Leadership in the workplace is paramount for organizational success. A strong leader fosters a positive work culture, motivates teams, and navigates challenges with resilience. Effective leadership inspires collaboration, innovation, and employee engagement, creating a foundation for growth. How can we continuously enhance leadership skills to propel our teams and organizations forward?
In today’s episode, I had an insightful talk with Steven Turner, the Founder of Business Flow Solutions. Our discussion centered around nuances of leadership development and effective employee training strategies. We explored key aspects such as cultivating a positive work culture, fostering employee development, and addressing motivation, engagement, and retention challenges in the workplace. Tune in and unlock leadership insights!
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Effective Leadership in The Modern Workplace with Steven Turner
Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. We’ve all had different experiences in different organizations and I think almost anyone listening that has worked for different organizations, worked for different managers within the same organization has experienced a difference between a manager and a leader, and I believe this is something I may have briefly talked about on some other previous episodes, being a manager is a person who can check off the Q2 list of tasks, make sure everything’s kind of going according to schedule, whereas a leader is someone that actually inspires their employees to be the best, inspires their employees to grow, and I think most of us would prefer to work under leaders. To elaborate on this topic, I would like to introduce my guest, Steven Turner. He is the founder of Business Flow Solutions [sic].
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Steven, welcome to the program.
Good to be here. Thank you very much.
So, you talk quite a bit about how to develop as a leader. What in your view truly makes someone a leader?
Well, the biggest thing about leadership, first of all, is just accept the fact that it’s not all about you, it’s about your team, and, as a result of being team oriented, you’re in a much better position to actually show interest in individual employees and develop them as individuals as opposed to just employees. That’s a massive conversation. I’ll give you the importance based on what happened to me. I think this is as good a way of any to explain it. But when I got started, I was a supervisor at UPS when I was a sophomore in college and UPS had part-time supervisors. So, when I got started, I got started early, I was 20 years old, and the people that were reporting to me were most likely older than I was. So, in your 30s, 40s, and 50s, nobody really cares too much. But in your 20s, a 22-year-old doesn’t like a 20-year-old guiding their life at the office. So I had to make a decision on day one of how was I going to make this work, so I simply decided to do this,
I would treat others the way I’d like to be treated. It worked on day one and it’s worked for 45 years since that date. Click To TweetSo, in the process of leading people, if we always remember and always put ourselves in a position where we can put ourselves in their shoes so that we can see and understand what we’re saying, how would we like to receive what we think we’re trying to say, and I found it to be a massively beneficial approach because it allows the individual to be an individual, opposed to just doing something because I said so.
Yeah. So this was apparent to you when you were 20. When you were starting out, you kind of just looked around and said, “I need to do this, I need to treat others how I would want to be treated.” Why do you think this idea is so much harder to realize and enact for so many other people in leadership positions?
Historically, it goes all the way back to the Industrial Revolution. Management people have been reproducing themselves generation after generation after generation. And, unfortunately, when the Industrial Revolution started in 1850 in the United States and farmers came off the fields and started working for somebody else and they entered into that dynamic, whereas farmers were always responsible for everything they ever did and they managed their cash flow based on getting paid two or three times a year. Now, they move into the factories and they’re getting paid more often, once a week or twice a month or whatever the case may be, and now they have to listen to somebody else telling them what to do.
They had no say in what they were doing. And the proof of that is that six years later, in 1856, the labor unions showed up.
So that’s when they showed up.
That’s when they started. And they came as a result of employees not liking the work environment. As time went on, and in 1895, there was a gentleman named Frederick Winslow Taylor, who was recognized in the business world as being probably the first industrial engineer by name, and I have nothing against industrial engineers because UPS has a great group of engineers. However, he made a statement that people took to heart and that was run business by numbers and, as a result, the human element was left out. And management people forgot that it’s actually people that do the work. So, management teams, again, they tend to replicate themselves. So generation after generation, we’ve got the whole thing, a lot of it still exists, and, all of a sudden, we bump into the great resignation. We come out of the pandemic era, and we know that in the pandemic, there was a lot of people that quit their jobs after they were asked to come to work. Now, that’s an interesting dynamic because people got to spend time at home, they did their eight-hour job over a twelve-hour period, worked in some family things along the way, when the time came to go back to work, they didn’t want to go.
