The Forced Retention Strategy Is the Worst!

I was talking with a friend recently, and he told me he's leaving the organization he has worked for thirty-five years.

When I asked the reason for this difficult decision, he told me that he's been offered an outside role, the kind that would have benefited his organization as much as it benefited him. So, he asked for permission but the HR director said no and told him:

“If we let you do that, we'll open the floodgates.”

So he's leaving. Can you blame him?

The cage can hold the chair, but it cannot hold the person.

The worst retention strategy is the forced one

HR director said more than he meant to. A floodgate exists for one reason: there's water on the other side, pushing. You build one where the pressure is high and constant, and where you're afraid of what happens the moment you let go.

So what he implicitly told my friend was this:

"We know people want out. We know that if we gave one person a little room, everyone else would want it too. And we've decided that the best course of action is to keep the gate shut."

Forced retention is the worst strategy an organization can have, if you ask me.

Reasons and restraints

There are two main ways to keep people in an organization. You give them reasons to stay, or you make it hard for them to leave.

Reasons to stay are expensive and long-term, because you need to invest in giving work that means something, a boss worth following, room to grow, including in directions the organization didn't plan, the feeling of being trusted with your own career. None of that is detailed in a contract, and you have to earn it again and again.

Restraints are the cheap kind. You can easily build a cage around policies that forbid outside roles, non-compete clauses, notice periods, clawbacks, and pensions you lose if you walk. All perfectly legal, and all very effective, in the short term, at keeping a body in a chair. Both work, but only one of them keeps the person along with the body.

Pro tip: listen to how your organization talks about people who leave. If staying is called “loyalty” and leaving is called “betrayal,” the gate is doing more work than the reasons.

What the gate actually holds

Here's the problem I have with restraints: they work best on the people you least need to keep. Your strongest, best people have options and ambitions. They're the ones getting outside offers in the first place, which is exactly what happened to my friend. A gate can't stop them. It only decides when they leave and how they feel about you on the way out. What the gate holds reliably is everyone else: the ones with fewer options, or a mortgage that makes the clawback hurt, or are too afraid to change

And the ones it holds, you keep in body only. They come in, they do what's required, and they stop offering anything that isn't. I am sure you've been in meetings where nobody volunteers or where the good idea stays in someone's head because the last one was ignored. So now the person who used to stay late leaves at five sharp, and who'd be gone tomorrow if the paperwork allowed it.

The real cost of a closed gate is the people who stay and are already gone.

Not so uncommon

I understand the HR director's fear, I do. I've led people for most of my working life, and I've said no to a request for exactly this reason more than once: if I say yes to one, I'll have to say yes to everyone. It's the most natural reflex in management, and it sounds like fairness.

However, the moment you look at what it assumes, you have a better understanding of the organization's culture and status. If granting one outside role really would open the floodgates, then a lot of people want outside roles. That should be precious information. It tells you your people are looking for growth, exposure, and meaning they're not finding inside, and that they'd bring some of it back if you let them.

You can treat that information as a risk to contain, or you can treat it as the most honest feedback your organization will ever get, delivered for free, by the people who still care enough to ask permission.

The open-gate test

So here's a test for anyone who leads people. If tomorrow morning every restraint disappeared, every clause, every vesting schedule, every policy that makes leaving expensive, who on your team would still be there next month?

The people on that list are your actual team. Everyone else is on loan from a contract, and the gap between the two is the most precise measure I know of how much leading you're doing, as opposed to holding.

Pro tip: the next time a request makes you reach for “we'd have to let everyone,” stop and ask a better question: what would it take for this not to be a problem? Sometimes the answer is a policy with clear criteria instead of a blanket no. Sometimes it's realizing that everyone wanting it is the whole point.

He's leaving anyway

So, my friend is leaving. The policy held, and the organization kept its gate shut, at the cost of losing someone who could have supported it from an outside role. It also sent a message to everyone watching, as policies always do, whether anyone intends it or not.

Going back to the metaphor we have used at the beginning of this blog, water doesn't stop pushing because you build a dam. It finds the crack, the seep, the way around. The gate only gets to decide whether people leave as friends who'd come back, or as people relieved to finally be out.

Give people reasons, and you won't need the gate. Rely on the gate, and one day you'll find it's the only thing still standing.