It’s pretty incredible how often you hear managers complaining about their best employees leaving, and they really do have something to complain about—few things are as costly and disruptive as good people walking out the door.

Managers tend to blame their turnover problems on everything under the sun, while ignoring the crux of the matter: people don’t leave jobs; they leave managers.

The sad thing is that this can easily be avoided. All that’s required is a new perspective and some extra effort on the manager’s part.

First, we need to understand the nine worst things that managers do that send good people packing.

1. They Overwork People

Nothing burns good employees out quite like overworking them. It’s so tempting to work your best people hard that managers frequently fall into this trap. Overworking good employees is perplexing; it makes them feel as if they’re being punished for great performance. Overworking employees is also counterproductive. New research from Stanford shows that productivity per hour declines sharply when the workweek exceeds 50 hours, and productivity drops off so much after 55 hours that you don’t get anything out of working more.

If you must increase how much work your talented employees are doing, you’d better increase their status as well. Talented employees will take on a bigger workload, but they won’t stay if their job suffocates them in the process. Raises, promotions, and title-changes are all acceptable ways to increase workload. If you simply increase workload because people are talented, without changing a thing, they will seek another job that gives them what they deserve.

2. They Don’t Recognize Contributions and Reward Good Work

It’s easy to underestimate the power of a pat on the back, especially with top performers who are intrinsically motivated. Everyone likes kudos, none more so than those who work hard and give their all. Managers need to communicate with their people to find out what makes them feel good (for some, it’s a raise; for others, it’s public recognition) and then to reward them for a job well done. With top performers, this will happen often if you’re doing it right.

3. They Don’t Care about Their Employees

More than half of people who leave their jobs do so because of their relationship with their boss. Smart companies make certain their managers know how to balance being professional with being human. These are the bosses who celebrate an employee’s success, empathize with those going through hard times, and challenge people, even when it hurts. Bosses who fail to really care will always have high turnover rates. It’s impossible to work for someone eight-plus hours a day when they aren’t personally involved and don’t care about anything other than your production yield.

4. They Don’t Honor Their Commitments

Making promises to people places you on the fine line that lies between making them very happy and watching them walk out the door. When you uphold a commitment, you grow in the eyes of your employees because you prove yourself to be trustworthy and honorable (two very important qualities in a boss). But when you disregard your commitment, you come across as slimy, uncaring, and disrespectful. After all, if the boss doesn’t honor his or her commitments, why should everyone else?

5. They Hire and Promote the Wrong People

Good, hard-working employees want to work with like-minded professionals. When managers don’t do the hard work of hiring good people, it’s a major demotivator for those stuck working alongside them. Promoting the wrong people is even worse. When you work your tail off only to get passed over for a promotion that’s given to someone who glad-handed their way to the top­­­­­­­, it’s a massive insult. No wonder it makes good people leave.

6. They Don’t Let People Pursue Their Passions

Talented employees are passionate. Providing opportunities for them to pursue their passions improves their productivity and job satisfaction. But many managers want people to work within a little box. These managers fear that productivity will decline if they let people expand their focus and pursue their passions. This fear is unfounded. Studies show that people who are able to pursue their passions at work experience flow, a euphoric state of mind that is five times more productive than the norm.

7. They Fail to Develop People’s Skills

When managers are asked about their inattention to employees, they try to excuse themselves, using words such as “trust,” “autonomy,” and “empowerment.” This is complete nonsense. Good managers manage, no matter how talented the employee. They pay attention and are constantly listening and giving feedback.

Management may have a beginning, but it certainly has no end. When you have a talented employee, it’s up to you to keep finding areas in which they can improve to expand their skill set. The most talented employees want feedback—more so than the less talented ones—and it’s your job to keep it coming. If you don’t, your best people will grow bored and complacent.

8. They Fail to Engage Their Creativity

The most talented employees seek to improve everything they touch. If you take away their ability to change and improve things because you’re only comfortable with the status quo, this makes them hate their jobs. Caging up this innate desire to create not only limits them, it limits you.

9. They Fail to Challenge People Intellectually

Great bosses challenge their employees to accomplish things that seem inconceivable at first. Instead of setting mundane, incremental goals, they set lofty goals that push people out of their comfort zones. Then, good managers do everything in their power to help them succeed. When talented and intelligent people find themselves doing things that are too easy or boring, they seek other jobs that will challenge their intellects.

