The Art of Connected Leadership: The Manager’s Guide for Keeping Rock Stars and Building Powerhouse Teams

By Lyndsay K. R. Toensing

The Art of Connected Leadership teaches leaders how to keep rock star employees and build a powerhouse team.

Lyndsay K. R. Toensing has fifteen years of experience leading teams, mentoring, and coaching people in startups to Fortune 500 companies. In The Art of Connected Leadership, she shows leaders how to:

See the most common reasons why good people leave a job

Set team direction that motivates their employees

Build relationships that increase employee loyalty

Develop their employees in a way that benefits them

Create a team culture that gets results

Help employees love their jobs

• Language: English
• Publisher: Morgan James Publishing
• Release date: May 5, 2020
• ISBN: 9781642798388

Lyndsay K. R. Toensing

Lyndsay K. R. Toensing is a transformational leadership coach that helps people discover the leaders they were meant to be. She spent 15 years leading teams, mentoring, and coaching people in startups to Fortune 500 companies before discovering her passion for leadership coaching. Lyndsay lives in the Seattle, Washington area with her husband and their fur-babies.

Book preview

CHAPTER 1:

Why Do They Keep Leaving?

The greatest leader is not necessarily the one who does the greatest things. He is the one that gets the people to do the greatest things.

– RONALD REAGAN

Today’s job market and competition are more competitive than ever, which makes keeping and growing high-performing teams even more challenging. You spend a lot of time recruiting and training new team members. Sometimes, it seems like just when you get someone trained and working like a well-oiled machine, they tell you that they are leaving for one reason or another. Then, you are back in the same position of trying to do more with less until you can get someone else in the role and ramped up.

High employee turnover can sometimes slow or halt progress toward projects or goals, and can even slow your own progress to a promotion. This can really shake your confidence as a manager and employee. Unfortunately, the feedback from the exit interviews are vague and don’t give you a clear view of what you can do to stop losing your best people.

According to the Forbes articles Here’s Why Employees Are Quitting More Than Ever Before, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey results for July 2018 reported that 2.4 percent of employed American workers voluntarily quit their jobs by the end of July 2018. Voluntary quit rates have not been that high since April of 2001. While this is a problem many employers face, you know you need to solve it for your team if you want to keep your rock stars and build a powerhouse team. So why are people leaving your team and organization?

Why People Leave

You may be thinking the most common reason employees are going elsewhere is lack of compensation. While compensation is one reason they leave based on conversations I’ve had with employees, mentees, and clients, it isn’t the most common. Compensation doesn’t even hit the top five reasons according to a TinyPulse survey cited by Inc.com in Why Do Employees Quit on Their Bosses? Because of 5 Common Reasons Still Not Addressed, Says New Research published in December of 2018. TinyPulse, a leader in employee-engagement pulse surveys, analyzed data from over 25,000 employees across the world from January to October 2018. The top five reasons that people leave according to the results are:

1.Poor management performance

2.Lack of employee recognition

3.Overworked employees

4.Company culture

5.No growth opportunities

This ties closely to what I hear from employees, mentees, and clients when they talk about leaving a job or simply share their pain points with a job. People are burnt out. They feel like their manager is holding them back or not giving them the right opportunities. They feel like they just get more work instead of interesting work that helps them grow.

The majority of my clients come to me because they are looking for a way out of their current job. You can even think back to the main reasons that you left your last role. Another interesting trend that I hear from clients and peers is how fast employees are leaving jobs these days. According to the Jobvite survey cited in the Forbes article Here’s Why Employees Are Quitting More Than Ever Before from November 2018, thirty percent of job seekers left a job within ninety days of starting due to the day-to-day role not being what they expected, a bad experience drove them away, or company culture was a problem. That turnover means a lot of time and resources spent hiring, training, and repeating.

You have probably heard that being stuck in the hire, train, repeat cycle is costly, but most managers don’t know how to combat it. Employee Benefit News (EBN) reported that it costs employers thirty-three percent of a worker’s annual salary to backfill someone who leaves. The good news, according to the Work Institute’s 2017 Retention Report of 34,000 respondents, seventy-five percent of the causes of employee turnover are preventable. That means you, the manager, can directly reduce the turnover you are facing. The challenge is that many managers don’t necessarily know how, and it isn’t your fault.

Becoming a Manager

There are many reasons people become managers. For some, they are great individual contributors (IC) and their manager wanted them to replicate themselves in other people. Others seek out career advancement and that can come in the form of leading people. Others know right away that they want to develop people. Regardless of how you became a people manager, you were probably sold on the benefits of leading a team. Higher salary, better benefits, more responsibility, you get to make the decisions (like a boss), more flexibility, it will help you continue to advance in your chosen career, et cetera. But what they don’t tell you is how hard it is. You are the single neck to choke if something goes wrong, you are working longer and harder hours, you have to make the tough decisions, you have the weight of the team on your shoulders personally and professionally, to name a few. They also don’t tell you that your current skill set may not be enough to make you a good leader, and you might actually really hate leading teams.

Managing people would be great if it wasn’t for the people, was one of the first jokes I heard as a new manager. Managing people is hard and keeping them seems to be even harder. You are responsible for your work and projects as well as making sure the people on your team get their projects done and hit their goals. It sounds simple, but it isn’t. Sometimes it is like herding cats, being a therapist, a project manager, and a captain, all in the same hour. Additionally, today’s workforce is more diverse than ever, which increases the importance of skilled people managers who can create a culture of inclusion, innovation, and productivity. Regardless of the challenges, many managers continue to lead teams because it is one of the most rewarding jobs. Since you are here, I’m assuming this is you.

Leading teams is an art form. Leadership is about relationships, meaning you can’t lead from behind the screen. You need to interact with people person-to-person. There are hundreds of books, workshops, websites, blogs, coaches, and programs about leadership. This is because organizations and people understand the benefits of having strong leaders. Many managers think, I just need to tell people what to do, they’ll do it, and we’ll hit our goals. Easy. But, they quickly learn that there is so much more to managing teams. Even when you think you’ve figured it out, you are faced with a new situation or employee that all of your old tricks don’t work with and you’re back at the beginning of trying to figure out how to be an effective manager and stop losing your high