One of the privileges of consulting is breadth. Especially as strategists, you tend to not go deep in one organization, you go wide across many. David Epstein wrote about this in Range: generalists who draw from diverse experiences often see patterns that specialists miss. I am far from the smartest person in any room I walk into and I am grateful for the vantage point. Right now, the pattern is unmistakable. Everyone is losing people. Not just technology companies, also healthcare systems, financial institutions, consumer brands, and even public services. The talent bleed is everywhere.
The instinct is to treat this as a compensation problem. Raise salaries. Offer signing bonuses. Match counteroffers. I’ve watched several clients go down this road. It helps, briefly. Then the next resignation letter arrives.
Welcome to the Great Resignation, enterprise edition.
Running for the Fences
The pandemic gave everyone a forced pause. People reassessed, beyond the tangible “do I really want to work from home?” Do I want to spend my career in an organization that operates the way mine does?
I’ve been reading Daniel Coyle’s The Culture Code during this period, and it resonates more than ever. Coyle argues that great group cultures are built on three things: safety, shared vulnerability, and purpose. They’re not accidents. They’re skills. And when I map that framework against what I’m hearing from people who are leaving, the diagnosis becomes painfully clear.
They don’t psychologically feel safe. Nobody asks what they think. Experienced professionals are treated as execution resources, not thinking partners. They’re handed solutions and told to implement them, instead of being handed problems and trusted to solve them. Coyle would call this a failure to build belonging. The signals aren’t there. The message people receive, often unintentionally, is: you’re here to do a set of tasks which are measured by KPIs. .
The organizations losing people fastest are the ones where status meetings are performance theater. Where the overhead of enterprise delivery, with structured stand-ups, sprint reviews, steering committees, status reports, and stakeholder updates has become so suffocating that by the time you’ve told everyone what you’re doing, there’s no time left to do it. Nobody’s being real. Everyone’s managing up.
Sometimes, the purpose is gone. Or maybe it was never there. When you’re three layers removed from the customer, working on a component of a process that feeds a system that eventually touches someone, it’s hard to feel like you matter. One program manager at a retail client put it perfectly: “I manage dependencies for a living. That’s not a career. That’s a symptom.”
Seth Godin has this definition of culture that I keep coming back to: “People like us do things like this.” It’s deceptively simple. But when people look around their organization and think “people like me don’t do things like this”, they do not feel like they belong. And right now, a lot of people are looking around.
About that Greener Grass
A significant number of people who left have gone independent. Started their own consulting practices. Joined the gig economy. Became fractional executives or portfolio consultants. Some of them are thriving. They found the autonomy and purpose they were looking for, built their own client base, and are doing the best work of their careers. Others have failed spectacularly. The freedom they craved turned into isolation. The steady pipeline they imagined didn’t materialize. The administrative reality of running your own business consumed the time they thought they’d spend on meaningful work. A few have quietly come back to the organizations they left, or to similar ones, with a more realistic appreciation of what those structures provided.
The lesson isn’t “don’t leave.” The lesson is that the problem isn’t always the organization. Sometimes it’s a mismatch between what you need and what you’re in. Sometimes it’s that the culture you’re in needs fixing, not escaping. And sometimes, yes, it really is time to go.
How to Fertilize the Lawn
Do you recall Mark Fields’ quip “culture eats strategy for breakfast?” It’s become a cliché, but clichés become clichés because there’s truth to them. Organizations that seem to retain people right now aren’t the ones with the best strategy decks. They’re the ones where the culture actually works.
- They’ve organized around ownership. Persistent teams built around products or capabilities instead of temporary project teams. People own something. They’re responsible for outcomes. Organize around what’s meaningful.
- They’ve reduced the nonsense. Audited meeting loads, reporting requirements, approval layers. One client eliminated a weekly status report that took a small army hours each to prepare. Not one person missed it. Every unnecessary friction point compounds.
- They’ve made it safe to be real. This is Coyle’s territory. The best-performing teams I see have leaders who go first in admitting what they don’t know. They separate performance feedback from growth conversations. They’ve created environments where disagreement is expected and silence is suspect.
- They invest in the path as well as the role. The best people think in terms of trajectory, not position. The clients that can show someone where they’ll be in two years, and it’s a place worth going, seem to hold onto people through market turbulence that wrecks their competitors.
The View From The Outside
There’s something about seeing the inside of organizations in the context of solving problems that gives you a sense of what’s working and what isn’t. And right now, what’s broken in a lot of places isn’t the strategy or the technology. It’s the daily experience of working there. In other words: the culture. Duh.
Maybe the question isn’t how to make people stay. It’s whether you’ve built a place worth staying for.
