Why Your Best People Really Leave

Alison ran a thirty-five-person managed IT services firm outside Denver. Twelve years in, credentialed techs, an enviable client roster — and three of her best people gone in eighteen months. She blamed the market, the compensation arms race, the national competitor that had moved into town. Every one of those things was true. Every one of those things was also, she would eventually discover, the story she was telling herself instead of the one her ecosystem was actually telling her. Then her longest-tenured team lead sat across from HR and delivered one sentence Alison could not stop thinking about for three weeks. In this episode we take resignations out of the "market forces" bin and put them back where they belong — as reports from inside your ecosystem. We walk through what MIT, McKinsey, and Gallup have actually found about why people leave (hint: it is almost never the money), the four signals your best people send for months before they hand in notice, and the single fifteen-minute conversation that will save you more than any retention bonus you have ever paid.www.eqfit.org