Mission vs. Manager

Employee turnover at any level within a sports, events, and tourism organization can become tricky. In today’s day in age, organizations are waging wars for talent, thus creating even more challenges. When reviewing your best employees, how are you crafting culture and incentives to avoid replacing them regardless of economic and political irregularities?

Determining why essential personnel are leaving your organization can be vague. Their decision-making to leave can be difficult to understand. Experience tells us that employees accept positions for the organization’s mission and depart due to the manager.

How is this so?

Employees accept job offers because they believe in what your organization stands for and the type of work they get to perform. This reasoning is a crucial aspect of hiring top talent for important positions. Many organizational leaders just become talent agents to spread an organization’s inspiring mission and vision to attract the best talent available.

Subsequently, why does top talent leave an organization? Well, let’s review… It cannot be because of the mission, as it rarely changes. Regardless of popular opinion, most employees do not leave to chase more money. If organizational salaries are competitive with the market, and they feel they are impacting a mission, they often do not look elsewhere.

So, why do people resign? 9.9 times out of 10, the reason is their manager. Staff moves on due to personal issues with their manager or because they do not feel their manager treats them respectfully.

The average manager will see an employee or two leave at separate times. When several exit around the same time, however, it should send warning signals to the organization. You can pinpoint the issue at hand with just a bit of thoughtful research. Then when you identify who the problem is, you must act.

The point is many employees are not resigning because they no longer identify with the mission and objective of the organization.

Salaries are not the issue either. Many are leaving due to a divide with their manager.

If it is too late, or you cannot resolve the issues, then change is necessary. Organizations must find a way to avoid creating a revolving door with top talent and then develop a reputation for poor management. Consequently, be mindful of departures or even transfers to other divisions or departments and, if appropriate, track it back to their direct report. You must take action if the issue traces back to a specific manager.