They Leave Leaders Who Never Saw Their Potential.

There was a stretch of my career when I came home from work drained and dejected more often than not. I worked for managers who were more focused on office politics than on production, and who seemed to look right past me. My wife, Jana, would get angry about it. Not at me. At them. She saw something in me that my bosses didn’t, and she couldn’t understand how they missed it.

She had reason to be frustrated. I wasn’t a bad employee. I was an overlooked one. I’ve since learned that’s one of the quietest reasons good people walk out the door.

Marcel Schwantes made the point recently in Inc. that people leave because of how they’re treated: whether their leaders act with integrity, show respect, and make them feel valued. I agree with him. But I’d take it one step further. People don’t just leave leaders who treat them badly. They leave leaders who never saw what they could become.

Good intentions aren’t the problem

Most of the leaders I coach are good people. Nobody wakes up planning to make someone feel small. They have numbers to hit, customers to serve, and a calendar that never lets up. Under that kind of pressure, the work gets all the attention, and the people doing the work fade into the background.

That’s where a gap opens up between what a leader intends and what the team actually experiences. You think you’re holding people accountable; they feel controlled. You think you’re giving clear direction; they hear that you don’t trust their judgment. You think you’re keeping the bar high; they’ve quietly stopped bringing you ideas.

I call this the intention-impact gap, and it runs through every chapter of my book, The Divinity Principle. Your intentions matter to you. Your impact is what everyone else lives with.

The superintendent and the crane manual

I coached an operations manager at a steel erection firm. I’ll call him Barry. He was working sixty to eighty hours a week with sixteen direct reports and had no time left for his wife, his kids, his church, or himself. During one of our coaching calls, a superintendent phoned him with a question about crane regulations. The answer was sitting in the job site manual.

Barry answered it, of course. He always did. He thought he was being helpful. What he was really doing was teaching sixteen capable people that their own judgment wasn’t needed. Every answer he handed out was a small vote of no confidence.

When Barry started setting boundaries and handing those questions back, his team began solving the problems he had been solving for them. They didn’t need a different boss. They needed one who believed they could figure it out.

What it means to see someone’s potential

My first real boss out of graduate school was Kelvyn Cullimore. Years later, when I asked him to describe his leadership philosophy, he said, “The dignity of the human soul is paramount.” That idea became the foundation of the Divinity Principle: every human being has inherent worth and unlimited potential.

If you actually believe that, it changes the questions you ask. You stop asking only “Is this person meeting expectations?” and start asking “What would help this person grow?” When a problem lands on your desk, you ask whether it’s yours to solve or someone else’s to learn from.

None of this means lowering the bar. Kelvyn once told me I wasn’t performing as operations director and gave me six months to improve or be replaced. It stung. But I never doubted that he believed I could do it, and I didn’t want to let him down. Six months later, he promoted me to vice president of operations.

Honest feedback and high standards don’t work against someone’s potential. When the relationship is right, they’re evidence that you believe in it. The question is the purpose behind them. Are you correcting someone to make a problem go away, or to make them more capable next time?

When your strengths become the problem

This is the heart of my keynote, Stronger Than Your Strengths. The strengths that got you promoted can push people away when you lean on them too hard. Decisiveness turns into control. High standards turn into impossible demands. Confidence turns into not listening. Even the desire to help, as Barry found out, can keep people dependent on you.

I learned this the hard way. Early in my career, I got into a shouting match on a sales floor with an HR manager over my job title. I’m 6’7″, she was 5’5″, and we stood toe-to-toe at the top of our lungs. I felt completely justified. Then I noticed one of our newer salespeople staring at us with her mouth open, visibly intimidated. I taught emotional intelligence for a living, and I had just been hijacked in front of the people I was supposed to be leading.

You can’t see your own impact without help. Ask for feedback, and ask in a way that makes honesty safe. Then do something with what you hear. When your team watches you own a mistake and change, they learn that growth isn’t just something the boss expects of everyone else.

Retention is a leadership issue

Organizations like to treat retention as an HR problem: pay, benefits, perks. Those things matter. But people decide whether to stay one conversation at a time, and most of those conversations are with their direct leader.

Here are three questions worth sitting with this week:

• When someone brings you a problem, do you solve it, or do you help them solve it?
• Do you listen to understand, or just long enough to respond?
• Would your people say you see more in them than they see in themselves?

When I was frustrated with one of our kids, Jana used to ask me, “Do you want to be right, or do you want a relationship?” That question changed how I parented, and later, how I led. Leadership isn’t about getting the most out of people. It’s about bringing out the best in them.

Do that consistently, and you won’t have to work nearly as hard to convince your best people to stay.

Author: Spencer Horn, President, President, Altium Leadership & Coaching