Fostering a Team to Last: A Look into What it Really Takes

As a concluding element to my month-long effort of building a lasting team, I dive into the main ingredients to successful employee retention.  

Employees aren’t retained in the ways you might think. 

It takes more than simply paying fair-market wages, offering a decent benefit package, and allowing two weeks of vacation a year. It has little to do with a streamlined human resources department, a cute annual holiday party, or bonuses for meeting quotas. 

These are outdated ideas on what truly keeps a long-lasting team. 

In reality, it requires something much more personal. 

It requires a total overhaul of the approach of leadership.  

TWO NECESSARY ELEMENTS

University of Michigan’s Chris White observes that employee turnover, team decline, and walk-outs don’t necessarily occur when employees are underpaid or annoyed with their superiors. More so, they occur when employees feel: “unheard, shot down, disengaged, and unimportant. [And when they begin to feel these ways], their reaction is to stop caring very much about their work.” 

So what’s the solution?

A workplace of genuine trust and safety. 

In the light of team decline, Simon Sinek takes it back to the basics when he shares how we have evolved as human beings to thrive in a group in which we trust one another. He notes how it has been vital to our survival as a species and it has remained the prevailing mentality in our social circles and especially our workplaces. 

Until employees feel safe, they cannot trust and cooperate with those around them. When an organization has proven it is not looking out for the well-being of its people, the people must then look out for themselves. As a result, they spend much of their energy self-protecting with little left over to do their best work and further the organization.

Any level of targeted recruiting and clever interviewing techniques amount to only short-term results if candidates are hired onto a disengaged team. Carefully curated talent will spoil in the unfavorable conditions of a workplace lacking trust and safety.

Sinek goes on to observe, “It’s the leader that sets the tone [in the workplace]. When a leader makes the choice to put the safety and lives of the people inside the organization first, to sacrifice their comforts, and sacrifice the tangible results so that the people remain and feel safe and feel like they belong, remarkable things happen.” 

So how do we create this environment of trust and safety in our organizations? How do we retain the solid team of individuals we’ve worked hard to build? 

FIRST, DO A HEALTH CHECK

You don’t know where to go if you don’t know where you are. The first step is to take an honest look at the current level of health of your organization. 

Chris White encourages leaders to ask their current team members, “What don’t we talk about here that we really should be talking about?” to get a gauge on where staff sees the holes in communication, efficiency, and the level of toxicity of the workplace.  

This is especially powerful to do in today’s climate of The Great Resignation as Donald and Charlie Sull note that, “A toxic corporate culture is by far the strongest predictor of industry-adjusted attrition and is 10 times more important than compensation in predicting turnover.” 

To actively combat this, researcher Dr. Brene Brown offers organizations curated guidance in not only refining the health of their companies, but understanding where to presently rate it with her Daring Leadership Assessment. Here, Brown works to provide leaders with a roadmap to building the trust and safety necessary to creating an environment in which teams can thrive.  

You can’t advance if you don’t begin at your starting point. So sit in reflection. Ask questions. Go eye-to-eye with your present staff to create the next move.  

SECOND, RECOGNIZE AND RESTORE THE HUMANITY OF YOUR TEAM

The next step to fostering an environment of trust and safety is making the following paradigm shift across your leadership, offered by Adam Grant: “Employees are not resources to manage. They’re humans to value.” 

Your people are the lifeblood of your organization. They interact with your customers, vendors, and clients every day. Recognizing the mark they make in and on your company is essential, and it ought to be recognized for the significance it holds. 

No human can feel safe in a workplace where they are treated as just a number or a cog in the wheel. Restoring humanity back to your team starts with adjusting priorities at the top. 

Grant goes on to express, “Bad managers only care about your results. Good managers care about your well-being. Great managers care more about your well-being than your results. We do our best work when leaders put people above performance.” 

Shifting the conversation of leadership from “it’s all about the bottom line” –and the ruthless moves made to protect that–to “it’s all about the people building this with us” will essentially kill two birds with one stone. Not only will your team thrive, but your bottom line will reap the benefits of a whole group–not just the few at the top–striving to push the needle forward. 

Hamza Khan falls in line with Grant’s advice when he notes, “You manage things [but] you lead people…I don’t stand behind my team and say go. I stand in front of my team and say let’s go.” 

When everyone’s humanity is honored, organizations are laying the foundation of trust and safety. 

THIRD, UNCOVER VALUE, BE THE WIND IN THEIR SAILS

In order to establish this framework of trust and safety, employees must become more than just task completers and bodies filling roles in the eyes of leadership. They must be seen as dynamic players in the grand effort to further the company’s cause with something unique to give. 

This starts with leadership working to recognize the potential of its people, calling it out, and providing opportunities for them to rise to the occasion of fulfilling it. 

As Simon Sinek advises, “This is the responsibility of management–to take us under their wing and help us understand our own value to ourselves.” 

“Management” only maintains while “leadership” inspires, supports, and develops its people. 

A team member will go to the ends of the earth believing in the mission of an organization that has demonstrated time and time again believes in them. Surrounded by an ecosystem of trust and safety with leadership who sees, calls out, and invests in the growth of their people, teams will skyrocket. 

In the wake of people coming alive in their jobs, companies will transform, and likely, success will abound. Leadership must approach their teams as a group of living, breathing individuals with aspirations, strengths, and ideas in order to harness that sacred human power of creativity and passion.

Bring your people into the fold of the cause, the purpose, the “why” of your organization, identifying and nurturing the ever-growing sense of importance they uniquely hold within it, and watch magic unfold.

As Anotine de Saint-Exupery said, “If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.”

The secret to employee retention hides within the beautiful longings of our humanity. As humans, each of us longs for safety, belonging, and fulfillment in life, and our workplaces are no exception. Organizations that foster that ecosystem will be the ones that capture the long-lasting dedication of their people.