Several years ago, I asked a client struggling to attract and retain good team members why they treated their customers so well but didn’t extend that same treatment to their employees. This client, the company’s owner, told me he paid his employees to do what he told them, so that’s what he expected. He also said his customers were paying him, so they deserved to be treated differently. I immediately replied that he had no business having employees unless he was willing to change that perspective. This reply ruffled his feathers, but that didn’t mean I was wrong!

Surprisingly, that wasn’t the end of our working relationship. I attempted to help that client change his approach for a while until I learned he had plans to dissolve the business. I won’t go into any more of the ugly details, but I will emphasize that it DID NOT have to be that way. Had he been willing to invest even the slightest bit of effort into changing the approach he was taking with the folks on his payroll, he could have built a team rather than just having a few random people showing up for a check.

If we’re genuinely interested in achieving quantifiable results by dealing with the profitability killers that are having the most significant impact on our bottom line, the simplest solutions can often make the most difference. But it’s critical that we start at the top because that will set the tone for everything else across the organization. I’ll stress it once more in case I haven’t been clear enough: this doesn’t require some magical gifting that’s only possible for a select few. Making these behaviors a part of who we are and what we do is as simple as creating any other routine we’ve ever built into our lives; we need access to the right tools and then decide to apply them!

Of all the areas in a business where additional profit could be captured through more effective top-down leadership, I’m convinced that recruitment and retention matter the most. Cindy and I developed a lesson in 2020 for our Executive Leadership Elite Think Tank, a group of a dozen or so local business owners at that time, called “How Top Leaders Set the Tone for Recruitment & Retention,” where we made a business case for how much money organizations lose when the owners and top executives don’t understand the importance of their relationships throughout their companies. While this also applies to everyone on our teams with even the slightest bit of leadership responsibility—and I’ll break that down in very specific detail soon—the approach those at the top take can make or break a business—just like with the client who seemed to believe he owned the folks he was paying.

And the hard reality is that if we don’t give our best people every reason to stay with us, sooner or later (and it’s almost always sooner), we’ll have a hard time recruiting people to take their place. That’s a big enough challenge when we’re trying to fill individual contributor roles in any given field, but it kills even more of our profit when the positions we need to fill are ones that oversee critical segments of our business!

Before we dive into the gory details of why Cindy and I built an entire course geared at helping leaders strengthen their organizational approach to Recruitment, Retention, & Culture, let’s look at one more area where we’ll see the effects of poor leadership from the top down if we’re not intentional in how we address it. Then, I’ll touch on one valuable thing we can do as leaders to prepare our organizations for a strong future.

For more on this, you're welcome to reach out to us directly at admin@dove-development.net to get a 45 Day Trial Access to our COMPLETE Leading At The Next Level program or you can check out Wes's recently released book, What's KILLING Your Profitability? (It ALL Boils Down to Leadership!) that was a #1 Best Seller on Amazon!