They didn’t want to go back.
To be losing the flexibility, but they didn’t want to go back to the environment they just got released from. And that really came as a result of the way management people were managing. There was no desire to go back. And there has to be that desire. Employees have to have a desire to want to work for who they report to. Now, that’s where the leadership thing comes in. When you go back to the way I started by treating people the way I’d like to be treated, that’s a good environment. That’s a good situation for people to work in. One thing great about UPS, basically, if you do well, you’re left alone, and I was left alone for 34 years in the management team there. I did my own thing for 34 years. During the process of doing that, I worked in operations, finance and accounting, and the technology groups, and the approach of leadership that I developed worked in every case.
Different types of job functions, essentially.
Right. Because people are the common thread. Now, one of the things I spent five years in Europe during UPS’s initial international expansion, and while I was over there, I was a finance director in 10 countries, 10 small countries. We had finance directors at Italy, Spain, France, the UK, and Germany. I had everything else. So I worked in the countries from the Nordic countries, so you got Norway, Denmark, Sweden, and Finland, down through Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands, recent Turkey and Ireland over on the other side. So I had an opportunity to work in these different cultures and I learned something valuable. Unfortunately, I didn’t think of it while I was over there but I did think of it when I started the coaching business. It didn’t matter where I was.
People are the same all over. Cultures vary, but hearts don’t. Click To TweetPeople just want to be cared for. They want to be well trained, they want to have a future, they want to be appreciated, and in that type of environment, people will be willing to do their best so now they’re being inspired to do the best rather than being forced to obey a manager. That was a long answer to your question but…
Well, it’s interesting to hear the history of it because one of the things I often observe myself is that, first, as you mentioned, in the industrial revolution, we made that shift from the farm to the factory and now, say, mostly in the last 50 to 75 years, a lot of work cultures now have made the shift from the factory to what people call office jobs or the service sector which also has a completely different type of dynamic and I often observe that we never really updated our culture in the sense that, in the factory, it mattered what time you showed up, it mattered how many hours you were there, that was a direct one-to-one connection, until someone got too tired to work between the value produced and the number of hours that you’re physically standing in a specific location, whereas a lot of the work we do today, it’s not nearly as connected and it’s not the same exact kind of work, some of it’s a lot more intellectually taxing and stuff like that. And one of the things that I always get curious about is how some of these ideas that you talk about are innate to humanity. People want that flexibility. People want to have some sort of dominion over their own lives, their own selves. People want to be cared for. People want to be inspired. But to me, it feels like there was a 50-year period before the pandemic from 1970 to 2020 where we didn’t really think through this on a mass scale and, somehow, things kept ticking on, employees kept just mostly dealing with this somewhat less than ideal situation. And it’s fascinating to me about why that happened. Why 1970 through 2020 happened the way they did and why there wasn’t any kind of a backlash to this continuing and sometimes even more and more draconian as more jobs get automated, more jobs get shipped overseas, and the workers’ situation seem to deteriorate a little bit, if anything.
Well, let’s go back to the time period because that happens to be my time period. So, the education system supports a method and the education system says this, “Go to school, get an education, go get a job, exchange time for money for 45 years, retire on social security, thank you for making 5 percent of the people financially successful, 95 percent of the people support them.” Now, we were trained by our parents to do exactly what I just said. That’s the way my parents trained me. They told me, get a good job and do your best and all that, nothing wrong with that. It’s just that there was very little training, financial training and leadership training, inside families unless you happen to be a son or daughter of an entrepreneur. And I have seen such a drastic difference between people at UPS who were raised in entrepreneurial families versus those that were not. I saw people that were. What I learned at UPS by being in the role they knew as they walked in the front door. And it was interesting to listen to the benefits of having that exposure. The education system created what happened in the 70s through right now, because the baby boomers are going through their cycle and we’re getting to the end of that cycle. The working part of it, anyway.
