10 Reasons Why Your Best People Hate Working for You

Great leaders know that how they accomplish results is just as important as what results they accomplish. They know burning bridges with their people, or with their customers, leaves them precariously isolated from the people they need most. Great leaders know they key to building sustainable results is building a healthy organizational culture. They consistently recognize performance aligned with goals and values. They help their employees enhance their skills, ensures their people can risk failing magnificently in pursuit of discovery, and build the relationships needed to engage the discretional energy of their teams. Effective leaders know the only thing worse than having a great employee quit and leave, is having them quit and stay.

Unfortunately, given the fact that less than one in three employees is actively engaged in their job, screams that all too many employees still experience a disconnect between what leaders know they need to do, and what they actually do. The State of the American Workplace Survey, released annually by Gallup, continually shows for every two engaged employees, one is actively working to sabotage their results. Meanwhile, two more are just going through the motions, paying more attention to the passing of time than to what they are supposed to be doing.

Why is it that seven in ten of your people either don’t care about your success, or are actively working to ensure you fail? Here are ten reasons why your best people hate working for you:

1. Your People Feel Underappreciated. Just how long did you think you could rely on your best people to pick up the slack for those sucking the life out of your organization? They don’t need a pat on the back every time they show up for work on time or finish a task, but they need to know you recognize their sizable contributions. They need to be reminded from time to time that you appreciate their contributions to the team. Most importantly, they need you to address those who are not pulling their weight. Ignore your top performers for too long, and you will be left without the people most responsible for your success.
2. A Lousy Compensation System. Tap into your people’s intrinsic motivators, and you will get more from your people than you need. However, if you fail to pay them what they are worth according to the market, they will find somewhere else to unlock their discretional energy. You don’t need to be at the top of the market pay scale, but you certainly shouldn’t be at the bottom.
3. Lack of Balance. Today’s employees watched their workaholic parents give up everything in pursuit of career accomplishments. They want something different for themselves and their families. Forcing people to work hundred hour weeks, cancelling vacations because of your failure to plan, or requiring someone to pick up someone else’s duties because you reduced your workforce, are all surefire ways to breed discontentment and disengagement. Yes, you may need to cut costs at times, and you may need your people to do more at times, but those need to be the exception, not the rule.
4. Constant Changes in Focus. Companies that fail to recognize the impact of constantly chasing direction without any communication or obvious reason, leave their people dazed and confused. The more closely you can align what you do with what you say, value, expect, and reward, the more likely you are to keep your people engaged during times of transition and change. Change for the sake of change, or just to shake things up, will chase your best people right out your front door.
5. Lack of Appropriate Resources. Your people need resources to thrive. Whether it’s warehouse equipment, the office phone system, or access to other departments, a lack of resources can drive your best people running for the exit. If your equipment doesn’t work, or if your staunch organizational silos keep resources locked away from the very people who need them most, it’s time to retool how you work. Stop forcing them to beat their heads against the wall.
6. Unrealistic Goals. Setting goals, even setting stretch goals, is important for maintaining production levels and achieving profitability. However, constantly moving the proverbial carrot without regard for what it takes to reach it, or setting the carrot so far away that there is no direct line of sight between what your people do and the result you expect, will usually wind up in a breakdown in morale and desire, followed closely by an uptick in turnover. Your people need to know they can achieve what you expect. If they can’t they’ll go somewhere that appreciates their contributions.
   
7. Poor Relationships with Management. The best relationships are built on consistent dialogues between people. If your managers talk at your people, rather than you’re your people, they will never get to know their people’s strengths, weaknesses, and talents. If your managers listen only to reply, they are missing the opportunity to build a relationship. You need your people to succeed for you to succeed. If you are working against them, instead of with them, you will soon be working without them.
8. The Need to Be Grow. When kids get bored in school, their minds wander and their performance drops. When adults get bored at work, their minds wander and their performance drops. Your people don’t want to look back on their time with you and wonder what they received besides a paycheck. Leaders that help their people grow not only develop a succession process through their own organization, ensuring they have the talent they need to grow, but they have a workforce who trusts their leaders. Keeping a light burning bright in your people is the best way to keep a bright employee.
9. Lack of Safety. When your people are challenged to grow, pushing the envelope of possibility, they are bound to fail. It takes practice to learn how to fail forward. If you punish people for failing, your people will never risk failing magnificently in pursuit of progress. Forcing your people to remain stagnant is not only an efficient way to drive them out of your business, it is a surefire way to ensure your organization’s failure.
10. Lack of a Clear Pathway to Success. Please, take off your people’s blinders! Humans are hard wired to be driven to accomplish goals we can see. If your people have no idea where their effort fits into the bigger picture, or why they are doing what you are having the do, they will never be able to sustain their engagement. Their work becomes abstract. Paint a picture through your vision, then help your people know why they should take that next step, even if that next step is unpleasant.  
11. Micromanage How Your People Work (BONUS). Do you really need everyone to work the same way you work? Do you really need them to think like you, act like you, and do things just like you? You don’t even have all the questions, let alone all the answers. Let your people find their way, walk beside them in their journey, and listen to what they discover. If you don’t, they’ll find someone else to let them work in a way that fits their strengths and personality preferences.

Talent is scarce enough these days, don’t make it unachievable. People work for people, not for companies, businesses, or brands. When you learn how to develop relationships with your people to ensure they want to work for you, the chance of engaging their heads, hands, and hearts is greatly improved. Continuing to work in a way that drives a wedge between what your people are willing to do, and what you need your people to do, will only hasten your organization’s path to irrelevance.

Scott Brown, MSOL, is the Founder Hardie Consulting, an  Orlando, FL based management consulting firm. Scott is a coach, consultant, author, and award-winning speaker who has successfully helped countless organizations learn how to meet shifting customer and employee expectations. Follow him on Twitter: @ScottBrownMSOL, connect with him on LinkedIn, visit his company’s website:  www.HardieConsulting.com, and check out his new book, Alignment: How to Transform Potential into Performance, Productivity and Profit, available on Amazon or CreateSpace to learn more about how to create a healthy organizational culture and highly engaged workforce.