Why great employees quit

People leave bad managers, not companies. When an employee quits, you pay 6-9 months of their former salary to find and onboard a replacement. But the real damage is when one departure triggers a wave of turnover, because the same problems that drove the first person out are still festering. The fourteen reasons great employees quit fall into patterns you can fix. Most have nothing to do with the company. Everything to do with you.

Lack of follow-through builds resentment faster than anything else. When your team believes you don't care, trust erodes. Eventually they give up on you altogether. Not having regular 1-on-1s means you don't know what they're really thinking. Is there conflict between team members? Does someone feel stifled? Without that private line of communication, you'll never know until they quit. Ignoring their ideas, not treating them like adults, undercompensating them, failing to praise good work. These all compound. Your best people notice. They compare notes. They start looking.

The toxic employee problem cuts both ways. Keeping bad employees frustrates good ones. Nothing makes it harder for everyone to get work done than watching someone underperform without consequences. But keeping high-performing assholes is even worse. Harvard research shows that even if you could replace an average worker with someone who performs in the top 1%, you'd still be better off replacing a toxic worker with an average worker by more than two to one. Toxic employees don't just underperform compared to great employees in the long run. They bring the entire team down.

The retention killers people miss: not aligning work with employee goals, embarrassing people in front of peers, lack of regular progress, being a hypocrite ("do as I say not as I do"), making sweeping changes without getting buy-in first, overloading people until they burn out. Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer's research found the feeling of making progress each day is the single biggest contributor to happiness at work. When people aren't making progress, they start to burn out. Learned helplessness takes over. At that point their departure is a matter of when, not if. The good news is people usually leave for more than one reason, so an occasional slip up gets forgiven. But if you break several of these, it catches up with you.