The most common reason employees give for quitting their last job is that their manager didn't care about them. 70% of top performers who leave their jobs point to a breakdown in a relationship.
Those employees aren’t your strugglers, or even your run-of-the-mill, average players. They are your top performers—those who you worked so hard to recruit, invested time in training and coaching, and who lead to the biggest growth in your organization.
Even though they may want to advance their careers, earn a living, support their families, and contribute to society – if an individual does not believe they can trust their manager to have their best interests at heart, they usually can’t keep doing the job.
Relationships Take Work
Relationships are important, and they don’t happen by accident.
To build the kinds of relationships where your people would walk through walls for you, where they would stay even if they were offered more money somewhere else, and where they trust and act on your coaching, you have to put in the work.
A relationship is something you do, not just something you let happen.
Why Put In The Work?
The ROI of relationships is evident in many ways:
- Morale: Strong relationships improve morale overall, which in turn boosts your culture.
- Retention: Employees want to work for people who have a vested interest in them!
- Teamwork: Strong relationships lead to increased cooperation, communication, and collaboration.
- Productivity: People are more productive when they’re in a supportive environment that builds them up.
- Feedback: A true synergy exists between relationships and feedback. People are open to feedback from leaders they believe care about them, which leads to continuous growth.
How Do You Build Relationships?
Here are ten things you can do to build strong relationships:
- Don’t wait around for someone to connect with you. Make it your job to build a relationship with them.
- Spend one-on-one time with your employees, and make sure some of that time happens outside of the office. Set aside your distractions and give them your full attention.
- Focus on their strengths, not their weaknesses. Anyone can point out shortcomings, but it takes someone who really cares to show them their strengths and help them to grow.
- Conduct a Growth Guide to help you understand what motivates them and, even more importantly, what doesn’t.
- Build trust by doing what you say you will do every single time. Trust is the foundation of any strong relationship.
- Provide continuous feedback by taking every opportunity to let them know what you’ve noticed.
- Catch them doing things right much more often than doing things wrong. For every one piece of “constructive” feedback you provide, make sure you provide at least five positive pieces of feedback.
- Ask for their opinions and advice, consider what you learn from them, and then get back to them with the “rest of the story.”
- Loop them in by sharing important information and providing them with the bigger picture.
- Challenge them with responsibilities that fall into their wheelhouse so they can be successful and grow in an area of talent.
Conclusion
Remember, people join a company, but they quit a boss. Don’t let yourself be part of that statistic!
Build a habit of actively nurturing your relationships and you’ll find yourself with a team of employees who are committed, inspired, and engaged.
*Editor's Note: This blog has been updated since its original post date.
