My Interview With Marketing Sherpa at IRCE 2015

Talent is the most important thing to consider when building a successful company. Whether it’s a startup business or a company that’s been in operations for numerous years, people make a company  primed and ready for success.

Granted, the products you sell or the services you offer are almost equally important, but the coffee doesn’t make the Starbucks experience unique. Their people do.

While I think we can all agree that hiring and keeping talent is vital for any business, why do employees leave? And why is it hard to keep employees for a lengthy period of time? In his remarkably successful book The Hard Things About Hard Things, author, entrepreneur, and venture capitalist Ben Horowitz says there are 2 reasons employees leave a company: they hate their manager, or they weren’t learning anything. While that’s a good start, I think there are 5 reasons in total.

1. They hate their manager

While I have been incredibly lucky to have only 1 mediocre manager or boss in my entire career (the rest were awesome!), this can be the main issue in employees leaving a company. If you can’t get along with your manager, someone whom you report to, deal with on a daily basis, and who sets your objectives and rates your performance, then that is a big hurdle to overcome. And if you don’t like your manager, the feeling is likely mutual. If mutual respect still exists, then this is perhaps salvageable. (Yes, you can dislike your manager, but still respect them). But more times than not, if manager and direct report do not get along, two things will happen: the employee will ask for a lateral move to seek another manager or they will leave.

Think about your organization: are there any obvious frictions between an employee(s) and their manager?

2. They Stop Learning

Horowitz is dead on when he states that another main reasons employees leave is because they stop learning. I would also add it could be because they never learned anything. If you have any kind of drive, you will want to learn as much as you can, either from your manager or leadership team, the position itself, industry events, or from your colleagues.

If your learning curve gets stunted or never starts, even as you keep wanting to learn, then perhaps it’s time for a change. One thing I have seen work in employees who stop learning or are bored is to swap positions with someone else in the department (for example, moving from email marketing to social media) or to change departments (for example, moving from Digital Marketing to Ecommerce operations). This forces you to learn new elements of a position and get your learning back on track.

If the above options are not possible, and it’s been some months since learning stopped, then maybe it’s best for employee and employer to part ways. Once an employee stops learning, it may be mutually beneficial to part ways.

Think about your organization: if you sense an employee is bored or has stopped learning, perhaps send him to an industry event to spark a flame, or see if there is another internal position he/she could fill.

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