According to the latest Gallup State of the Workplace report, employees are seeking new jobs at the highest level since 2015. This trend has been coined “The Great Detachment.”

A key reason for this is increasing employee dissatisfaction with management. For instance, Gallup’s research shows that those who work in companies with bad management practices are nearly 60% more likely to be stressed, and stress is the second most-cited factor influencing employees’ decisions to quit.

People’s values have also changed post-COVID-19. Employees prioritize well-being. They expect their contribution to be recognized, and if they aren’t valued or supported, they aren’t prepared to tolerate it.

The rise of Gen Z in the workplace also needs to be considered. They now make up 27% of the workforce across the 38 high-income countries that make up the OECD. This generation wants to be coached, not directed, and if they don’t feel that they’re progressing or that their employer wants to cultivate them, they’ll simply leave.

Yet, management practice has remained unchanged, with managers still using outdated and clunky methods unsuited to today’s workplace. Managers are ill-equipped to give feedback and handle challenging conversations in this rapidly changing work environment and consequently default to directing employees rather than enabling them.

Companies need to upskill their middle managers urgently to keep employees engaged and stop hemorrhaging talent. After all, talent is critical for success—companies in the top quartile of employee engagement achieve 23% higher profitability than those in the bottom quartile.

If you’re losing your top talent to your competitors and suspect poor management may be a cause, here are three things to do:

1. Shift the prevailing management mindset from ‘managing’ to ‘enabling’

Managers are often high-performing employees promoted for their technical strengths rather than their people skills. Their management style is typically “command and control”—simply directing and providing solutions for employees’ problems without engaging their capabilities.

This can be incredibly demotivating for employees, signalling their ideas aren’t valued or welcomed. Over time, they lose autonomy over their work and wait for direction from their managers before following their instructions, leading to increased disengagement.

Managers urgently need to change their mindset from perceiving themselves as the manager and solver of all problems to becoming the enabler of other people’s talents and capabilities. Affording team members the space to contribute creates opportunities for them to grow and advance. To do this, managers need to adopt an enquiry-led approach by learning to ask powerful and insightful questions that encourage reflection at the point that would be most helpful to someone’s thinking.

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