a woman who recruited “Two hires I thought we had absolutely no chance of hiring. Both on the team in a matter of months. Your question is, “What’s her secret?” and the answer is dangerously simple – deliberate, consistently expressed and reinforced want.”
The funny thing about telling people that you want what they can do for you is that it works outside of having requisitions and formal teams and official organizational charts in a slide deck. There is a job in an organization that is adjacent to mine that I’m certain I could do well in and my current manager (who is flailing in turbulence that our previous CIO caused with aggressively under-managed disruptions years ago) has encouraged me to pursue it—but that hiring manager has, uniquely among hiring managers I’ve talked to over the years, not responded to my inquiries at all. He is the polar opposite of another manager who makes a point of telling me that she needs me to work for her if only she can get the headcount approved. I walked past him the other day on my way to help her team, and also brew them coffee as a cultural-enhancement practice (Factor, 2007).
Even if something changes, though, they’ll both have loyalty difficulties that are not of their making. And the problem starts at the top of the company where we have a finance-oriented CEO who is unable to articulate what he expects from the company other than “profit” and flows through a variety of vice presidents who undercut projects with reorganizations and layoffs because immediate-term financial targets are the first-and-only thing that is worth delivering. This shouldn’t be true, of course, but our singled-minded CEO is lacking a broader capacity to compellingly explain how it’s not true.
This is not to say that our current CEO is absolutely a bad leader: as Buckingham and Goodall explain, leadership is not really a specific thing or defined set of qualities, it is instead a particular resonance that attracts particular followers. Our CEO can attract people who care about corporate profitability, whoever they happen to be; he just doesn’t have much standing with people who want to create products or make the world a better place or even get a vaingloriously large pay raise (since that detracts from corporate profitability). Indeed, my former student will be comparatively well-rewarded by his new employers, a point he mentioned as contributing to his departure.
Highly financialized companies like my employer and my student’s new employer, companies that rely so heavily on stock to pay their executives that the executives focus on their market cap rather than their mission, contributes heavily to Buckingham and Goodall’s assertion that people don’t care which company they work for. After all, outside of a rogue’s gallery of actively unethical and borderline-criminal organizations, what company wouldn’t you work for? At the point where the CEO is incapable of seeing the company as producing anything but money, I may as well take my portable skills and go work for some place like Charles Schwab or Fidelity where we can more-fully focus on money instead of being bothered by having actual products that people use.
About a decade ago, our then-CEO (since deceased) told us that our mission over the next 10 years would be to touch and improve the lives of everybody on the planet with our products. I remember this even now. I remember laughing at it, the goofy, nerdy enthusiasm with which he presented it to us. I remember thinking “Sure, we’ll get right on that” with no small amount of sarcasm. But I also remember that when I took my previous job (that I was disruptively reorganized out of) that I was excited to grow and deliver continuously improving results because it felt like I was doing a small part of making the world a better place. My co-workers also remember that mission, remember being a bit too cynical to really buy into it, but also now feel its absence in their grinding lack of pride in their current work.
I could be convinced to take another job with my current company, particularly for a manager that tells me she wants what I can do for her, but I also expect my next career move to come with a mission statement.
Condensing all that down, here’s the take-aways:
- Companies under-value the momentum that employee loyalty can bring to the pursuit of organizational objectives.
- To this end, they under-invest in improving loyalty to company and team missions or even proactively directing momentum to where contributions will be most valued
- And will instead, conversely/perversely, allow leaders to demonstrate their executive functions through disruptive and disorienting actions such as reorganizations, project cancellations, and layoffs that cause employees to reactively bring their momentum to a sudden halt.
- This is perhaps partially a natural consequence of not having a larger mission for managers throughout the organization to proactively direct contributory momentum towards.
References
Buckingham, M. & Goodall, A. (2019). Nine lies about work: A freethinking leader’s guide to the real world. Harvard Business Review Press. Cambridge, MA.
Factor, P. (2007, April 15). At half-past three, it’s time for tea. Red Gate: Simple Talk. Retrieved from https://www.red-gate.com/simple-talk/blogs/at-half-past-three-its-time-for-tea/
Lopp, M. (2010). Wanted. Rands in Repose. Retrieved from https://randsinrepose.com/archives/wanted/
Roberts, J. J. (2015, Sept 3). Tech workers will get average of $5,770 under final anti-poaching settlement. Fortune. Retrieved from https://fortune.com/2015/09/03/koh-anti-poach-order/