Sara Sweat, MA – Founder & CEO, Mindshift Advisors
She was one of your best. No drama, no complaining, just consistent, excellent, brilliance. Then she asked for fifteen minutes, told you she’d accepted an offer somewhere else, and gave you two week’s notice.
You had no clue she was even unhappy. You thought you’d done everything right. But here you are wide awake at 2 am racking your brain for the moment you missed. “Was it me?” “Was it the job?” “What could I have done differently?”
You’ve heard all the platitudes.
“People don’t leave companies, they leave managers”, so you invest in training for your leaders.
“Pay your people what they’re worth.”, so you benchmark your roles and increase pay.
“Nobody quits a job they love.”, so you take the whole team out to dinner & create a weekly game night for fun.
But, you just can’t shake the feeling that it’s going to happen again. And, you don’t know what else to do.
The solution starts way upstream. By the time someone hands you notice, they’ve already been gone for months. So, you want to build the tactics that identify their drives and detect dissatisfaction before they even hit “apply” on another job.
Your turnover number isn’t telling you who left. It’s telling you who you noticed leaving.
Here are three common mistakes I see founders make when it comes to retention.
1. Performance is the last thing to go, not the first
We are hard wired to keep our eyes on the output. To focus on the data; the metrics and deliverables that quantify our success. But, output is a lagging indicator of disengagement. Psychologically, there’s a lot that happens first.
It starts with our perception. When we’re contented and challenged in a balanced way, we can handle the inevitable bumps in the road.
But, when that balance is off, in either our work or our personal life, the emotional and mental fuel we need to stay positive starts to run dry.
We get cynical. We view situations through their least favorable lens. And, discretionary effort often disappears.
We stop offering unprompted ideas, stop volunteering for complexity, and start allowing others to own things that are core to our role.
Eventually, our cynicism stops reacting to those situations and starts predicting them. We now see patterns where none exist, start expecting bad things to occur, and allow all that anticipatory frustration to drive our contribution to a grinding halt.
We stop pushing back in meetings, stop arguing for the better version, stop caring whether it’s good, and stop taking pride in what we do.
By the time the work itself visibly slips, we’ve long since checked out or burned out.
This process is largely silent – especially in your top performers whose competence hides their disconnection.
I help clients design systems that detect these leading indicators of disengagement before they become disconnection:
- Track discretionary effort, not just delivery. Who stopped speaking up? Who used to push back and now just complies? Who is voicing the most uncharitable read of the situations they encounter?
- Make 1:1’s about energy and meaning, not just status. A status update tells you what got done. It tells you nothing about what it cost them to do it. Ask what is energizing them and what is draining them over time.
- Create a culture that rewards contribution and empowers everyone to work at the top of their license. When we feel like we can’t grow, we start looking for somewhere new to plant ourselves.
2. Competence reads as contentment, and it’s a trap
When it comes to your top performers, no news is most definitely bad news, but we often make the mistake of treating our top performers as the low maintenance workhorses of our orgs.
They get the most work because they’re good and they have earned your trust. They get the least recognition, because they don’t need a pat on the back. They get the least support, because they never ask for it.
So, you end up systematically over-extracting from the exact people you can least afford to lose.
And, for a while, they’ll let you. They’re driven to succeed by something innate, so they’ll find a way to keep achieving even in a broken system.
But, over time, a slow accumulation of resentment and depletion add up and they start to believe that being “excellent” just means being given more with less.
Inevitably, they hit the wall and their retention goes off a cliff. They keep churning out the work until one day they are simply done. And, there’s nothing you can do to get them back.
The people who never ask you for anything are the ones you should be checking on most.
Founders who perform deliberate and frequent audits about load and recognition stand to retain their best.
Once a quarter, ask yourself some blunt questions: who on this team is carrying the most? Is what they are carrying moving them in the direction of their goals or are they just achieving out of habit? Do I fully understand what lights them up and am I investing in those things on their behalf?
3. You’re collecting your most important data at the moment it’s most useless
Nearly every company runs exit interviews. And, I get the idea. Continuous learning around what went wrong to help you learn how to hire and retain in the future.
But this exercise is historically full of low-quality data. People who have already decided to leave, will almost never tell you the truth – in large part, because they already believe it won’t matter.
The exit interview is the equivalent of a relational autopsy. Sometimes, it can tell you what killed the patient, but it can never save a life.
You are gathering your single most valuable retention data at the exact moment it can do nothing for you. So, move it up!
Retention interviews are regular, structured conversations about motivation, meaning, and change. We want to know why people are staying and how to operationalize those things, so they happen automatically.
Self-Determination Theory, one of the most validated frameworks in motivation psychology, finds that people are driven by three core needs: autonomy, the sense that they have meaningful control over their work; competence, the sense that they are growing and good at what they do; and relatedness, the sense that they belong and are valued by the people around them.
The retention interview allows you find out, person by person, whether they can get those needs met where they are.
Asking questions like the ones below can help you measure engagement long before it becomes a problem.
- What part of your work energizes you most right now?
- What are you learning most in your role currently?
- When did you last feel genuinely recognized here?
Let Them Go
Regrettable attrition is inevitable in a high growth environment. Sometimes, you’re going to get it wrong. But, with some intention and architecture, you can keep that number way down.
And, remember, when someone does tell you they want to leave, it’s almost always better to let them go.
Counteroffers might delay their departure for a while, but once someone has one foot out the door, they will almost always eventually leave.
If you must talk somebody into staying, you’ll have to talk them into working too.
Your best people are already being approached by your competitors. They may already be taking those calls. Investing now – not just in retention, but in the thriving of those employees may be your greatest ROI yet.
Ready to go deeper?
This is the third in an ongoing series on the psychology of growth, built for founders and executives at early-stage companies who want to use human psychology as a competitive advantage.
If you keep losing people you didn’t expect to lose, the problem usually isn’t your comp band. It’s your detection system. Let’s build you one. Book a free consultation at mindshiftadvisors.com.