Yeah. Yeah, the retirement age.
Yeah. Now, you mentioned something about the way we’re made and I love this conversation. I respect the Bible tremendously and when you go to Genesis 1:26-28, the answer to what you said is in there. You’ve actually hinted to it already. Okay, in Genesis 1:26, God said, “Let us make man in Our image, and after Our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea, the birds of the air,” and that entire list of —
Rule of animals, yeah.
Verse 27, it says, “God made man, male and female,” because it takes both of them to embody the complete structure of man. Now, in verse 28, and this is key, it starts off, it says, “God bless them.” In those three words, we have God giving every single person who ever will live the skills and the personality to carry out the call on their life. We’re created in a way to fulfill that call. Let’s keep going. Then it says, “Be fruitful and multiply.” Now, we tend to take that statement and think it means make babies.
Yep.
That is part of it. However, the “Be fruitful and multiply” piece — the “Be fruitful” piece, rather, is a challenge to man and really the commission that says from all the stuff I gave you and, God bless them, take that and do something with it. Be fruitful in what you do and let it mature over time. So if you look at an apple tree, an apple tree grows, gets larger and larger each year, and each year produces more apples. So, the tree matures and creates the same fruit. Man, on the other hand, has the opportunity to mature the fruit.
Yeah, produce something different.
What produces, it gets greater and greater, so in the “Be fruitful and multiply,” part of the multiply is do something great, make your life great, do great things with it, and grow the population as well. Then he says to use the world to fulfill your task, basically. But then we get to this rule thing again, “And let them rule,” and, “Rule over,” and then you get the whole list of what to rule over. Now, an interesting thing about that list, man is not in the list.
So it’s not saying rule over other human beings, it’s saying rule over the cornfields like how farming was.
When you dig into the words, it refers to anything that crawls on multiple legs is really the definition. Okay, now, we are created to be relational people. We are motivated in relational environments. So, if you’re going to lead a group of people, do it that way. Now, God does not lead by committee. There’s no place in the Bible where the number one person was a committee, it was always an individual, but that individual is the most successful when they had relationships with people, not a club.
I think this is a test that people can do on a constant basis. When you get to the point, and I’m not saying that there aren’t challenging times, when there needs to be some stern conversations, but you can do that and still lead by relationship. You don’t have to beat somebody over the head with a two by four. So, in walking out the leadership role that anybody has, remember that we are only as successful as our weakest link. We’re only as successful really as the employee that has not fully developed. Now, I can go through the process of developing an employee because if you take the right process, they will follow you almost forever and there’s just a handful of key elements in this.
So you’re talking about developing employee, and now for it seems like 170 years of history, when we talk about 1850, Industrial Revolution, to 2020, recently, that number pretty much over time became all about just hitting numbers. And when you say about the metrics is the same thing as like the Q2 tasks, you checked off that list and that’s it, right? Nowadays, you’re talking about developing employee like developing them more as a human being than a set of numbers or a chart that has to be put on some screen, as you see a lot nowadays, saying, “Oh, here’s a bar chart that shows this numerical growth.” You’re talking about a whole picture of how someone becomes not just the human being they are but the human being they are that’s going to be an effective contributor to this particular organization’s mission, the way it’s set up.
Exactly. So in the onboarding process, employees have five basic needs. The first one is to be a member of a team. First of all, I’m assuming you hired the right person to start with.
Hopefully, given some people are doing five, six, seven interviews for their jobs so if you didn’t get it right after that, there’s other problems but, yeah.