Bringing It All Together

If you want your best people to stay, you need to think carefully about how you treat them. While good employees are as tough as nails, their talent gives them an abundance of options. You need to make them want to work for you.

What other mistakes cause great employees to leave? Please share your thoughts in the comments section below as I learn just as much from you as you do from me.

Fast food in America is undergoing massive change. Menu boards resemble the Chinese stock market listing, undergoing daily fluctuations in content, cost and calories. And still consumers fail to respond. Small victories, such as the recent announcement of a 7.9% quarterly increase in sales for Burger King, are treated with celebrations of V-E Day proportions. Let’s not fail to remind ourselves how financial departments in publicly-traded companies word such things – those PR flares are advertisements aimed at institutional shareholders to hold their positions and maybe boost their value by buying in for a little more. It isn’t about the impact of the Chicken Fries at the register. Or that sales from the previous quarter were uncharacteristically depressed by the long winter. Ultimately, companies that have grown (or were merged) to the size of a Burger King morph into short-term Ponzi schemes. For a while, the ledger sheet will belie declining trends in sales and it then becomes a matter of shadow marketing the impending disaster so that it appears the ship be not sinking.

For McDonald’s, the signs are obvious that someone forgot to stow enough lifeboats. They are drastically reducing the number of company-owned stores. The board of directors is back-loading CEO compensation with soon-to-be worthless stock options. Franchisees are in open revolt over everything from the cost of assembling a McDouble to the more pressing issue of employee salaries. And formerly loyal customers are staying away in droves. One could argue that McDonald’s wounds are mostly self-inflicted, from The Dollar Menu (in response to Wendy’s) to the attempt to cater to adult tastes (whereas I had already eaten enough Big Macs in my adult years to build a garage out of the meat patties) to the total abandonment of the number one reason people went to the restaurant: to stuff the faces of their whiny, propagandized children.

Sometime in the past twenty years, McDonald’s made a ninety degree turn in advertising philosophy by virtually abandoning the pre-teen demographic and increasingly focusing advertising on African-Americans. They got rid of the clown. Consider where this comes from and consider the timing. Concerns over childhood obesity have been with us since before the turn of the century, when my daughter was a toddler, and much of the blame found an easy target with national burger chains, McDonald’s chief among them. One can imagine the board of directors sounding like the meeting of the Five Families regarding heroin trafficking in the movie The Godfather when Don Giuseppe “Joe” Zaluchi says:

“I want to control it as a business, to keep it respectable. I don’t want it    near schools! I don’t want it sold to children! That’s an infamnia. In my city, we would keep the traffic in the dark people, the coloreds. They’re animals anyway, so let them lose their souls.”

Harsh? Yes, and harsher still when we consider that this emphasis continued during Donald Thompson’s watch as McDonald’s first (and probably last) African-American CEO. McDonald’s Corp. surmised that advertising their unhealthy products would be less objectionable to the nation if the perceived targets were black adults. It was one of the few decisions they got right.

Another reason for McDonald’s falling sales numbers in comparison to relatively newer national entries such as Five Guys, Sonic and Shake Shack is the aversion we have as humans to the familiar. We’re always attracted to the strange and exotic, the new kid in school with the weird hair. You can have McDonald’s anytime, virtually anywhere. There is a comfort in that which makes it feel boring. I sensed you would be looking up at your spouse after you read that sentence.

So, why isn’t McDonald’s Corp already in the ground, after over a decade of flat or declining sales? As Jane McGrath points out in her multi-part article How McDonald’s Works, the overwhelming underlying value in the corporation is in its real estate holdings. Every franchise restaurant is a rental and the McDonald’s Corp. real estate holding company, Franchise Realty Corporation, is the landlord. McDonald’s real estate is like BlackBerry’s cash – it bestows a certain value over and above actual performance results and allows the company to report the assets accordingly. This is where the similarity to a Ponzi scheme takes hold. Once the franchises begin to fail en masse, the rental incomes disappear. The property taxes previously covered by the franchisees revert to the corporation. If a new franchisee for the location can’t be found, the property is sold. Done enough times without commensurate regeneration results in the eventual withering of a company, if not an industry.

