Stuck between mediocrity and excellence

When good people either leave or are asked to leave the company, one of the things you'll commonly hear is,  "Well... he (or she) was one of the good ones..." It's like people just heard that a colleague didn't pull through after an accident or didn't survive a war.  When you start to hear the quote more often than not, you begin to wonder what's really going on.  Good people join and leave companies all of the time and you would hope that they leave to move on to bigger and better things.  But maybe that's not really the case.  If all an organization does is churn and burn out good people, you have to wonder if it's the people or if it's the culture of the organization.  If it's the culture, you're eventually going to run out of good people, right?   When you start hearing people talking of employee departures like the opening to a memorial service, take a hard look at the culture of the organization.  For the ones tha...

I know of a company that splits attrition into two categories: regrettable and non-regrettable.  "We are either sad that you are leaving or happy to see you go." Within the "sad you left" category there are sub-categories: what can we do for you to stay, or it's okay that you are leaving and you can come back if your other opportunity doesn't work out. If you have to split employees up into these kinds of categories something is severely broken. That something is the recruiting process.  If a company has standards that the recruiting process upholds, EVERY employee that leaves should be regrettable. If you have a good performance review process, there will naturally be people that will not perform. No hiring process is perfect.  But you hope that those people are the exceptions and not the rule. There have been a number of studies on the costs of turnover and it's not a small number. "Experts estimate it costs upwards of twice a...