Marcia's Leadership Q and As: My industry is stable. Why are my employees leaving?

Q. As a business owner in a stable industry, I'm puzzled at our continuing employee turnover. Why don't we have more stability?

A. Your clarification about being in a "stable industry" is helpful. Some companies should expect relatively high turnover because they operate in sectors like hospitality, where there are a high percentage of student workers who start and leave jobs regularly. But because you don't operate in an industry like that, your turnover rate is a signal that something's wrong.

You should look internally for the causes. Among other things, your own leadership style and that of your team and managers needs to be evaluated. There are a couple of ways to do this.

One method is to assess the situation yourself, together with your team. If you and your managers and employees can be objective and honest, you can have some tough conversations about topics including the quality of leadership within the company, how well people inside it communicate, its culture, the level of trust team members have in each other and management, and how the company solves problems.

Unfortunately, self-evaluation is often a challenge, because people inside an organization are typically too close to the situation to be objective about it. Even if they can identify the operation's actual issues, they often struggle to find solutions. Generally, if a team had the answers, it would have already solved the problems. 

Indeed, going the self-evaluation route often just delays the inevitable need to go the alternate path, which is to bring in someone from the outside.

An outside consultant will typically observe how the company operates, how managers lead and how people inside the business communicate, solve problems and make decisions. The consultant might also interview people inside the company to get better insights about it. At the end of the process, the consultant should be able to help you understand what's going wrong and offer solutions.

A knowledgeable facilitator is much more likely than self-evaluation to help you identify the root causes of your problems and find good ways to address them.