Admittedly, it seems as though we are living in the middle of the Jurassic Age waiting for the dinosaurs to die off. McDonald’s Corp. is a big organism and its extinction feels remote. Such monumental disasters never happen overnight, until the one night when they do. As a guard against inevitability, I’ll have to remember to periodically stop in for a Big Mac sandwich and revel in the possibility each time that it may be the last time I wipe a dab of Special Sauce from my cheek.

Let’s dive into one of my favorite coaching exercises. This exercise will help you determine where you are and who you want to become. I love this exercise. I hope you do too!

First imagine you’re 95 years old. You’re just about to die. You’re given a gift. To go back in time, to this moment and to tell yourself what was really important and what wasn’t, what really mattered and what didn’t. What advice would this wise “old you” have for the “you” who is reading this page?

Take your time. Answer this question on two levels: personal advice and professional advice. Jot down a few words that capture what the old you would say to the young you.

Once you’ve written these words down, the rest is simple: Just do whatever you wrote down. Make it your resolution for the rest of the current year, and the next. You have just defined your “there”!

Though I cannot define “there” for you, I can make a rough prediction about what some features of your “there” will look like. A few years ago, a friend of mine had the opportunity to interview people who were dying and ask them what advice they would have for themselves as a younger person. The answers he got were filled with wisdom.

One recurring theme was to “reflect upon life, to find happiness and meaning now,” not next month, not next year, not when they got the car, promotion, relationship, but right now. Many older people say they were so wrapped up in looking for what they didn’t have that they seldom appreciated what they did have.

A second recurring theme was “friends and family.” Consider this: You may work for a wonderful company and you may think that your contribution to that organization is very important. Yet when you are 95 and you look around at the people at your deathbed, very few of your fellow employees will be there waving goodbye. Your friends and family will probably be the people there, so appreciate them now and share a large part of your life with them.

The third recurring theme was the reflection to “follow your dreams.” Older people who have tried to achieve their dreams are always happier with their lives. Figure out your true purpose in life and go for it! This doesn’t apply just to big dreams; it is also true for little dreams. Few of us will achieve all of our dreams. Some dreams will always elude us. The key question is not, “Did I make all my dreams come true?” The key question is, “Did I try?”

So, now that you have the wisdom of that 95-year-old you, use it! Know that you need to be happy now, to enjoy your friends and family, and to follow your dreams! Let the journey begin.

Lady Gaga had lots to celebrate this weekend.

Mother Monster was excited to come off of traveling and reunite with her fiance Taylor Kinney in New York City. "Lion cub stuff," she captioned the selfie of her and Kinney, showcasing him flipping a bird and her bedazzled eyebrows.
 
Upon arriving to the Big Apple, she was also greeted with another surprise.

Gaga posted numerous pics of receiving several pairs of Alexander McQueen shoes. "When a gift comes to you from Heaven," she gushed over the outlandish footwear with 11" heels. She was also quick to point out that the photo was taken by Kinney, a.k.a. "best fiance ever."



These bizarre heels may look familiar. Gaga wore a nearly identical pair to the MTV Video Music Awards in Sept. 2010.

Long Live McQueen," the 29-year-old "Born This Way" singer shared. "Look monsters, we got a sign of love from the beyond. Photo by the babes.



Gaga then attempted to make a tiny McQueen museum in her apartment. "And I just happened to have a glass dome laying around," she Instagrammed. "So they can live protected and happy."


She still wasn't done doting on the shoes. "Shining up the glass sparkly and pretty, listening to Jazz, why a beautiful morning," Gaga added.



After her pumps were safely on display, it was back to enjoying some R&R with Kinney. Gaga posted an adorable video of the 34-year-old Chicago P.D. star cuddled up to her pup, writing: "@missasiakinney, 'Mummy don't bother me I'm with daddy.'"


Gaga and Kinney got engaged earlier this year, and the pop star was eager to share her guy's proposal prank with ET.

"It was so special," she gushed. "It was actually funny. He first gave me a Ring Pop – a candy Ring Pop -- and I was crying so hard, and I said yes right away, and then he pulled out the heart-shaped diamond and I said 'Oh, God!'"

Everyone wants to build a successful career: To get promoted, to gain new responsibility and authority, to earn a higher salary....

