Show Notes
Employee retention breaks the day your best person starts drifting and the only lever you can move fast is a title. You feel them getting ready to go. You do not have a plan. You have a promotion you can get approved in four days. So you give it to them, and it works, and they stay.
And then you spend the next year watching the best person on your team turn into somebody you are having hard conversations with.
A promotion is a job assignment. That is all it is. It says here is different work and we believe you can do it. But that is not how managers use it. We use it as currency, as a thank you, as a raise we cannot get approved any other way, and most of all as the thing we grab when we are afraid somebody is about to walk. And a promotion is the only reward that takes the work a person is excellent at and swaps it for work they have never done. It is the only thank you that can make somebody worse at their job.
In this episode I walk through The Title Trap, three moves for the moment you can feel somebody getting ready to leave:
ONE. ASK WHAT IT IS ACTUALLY ABOUT. Not what is wrong, which makes them the complainer, and not what would it take to keep you, which hands them a blank check. Ask what changed, then go quiet. And make no offer that day, because anything you put on the table in the first ten minutes is fear talking. People leave for five reasons, the money, the manager, the load, the path and the meaning, and a title only touches one of them.
TWO. PAY WITHOUT PROMOTING. You have five levers, not one. Money, scope, access, mastery and relief. Never give a title you would have to explain, and here is the test for that. Plus the cost nobody warns you about, which is that the rest of your team just watched you publish the price list on how to get promoted around here.
THREE. GIVE THE WORK BACK. For the managers who already did this eighteen months ago. You cannot un promote somebody, but you can name it before their reputation does, cut the one piece of the role that is drowning them, and deliberately give back the work they were great at.
Plus how it maps to the LEAD Framework: Listen, Envision, Align, Drive. And the job description test you can run today on the last person you promoted.
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