That’s just it. So, what I’m saying now assumes you brought the right person in, which that’s another conversation but still you can get the right person. Anyway, so when someone comes on the first day, you want to make them feel a member of the team so, first of all, you explain the importance of their job, the importance of how it fits in the big picture, introduce them to the players on the field, basically, and make them feel a part of the group. So, if you do that, and I say you collectively, if you do that, then you’ll get that person off to a great start.
We have to remember, an individual is the most moldable on day one. Click To TweetThey don’t know anything, apart from their job title, the fact that getting paid for somebody, and who they’re reporting to. That’s about it. So now you get to develop those expectations. Okay. So, now, once you’ve got that part, the next part is for them to be well trained, and that’s the second employee need, to be well trained. What that means is the employee feels that they can be successful in what they were hired for. And that, in and of itself, is a comfortable place to be. All we got to do is put ourselves in those shoes. Am I more comfortable as an employee and more valuable? Can I see my value better the better I’m trained? That’s a no-brainer.
Yeah, got to be.
Okay. Now, once you get past those first two steps — and getting somebody fully trained obviously depends on the job but —
Yeah, some of them take some time.
Yeah, exactly. Now, you’ll get to a point when you can define that that person is well trained, while you’re doing the training, you’re having some periodic reviews. This is what you’re doing, you’re doing great, all that kind of stuff. Now, when the time comes that you’re well trained, now, I’m going to have this this conversation and this is what I’m going to ask you. I’m going to say, “Steven, what would you like to do in three years?” Now, when I ask that question to you or anybody the first time, when I ask it the first time, it may very well be the first time anybody ever asked them the question.
Yeah, it’s not common. Usually, the focus is on whatever project is going on and how we get it finished and how we start the next one so, yeah.
Exactly. So if I ask you that question, I’m likely to get a deer in the headlights look back from you. Like, “Huh?” Basically, never thought of that question. I will immediately come back and say, “Well, I’m really interested in that answer for you. Let’s get back together a week from today at this exact same time and let’s talk about what you’d like to do.” So now, I have just given that person a feeling that I care about them more than just the job they do.
So can I ask you a follow-up question about this third step?
Yeah, for sure.
Because if people can say what would you like to do in three years and take it in so many different ways, like it’s December 2023 right now so I could be specifically saying, “Oh, December 2026, I would like to be skiing in the Alps on a vacation,” and that’s not really necessarily what you’re getting at when you start that conversation, you want to know in the work sense, so do you ever have to like really qualify with like additional statements on that or is it usually imply that since we’re talking about a supervisor, a leader talking to their employee, it’s usually understood that they’re talking about within the context of work and within the context of the organization that they’re working for?
Well, by the time I’ve gotten to this point, I’ve had numerous conversations with this person already. I’m just taking it to the next level. I’ve just spent all this time getting them ready to feel comfortable. When I ask them that question, whatever they say, I’m going to find some way to help them get on the road to that point. If they find something in the business they would like to do, great. If it’s something outside that they need a skill for, fine. I’m going to do something to help them develop themselves. Now, here’s the value of this one, this takes you to employee need number three, to be capable of doing more. So if I talk to you about doing something more, I don’t care if it’s inside or outside the business. I have just reinforced with this person that I believe they’re capable to go beyond. Now, when somebody feels that the person they report to thinks they’re capable of doing more…
Yeah, they’re going to level up.
It’s a confidence builder. And you’ve got a dialogue that can go on forever. Now, one of the important things in this process is review periods. One of the most detested things employees have is the annual review. Because the annual review does nothing. It allows the manager person to check off a box that says, “Yep, I had a review with that person.”
Yeah, you check it off then you figure out what merit, pay increase they’re getting that year, essentially. That’s like the main purpose of it.
