Retaining top talent is one of the most pressing challenges companies face. The single most powerful factor in overcoming this challenge? Outstanding supervisors at every level of your organization. Nothing else comes close.
The Leadership Reality
In most organizations, leadership quality varies widely. You’ll find one or two exceptional leaders, a fair number of mediocre managers, and unfortunately, a few poor supervisors. This mix means that whether an employee gets to work for a phenomenal leader often feels like a roll of the dice. But it doesn’t have to be that way. We can – and should – do better.
An Ambitious Goal: Every Employee Reports to a Phenomenal Supervisor
At BetterCulture, we challenge our clients to aim high: every employee should have a phenomenal supervisor. And even though this big hairy audacious goal is terribly challenging to achieve, for organizations that even set their sights to this goal, the payoff is huge:
- Boost Recruitment: Your company will become known as a great place to work.
- Improve Retention: Employees often leave managers, not companies.
- Manage Today’s Workforce: In a tight labor market, you may hire people who need more development, making skilled supervision even more critical.
How to Achieve This Goal: Three Straightforward Steps
1. Define Leadership Clearly
Create a clear, company-wide vision of what leadership means. For example, BetterCulture’s Seven Principles of Leadership© provide a consistent framework for leader behavior. Without this clarity, employees face unpredictable leadership styles, which increases workplace stress and turnover.
2. Place the Right People in Leadership Roles
This sounds obvious but is often mishandled. Too often, promotions are based on technical skills or seniority – neither reliably predicts leadership success. BetterCulture helps our clients identify observable skills and traits that forecast leadership potential.
3. Invest in High-Quality Leadership Training
Leadership is a skill – and like any skill, it can and should be developed intentionally. Provide your supervisors with top-tier training that explicitly teaches what it is that outstanding leaders know and do. Show them how to bring BetterCulture’s Seven Principles to life for their teams.
The Kicker: Cultivate a Thriving Culture
Great supervisors can do a lot to retain employees, but the real magic happens when the entire workforce is engaged in building a positive culture. At BetterCulture, we often call this creating an employee-led culture (or building a “bottom up” company culture). For more on that, check out this BetterCulture webinar: From the Ground Up: Six Essential Steps for Building an Employee-Led Culture.
If you want to make building a bottom-up culture easy, check out BetterCulture’s 20 Tenets of Culture© coaching program. We’ve built it to take the culture building lift off of leaders and to empower all employees to contribute to a strong, vibrant workplace culture.
A Tale of Two Companies
- Company A: Vague values, inconsistent promotions, minimal leadership training, and no employee involvement in culture-building.
- Company B: Clear leadership principles, carefully selected supervisors, excellent leadership training, and active employee involvement in culture.
Which company would you bet on? If you pick Company A, good luck—you’ll need it.
The Bottom Line
High employee turnover is often the canary in the coal mine—an early warning sign of deeper issues that can severely harm your business. Turnover hurts both productivity and quality. It’s far better to prevent these problems proactively than to scramble to fix them later.
Follow the BetterCulture formula laid out in this article: three clear steps and a culture-building kicker.
While simple, these steps are surprisingly rare in practice. Companies that commit to this approach see retention improve dramatically—like compound interest, the benefits multiply over time.
Make this your goal: employee retention will be one of our company’s greatest strengths!
If you’re ready to transform your leadership and retention strategies, BetterCulture is here to help. Together, we can build a workplace where long-term employees thrive, and your company prospers.
