CASE STUDY
Cheryl.W
Published 18 hours ago
I’ve come across versions of the same situation in more than one business. Staff turnover in relatively junior roles is high. Recruitment becomes a constant cycle, time is repeatedly spent training new starters and, understandably, people start to accept that this is simply the nature of the roles.
They’re often entry or junior level jobs. Some of the work can be repetitive. People join, get some experience, get bored and move on. Perfectly plausible explanation… except it wasn’t the whole story.
When we started looking more closely at why people were actually leaving, another issue began to emerge. Their experience of being managed wasn’t always particularly good. It would have been quite easy to stop there and conclude we had a management capability problem.
But that wasn’t the whole story either.
How did they become managers in the first place?
In some areas, people who had been around the longest or were good at doing the job themselves had progressed into management positions.
That sounds fairly normal. The problem was that becoming a manager effectively meant being given people to manage.
There wasn’t necessarily any assessment of whether they had the skills to lead other people, whether they actually wanted to, or what development they might need before taking on that responsibility.
Some had the potential to become great managers with the right support. Some probably didn’t. Not everyone is cut out to be a people manager - and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that.
But there was another problem underneath all of this.
Managing people had become the route to progression.
If someone wanted to progress, earn more or gain greater status, taking responsibility for a team was pretty much the next step.
So we had people who were perfectly capable and experienced in their actual jobs being moved into positions that required an entirely different set of skills.
That wasn’t particularly fair on them and it certainly wasn’t fair on the people they were suddenly responsible for managing.
Nothing good comes from being managed by someone who doesn’t have the ability, or perhaps even the desire, to manage people.
The problem had moved
What started as a conversation about staff turnover had now taken us somewhere quite different.
Rather than simply looking at how we could retain people in those roles, we needed to look at how the department worked as a whole.
What did progression actually mean? Did becoming more senior automatically have to mean managing people? Could someone progress because their skills and knowledge had developed? Could they become someone who trained others, took responsibility for more complex work or became an internal authority in their area without having a team reporting to them?
We introduced clearer structures and progression routes that allowed people to see how they could develop without people management being the only option.
That also meant getting much clearer about the skills required at each level.
If someone wanted to progress, they could see what they needed to learn and demonstrate to get there. Induction and training could then support that rather than being something that happened mainly when somebody first joined.
And if someone did want to become a people manager, that was treated as a role requiring its own skills and development rather than simply the prize for having been there the longest.
The result was happier people and much better retention.
What if we’d fixed the original “problem”?
We started with what appeared to be a staff retention problem.
Had we accepted the original explanation, “they’re young, the work can be monotonous, people don’t stay in these sorts of jobs”, we could have concentrated on recruiting replacements more efficiently.
We’d have kept recruiting.
Kept training.
And quite possibly kept losing people.
Even identifying poor management wouldn’t have taken us far enough. Sending a few managers on a training course might have helped, but it wouldn’t have addressed the structure that was continuing to put people into management roles simply because that was the only way for them to progress.
The presenting problem was real. People were leaving.
But it was a symptom of other things happening elsewhere in the business.
And that’s why I’m wary when a problem and its solution arrive neatly packaged together.
Get underneath it before you fix it
When something isn’t working in a business, naturally our attention goes to the place where the pain is showing up.
Sometimes that’s exactly where the problem is… but sometimes it isn’t.
Before jumping into fixing it, it’s worth following the thread backwards.
What’s happening before the problem appears? What assumptions have we made about why it’s happening? Have those assumptions actually been tested? Is something in another team, process or part of the business contributing to it? And is the thing we’re looking at the cause, or simply one of the consequences?
You don’t necessarily need months of analysis to answer those questions. Sometimes you just need to stop long enough to challenge the explanation everybody has become used to accepting.
In this case, we started by asking why people kept leaving.
We ended up looking at management capability, career progression, departmental structure, induction and training.
Not because the work wandered off in every direction, but because that’s where following the problem took us.