(Well, maybe not everyone, but you get the point.)

Even though I held a number of responsible positions, I also made a number of missteps (one of my nicknames was CLMJ, for Career Limiting Move Jeff), so sometimes I'm not be the best person to give career advice.

So I found someone a lot better: Jim Whitehurst. Jim has gone from management consultant at Boston Consulting Group to Treasurer of Delta Airlines to Chief Operating Officer of Delta Airlines… and is now the CEO of Red Hat, the $1.1 billion open source software company. (And he's the author of The Open Organization: Igniting Passion and Purpose.)

Jim definitely knows how to build a successful career – and just as importantly, what smart leaders look for as they develop and promote talented employees.

Just don’t be surprised that the road to success requires dedication, commitment, and hard work. (If building a great career was easy, we'd all be CEOs.)

Here's are Jim's tips:

1. Be deeply curious.

When I look for people to place in leadership positions, especially senior leadership positions, I look for people who deeply understand the business. Probe deeply into most companies and you’ll find way too many senior executives understand their role and their division... but not the overall business, much less the broader economy.

An outstanding executive: 1) Deeply understands her specific areas of responsibility; 2) Thoroughly understands the aspects of the rest of her company; 3) Has a solid understanding of her industry, other industries, and macro-economic forces and trends.

Sound like a lot to know? It is – but it's knowledge that will separate you from the pack. Most people work hard to check the “I’m doing a great job in my job” box, but to be a leader you need to be able to step up, care about, and truly understand the larger issues of the business.

For example, at Delta I was treasurer but I was also very concerned about our then-poor on time record. I dug into the data, met with peers, learned what people did in different departments… I wanted to know everything possible about everything possible.

It takes time, but it's also easy: People readily talk about their frustrations, issues, and concerns. All you have to do is ask questions and listen.

In time I became known as a guy with broad skills… and one day our CEO said, “Okay, since you’ve been complaining so much about our transportation network, it’s yours.” Even though I had never held an operations job I became the COO.

People instantly recognize when you truly care about your business and truly care about learning. That always shines through – and will always take you far.

2. Learn how to get the people around you to do the best they can.

I phrase it that way because different people have different leadership styles and different ways they influence others.

Authenticity is the real key to leadership at any level, especially the senior level. The goal is to be authentic and learn to work within the framework of your personality to get people to follow your lead.

Be yourself and leverage your strengths. Don't try to act like someone else; people can instantly tell. If you're casual and easygoing, don’t try to switch personalities and become refined and polished. You'll just come across as insincere and plastic.

People like, respect, and follow real people. Be yourself and learn how to get people to do what you want them to do – as yourself.

3. Find a work-life rhythm you can maintain.

You can’t treat your career like a crash diet: Cut your calories in half and exercise like crazy and you will lose weight, but eventually you won't be able to stick with a program like that… and you'll gain back the weight you lost.

A career works the same way. While there will be periods of intense stress – like in my case when Delta was preparing for bankruptcy or during my first 100 days at Red Hat – in general you must find a business and life rhythm you can maintain over the long term.

Find a rhythm where you can have enough time for family and friends, feel satisfied emotionally, and still excel at work, because building a great career is a marathon, not a sprint.

4. Care deeply.

Don’t kid yourself: Everyone knows when you’re only in it for yourself.

Unless you truly care about the company you work for and are personally invested in its success, you will never work as hard as you need to work to truly succeed.

Every great leader is deeply invested in the success of others; every great business leader, regardless of position or level, cares deeply about their company and the people around them. If you don’t care deeply now, find something you do care deeply about: Another function, another mission, another company, etc.

You can only reach your full potential, both personally and in a career, when you truly care.

5. Build your team.

Outside of work we all need a broader group of people we can rely on to provide advice and guidance – people who care about our success the same way we care about theirs.

My "team" includes ex-partners from Boston Consulting Group, ex-colleagues from Delta, great friends from B-school… they all care about my success and freely give me advice, perspective, support, etc. They’re on “Team Jim,” and I’m on “Team Chris,” “Team Rob,” etc.

The people on your team don’t need to be older, grizzled sages – they just need to know you and care about you.

Make sure you have people in your life you can always turn to… and for whom you will always do the same.