Insights

Performance Review Language
Pick the strongest person on your team whose last review you have read. Somewhere in that document is a sentence about how they come across. It does more work than the rest of the page, and it is the one line you cannot audit. Most review templates ask for a rating on collaboration, communication or executive presence, and attach no definition to any of them. The ratings arrive anyway. They go in the file, feed the calibration meeting, and follow the person into a promotion discussion three years later. What... Read more...
Every Expensive Problem Has Two Dates
No one escalated Think of the person three levels below you who would be first to know. Not your strongest performer. The one whose job puts them in front of a problem before it has a name. Your escalation log does not contain them. It contains your direct reports, and the week the problem reached a steering meeting. Most escalation paths route through the person whose decision is being questioned, so the path filters the information before the log records it. Someone already knows. The question is whether it changes... Read more...
What "Too Sensitive" Records in a Review
What a review means when it says "too sensitive" Think of the person on your team who raises the thing no one else raises. Not the one who complains. The one who has been right before, more than once, about something that later turned out to matter. Somewhere in a performance file there is a line about her being too sensitive to feedback. The line was written in good faith by a manager describing something real. What it is actually recording is the subject of this piece. Most performance review... Read more...
Neurodiversity Workplace Training: What It Changes
Neurodiversity training does not change a system Think of the manager in your organization who runs the most hiring loops. Not the one with the biggest team. The one whose requisitions close fastest, because speed is what gets noticed. Neurodiversity training reached him in the spring, the feedback scores were good, and the interview scorecard he used the following Monday was the same document it had been for three years. Most neurodiversity training is bought to change a system and is built to change an audience. Those are different purchases,... Read more...
Turnover Data: Why One Year Is Not Enough
Two years of data, one question Think of the manager whose team you would least like to rebuild. Ask what that team's voluntary attrition rate was last year against the company's, and then what it was the year before. Most reporting packs cannot answer that, because they were built to produce one rate for everybody. That rate is a single number describing the whole organization. It is also the only turnover number most boards have ever been shown, and one year of it cannot distinguish a pattern from a bad... Read more...
Reorganization Costs Your Chart Does Not Show
The reorganization that moved one person twice Think of the person on your team whose read on the business is most accurate. The one who tells you about a problem a month before it shows up in a report. In the last two years, how many times has that person changed manager? The org chart you signed does not hold that number. It holds boxes, reporting lines and headcount, and every version of it you have ever reviewed was correct about all three. What no chart records is who has... Read more...
New Manager Training Misses the First Decision
Think of the manager you promoted last quarter into a team they did not build. On their first morning they were handed a file on each of the eight people they now own. Somewhere in that file is a sentence describing one of those people as difficult, and that sentence is the only thing in the handover anyone will remember by Friday. A handover file records what the last manager concluded. It does not record what they observed. Those are different objects, and your onboarding process treats them as the... Read more...
The Resignation That Was Eight Months Old
Think of the best hire your company made two years ago. The committee got that one right: the person was as good as advertised, and for the first quarter everyone said so out loud. They resigned in month seventeen, for a better opportunity, and the file codes it voluntary. Your reporting stack shows one event on that person. The resignation. Everything that led to it happened inside systems you already run, and none of them is cut by tenure month, so the sequence never assembles into anything visible. The sequence,... Read more...
Deming's Second Pillar
Deming treated people as part of the system. Most plants adopted his tools for the floor and left the people systems unwritten. Here's where that shows up and what fixes it. Read more...
An Unwritten Rule Has a Retirement Date
Experienced people retire, and months later new hires stop staying. The two get reported separately. Often they're one problem, and the data to see it is already in your HRIS. Read more...
Undocumented Competence: A Hidden Single Point of Failure
The process works because one person is quietly correcting it. Count how many people can run each critical process end to end, and read what comes back. Read more...
Culture Fit: Three Criteria Hiding in One Phrase
Culture fit means three different things in a hiring debrief, and only one of them survives being written down. Two counts that price what it costs you. Read more...
The Rules No One Wrote Down
An unwritten rule is a test you only give to new people. What it costs in early departures, and a four-step way to count it on your own team. Read more...
Same Attrition Rate, Opposite Problems
Two departments, one attrition rate, opposite problems Two departments in the same company closed the year at fourteen percent voluntary attrition. The benchmark for the sector was fourteen. Nobody looked further, because there was nothing in the number to look at. Underneath, they had nothing in common. The first department had lost four people from the bottom performance quartile and one from the top. Its manager had spent the year making overdue decisions, and the attrition figure was the sound of a system working. The second had lost four people... Read more...
The turnover number you can actually move
Reduce employee turnover Most retention programs are built against a single figure that describes nobody in the company. The annual rate goes up, a budget gets approved, the rate comes down two points the following year, and the same people leave. That is not a failure of effort. It is a failure of instrument. A company-wide turnover rate is an average, and an average is a device for making a distribution disappear. You cannot aim at what it has hidden. Here is the version of this work that moves the... Read more...
Is 1.5× Salary the Right Number? Probably Not for the People You're Losing
Three credible sources price employee turnover at 21%, 150% and 200% of salary. They do not conflict. Here is what each one counts, and which is yours. Read more...
What Your Exit Interview Data is Really Telling You
Your exit interview data says compensation. MIT's research says culture predicts leaving 10.4x better. Here is how to read a file of safe answers. Read more...
Two Years of HRIS Data Will Tell You What Exit Interviews Never Did
Two records exist for the same departure. The first is an exit interview. A senior engineer, with four years on the job, talks to HR. She says she’s found a role with more scope. She's warm about it. She thanks the company. The form is filed as voluntary and non-regretted. The reason listed is career growth. The second record is in your HRIS. It shows she was the fourth person to leave that manager's team in fourteen months, out of eleven. It shows the previous three all had above-median tenure.... Read more...
Differential Turnover Cost: The Gap No One Has Priced
Here's the arithmetic and how to run it on your own HRIS data. Somebody good left last quarter. The file codes it as voluntary.  That is the last time anyone looked at it. It reached a total turnover of twelve percent. This figure went onto a slide for the board. They noted that twelve percent matches the industry benchmark. Nobody in the room was wrong. The rate is normal. The benchmark is real. The most costly issue in your organization went unnoticed in that meeting. An aggregate averages costs, and... Read more...
Can Autism Develop Later in Life?
No. Autism doesn't develop later in life. It's a difference in how the brain develops early, and it's there from the beginning. What develops later is the situation. At some point, the demands on you become too much to handle quietly. Then, what was once invisible becomes clear. I was fifty-five when that happened to me. Not because anything new started, but because the bill finally came due. The Threshold, Not the Onset The diagnostic manual is unusually direct about this. It says that autistic traits might not show up... Read more...
What Psychological Safety Is Not
By Peter Mann Psychological safety shifted from a research finding to a slide sometime between 1999 and now. The original work was specific. Amy Edmondson defined it as the belief that team members can take interpersonal risks without facing punishment. She also created a seven-item tool to measure this concept. Google's Project Aristotle studied 180 teams to see what made the best ones succeed. They expected to find smart people or the perfect mix of skills. Instead, they discovered that psychological safety was the key factor. Both of those are... Read more...