Truth 53. People don’t quit their bosses, they quit their colleagues

You have, no doubt, heard this maxim: “People don’t quit their companies, they quit their bosses.” No pressure or anything.

It could be that this is no longer true—if it ever was. According to Michael Haid, senior vice president of talent management for Right Management, people are more inspired to stay by the quality of who their colleagues are than who their immediate boss might be. So, it stands to reason that your own role as a leader and standard setter might have shifted in response to this change. Your role in getting the best from people is actually to create an environment where they get the best from each other.

According to the 2012 World of Work Trends study released by Right Management’s parent company, Manpower, the power of individual choice, combined with a predicted “talent mismatch” and global technological advancements, is forecast to revolutionize the way companies source and combine the talent they need to achieve their objectives. One development that Haid reports on is that once that talent is found and combined into a team, the team is likely to remain intact while its leaders change.

“Talent is relying more and more on each other than on a particular leader,” he says. “We’re seeing a lot of leader churn in many industries in many parts of the world where teams remain intact while leaders rotate above them. They’re saying to each other, ‘We may be here 6 months from now, but our leader may not. So, what are we going to do to hold ourselves together?’”

As a result, Haid predicts that engagement in the very near future will be more sustained by the peer group and less reliant on their one-to-one relationships with their managers (that would be you). But while this might make you less directly responsible for team engagement over time, this trend will not let you off the engagement hook in terms of how your decisions immediately affect the collaborative culture of the community that works for you. Your obligations remain the same, even though your role might evolve.

Hire for team sustainability. The idea of hiring for cultural fit has been around for several years now—and so, too, one would hope, the discipline of equipping a team with the expertise and skills necessary to carry on without you should the bus with your name on it cross paths with you tomorrow. But now you don’t have to have a date with destiny under the eastbound express to expect that your team could long outlast you. Make sure that all the talent components you assemble can thrive on their own and actually survive the influences and ministrations of any just-passing-through manager.

Reward collaboration instead of competitiveness. As long as you have your team intact, it’s your job to create a culture in which they can trust each other and focus on their shared objectives. They should have each other’s back, not be stabbing each other’s back. The management literature from the past few decades is full of tips and games for squeezing out the last drop of high performance from people depending on your goodwill for their paychecks. Leave that trickery in the past. It’s not guaranteed to elicit any added performance output that would make much of a difference to company value. But it is guaranteed to hurt feelings, demoralize essential passion, and sow distrust throughout the team.

Give your team the chance to develop itself as a unit. Your people know each other’s strengths and weaknesses probably even better than you do. In addition to developing each employee as a freestanding individual on his or her own career path, think of the entire team as a micro-enterprise, with each player adding knowledge and ability to the whole. Work with your team to identify its strengths and weakness and who might be the best team members to develop to strengthen those weaknesses. Even consider sending some members out into the larger organization “on loan,” so to speak, so that they can receive essential developmental experiences that will strengthen the team’s abilities when the loaners return to the fold. Imagine how much stronger your entire corporation would be with that kind of exchange system in place. Silos would dissolve quickly, and cross-departmental, mutually inspired collaboration could enhance all operations.

They should have each other’s back, not be stabbing each other’s back.

Make sure that business communication is group-wide, not just one on one. Champion every opportunity for the entire team to brainstorm and share ideas and opinions in real time. Naturally, some conversations must remain private (such as individual performance reviews or disciplinary actions). But make those conversations exceptions to the general rule of the team spirit of everyone working and communicating together as a group—a group of colleagues who deeply trust each other and who inspire each other to do their best work.