A common complaint among leaders is when their organization loses good employees, resulting in a higher and more costly turnover rate. 

There are often many things blamed for this, from a bad boss to a lack of benefits. But why do employees really quit their jobs?

While a study by Gallup confirms that 50% of employees leave their jobs to escape a bad manager or improve their overall life, ultimately employees leave when they feel they aren’t able to achieve their full potential. A similar study by Glassdoor showed that employees leave a job for one with a better company culture.

Based on these findings, the best ways to retain employees are:

1. Changing your management style
2. Increasing potential for in-house development
3. Focusing on culture fit when hiring

If your managers are not leading employees to perform at the highest level, you are likely to see low morale, engagement, and high turnover. Managers are direct influencers over how employees perform, and having an ineffective manager is a factor in job dissatisfaction. Good managers are honest, supportive, and recognize the talents of their team.

The benefits of leadership competencies

One way to ensure your company’s leaders have what it takes to be effective in their job is to incorporate transformational leadership competencies into your selection and development programs to ensure your managers embody the behaviors of successful leaders.

You can also use these competencies to your advantage in creating a succession plan or choosing current employees as leadership candidates.

Employees don’t stop growing throughout their careers, and it’s important that they have the ability to build their skills in relation to their current job and their future aspirations. Sometimes employees feel that in order to fulfill their potential they have to seek employment elsewhere.

To avoid this, use competencies to ensure you’re capturing the specific skills, abilities, knowledge, and behaviors that make up success on the job. This allows you and your employees to measure how they are performing, and see what they would need in order to make an internal career move.

Besides simply moving up the career ladder, employees have more options to explore and pursue their interests.

Focusing on Culture Fit

Finally, a solution to high turnover could be focusing more on culture fit. Essentially, culture fit is the degree to which someone currently reflects the beliefs and values of an organization.

By defining your organization’s values and integrating them into your organization, you can attract employees whose values are in alignment with yours, and screen out unsuitable candidates.

A common criticism of hiring for culture fit is that you can end up with a lack of diversity in your teams. But when done correctly using competencies as a basis for translating an organization’s key values into concrete, day to day, workplace behaviors, you can focus on hiring individuals who have the capacity to effectively embody the values of the organization, leading to greater job satisfaction, improved performance, and increased employee retention.