What Executives Get Wrong About Retention

There is a metric most organizations track religiously: turnover rate. And when it stays low, leadership tends to exhale. People are staying. We must be doing something right. 

But what if the number is lying to you? 

After nearly two decades in leadership, including time as a Chief Operating Officer, I have come to believe that retention is one of the most misread signals in business. We celebrate it when we should be interrogating it. We measure bodies in seats when we should be measuring energy in the room. 

Here is what most executives get wrong: retention is not the goal. Engagement is. And those two things are not the same. 

Staying Is Not the Same as Thriving 

People leave jobs for a lot of reasons. But the harder truth is that people stay for a lot of reasons too and not all of them are good ones. 

They stay because they are afraid. Because the benefits are too valuable to walk away from. Because they have a mortgage, a team they feel responsible for, or an identity so tied to a title that leaving feels like losing. They stay because inertia is powerful and change is terrifying. 

I know this because I lived it. 

And here is what made my situation complicated and what I suspect makes it more recognizable to many of you: I never stopped loving the work. I was energized by the mission, deeply invested in the people I was developing, and poured my heart into the job until my last day. By every internal measure, I was engaged. 

But I was also being worn down. By bureaucracy that moved slower than the problems we needed to solve. By a board and C-suite peers who did not offer the support or trust that the work required. By the slow erosion that happens when you give everything to a mission and do not feel that investment reflected in the people around you. 

That is where my misalignment lived, not in the work itself, but in the environment surrounding it. And that distinction matters, because it is invisible on a retention dashboard. I was still showing up. Still performing. Still, by all external measures, retained. 

The day I finally got honest with myself, I realized something important: my organization had retained me, but they had lost me long before I walked out the door. 

The Audit Nobody Wants to Do 

If you are an executive or a people leader, I want to ask you something uncomfortable: When did you last take an honest look at your own engagement? 

Not your output. Not your calendar. Not your KPIs. 

Your energy, and more specifically, where it is going and what is draining it. Because engagement and misalignment are not opposites. You can love the work and still be in the wrong environment to do it. You can be fully committed to a mission and still be slowly worn down by the people, structures, or dynamics surrounding it. That combination is particularly dangerous because it is hard to name and easy to dismiss as just the price of leadership. 

Here is what I have observed: leaders who are operating in that kind of tension - giving everything to the work while running on empty in every other direction - produce teams that feel it, whether it is spoken or not. A leader absorbing that much friction creates a culture that quietly suffocates the people underneath them, even when everyone is technically still showing up. 

You cannot pour from an empty cup. And you cannot build a culture of genuine retention if the people responsible for that culture are themselves just going through the motions. 

What Retention Actually Requires 

Real retention, the kind where people stay because they want to, because they are growing, because the work is meaningful, requires three things that executives often underinvest in: 

1. The courage to go toward the fire. Most executives are deeply uncomfortable having honest conversations with themselves and with their people. It is easier to skirt the hard things, to stay vague enough that no one has to sit in discomfort, to hope the tension resolves on its own. But when leaders avoid the direct conversation, people do not experience relief. They fill the silence with their own conclusions. And those conclusions are almost always worse than the truth. 

Going toward the fire, not around it, is actually the path of least resistance in the end. It is also the most respectful thing you can do for the relationship, for the person, and for yourself. It just requires courage. Real conversations about whether someone's role is still feeding them, whether there is misalignment worth naming, whether the environment is working. Those conversations do not always end in exits; sometimes they save everything, but only if you are willing to have them. 

2. Development that goes beyond skill-building. Too many organizations train people on systems, processes, and technical competencies while neglecting identity-level development. The leaders who stay and thrive are not just better at their jobs. they are clearer on who they are and where they are headed. That clarity is cultivated, not accidental. 

3. Leaders who model self-awareness. This is the one most executives resist. But the culture you want cannot exist independently of the people leading it. If your senior leaders are not willing to audit their own engagement, examine their own misalignment, and do something about it. Don’t ask your people to do something you are not willing to do yourself. 

The Question Worth Asking 

Before your next all-hands, before your next engagement survey, before your next exit interview, pause and ask yourself honestly: 

• Am I still energized by the work or by the environment I am doing it in? And if those two answers are different, what am I doing about it? 

If the answer gives you pause, pay attention to that. The leaders who are willing to sit in that discomfort are exactly the ones their people will follow anywhere. 

The organizations that get retention right are not the ones with the best perks or the most competitive salaries. They are the ones where leaders are awake to their own experience, honest about what they need, and courageous enough to model that honesty for others. 

That kind of culture does not happen by accident. It starts at the top. 

Erin and her co-founder Courtney work with leaders and organizations on the development, alignment, and culture work that makes retention mean something. If this resonated, they would love to connect.