People leave their jobs because they are not happy. I saw recently a list of "General reasons why people decide to leave their jobs", and against each reason there was an action. Each action was something that, it was suggested, the manager could do to change the working environment. Something the manager could do to change the way the employee felt about their job and therefore allow them to stay. Why does the manager not understand that these actions were what he should be doing all the time? It is time that we realised the real influence of the manager. The manager is responsible for the performance of his team. The manager is responsible for finding and training new employees. The manager is the person who creates the environment at work that causes people to leave. The manager is responsible for the loss of experience when people leave the organisation. The manager is responsible for creating the unhappiness that causes people to leave. The traditional view of the function of a manager is that this is the person who tells others what to do. This view suggests that when people do what they are told then things work well. The same view suggests that when they don't do what they are told things dont work well and that it is then the fault of the workforce for not doing what they were told and therefore not the fault of the manager. But in the real world it is the fact of telling people what to do that causes the resistance that prevents them from doing it. If I never want to get a shirt ironed again all I have to do is tell my wife to iron it. Telling her to iron a shirt will make it almost impossible for her to do it. The manager by telling the workforce what to do has a hugely destructive effect on their ability to do it. Thus instead of blaming the workforce for failing to do what they were told, we should be blaming the manager for creating the environment, by telling the workforce what to do, that prevented the workforce from doing what they were told. If we can accept a list of actions to prevent people from leaving their jobs as valid then its use should not be as a sticking plaster solution to prevent people from leaving. It should be used as an everyday checklist for the manager to allow him to create the working environment in which his employee are content such that the thought of leaving never crosses their minds. When people feel good about what they do their performance is amazing. When they dont feel good they want to leave. The manager has the ability to make the workforce feel good about what they do and therefore must accept responsibility for their poor performance and for their failure when they want to leave. |