Yeah, with no — with nothing for the past year, really, other than doing their job. So now, the way I do reviews is, if we’re having a review, and I figure based on a conversation we need to get back together again, let’s just see how we’re doing in three to four months, I’m going to pick a time three months down the road, I’m going to set the time so they know that it’s coming. I’ll never let the period go longer than six months, ever. Now, an interesting thing about the fact that I wouldn’t go beyond six months, I also have a relationship with these people so if something’s wrong, they’re going to come to me. They’re not going to wait for six months. So what happens then is every time I have the review, it truly is a review of the period since the last review. There are no surprises. There’s no surprises in there. I’ve already had dialogue with you throughout this whole period so now it becomes simply a review and a summary, which can be very encouraging and they can get to the next question. It might go to this point, “Have you ever thought of being on the management team?” or whatever the conversation is, but it can lead to such an encouraging environment. And I can tell you, it has never failed.
Interesting. So it’s never led to, say, someone that doesn’t have the capability of being on the management team, doesn’t have what it takes, like getting a false sense of capability or false sense of hope or —
No.
— that people naturally would put in their mind that they’re afraid of happening if you were to say something like that.
I’ll share a situation I had, this happened one time in my 35 years at UPS and 10 years thereafter. I had one time when I had a guy that wanted to be in the management team. He just wasn’t management material and I told him in as easy way as possible. Well, he got irritated at that and he filed a discrimination case against me within the organization. Now, I have two options now. I can get angry, mad, and resist, or I can listen to what he has to say. So, in UPS, if you have something like that, the HR department gets involved so you got a third person involved and you got an outside person watching the conversation. Here’s what happened. Because I didn’t treat him any different than anybody else, it died its own death. I met one time, he got refreshed to the fact that I’ve been on the level with him all along. So I didn’t change my story, I didn’t treat him bad, I treated him like every other time, and it just died. That was it.
So he was kind of just reacting to that piece of news, like you’re not management material and it was probably a shock to him and sometimes people get shocked by a piece of news and they just kind of react poorly at first and then it takes a while for it to sink in.
Yeah. And then we, as leaders, get to lead them out of that situation. Well, I didn’t treat him any different than anybody else so it just died its own death.
So you mentioned obviously the onboarding, the training, then kind of that initial conversation and the regular annual review-ish type of process, the regular conversation, is there like a final part? Like you mentioned five parts.
There are two other parts of this. Number four, number four is to be fairly compensated. Now, the interesting thing about this one is what? That it’s number four on the list. It’s not number one. When someone first gets started, yes, they’re joining on because of getting paid a certain amount of money, but do you know that when you work with people and you show them personal interest, money doesn’t become the first thing? We are in the process of encouraging and building people up to be successful as individuals. Yes, they should be paid properly but it’s not number one on the list anymore. It drops to number four. Now, money is a short-term motivator. This is something people need to remember.
It’s human nature. It happens all the time. So, if you give somebody, let’s just pick a number, 10 percent increase, and I think they should be thankful and they will be thankful. Now, if I think I can hold on to that thankfulness for the next year and do nothing because I just gave them a 10 percent increase. Wrong. It’s going to lose its impact, because of adjusting the lifestyle. That’s why some of the times when it comes time to do increases of sort, instead of making it money, and this comes out of a dialog with the person, it’s not something I just pulled out of thin air, let’s say that this person would like a gym membership. So instead of giving him 100 bucks a month or whatever, buy him a gym membership. That money will always be used for the gym and every single time that guy walks in the door, or lady, they will remember how they got there. It’s constantly reinforcing. Again, it’s not intended to replace somebody’s salary. What it’s intended is that when you have an opportunity to give somebody something extra, it doesn’t always have to be a dollar. That’s number four. Number five is obvious, to be appreciated. So when we appreciate what people do, actually going through these first four things, we are continually honestly from the heart, not the head, appreciating people are, they’ll be with you. Now, I’ll give you an example what happens when this goes and happens. One year, when I was at UPS, I decided — now, I was still a supervisor so I hadn’t been around in the management ranks that long, probably full time three years at this point, I decided that I was going to bring my people together and tell them what I would like to accomplish for the year. I mentioned that to some of my peers and I was advised not to do it because they’ll just take advantage of you. I said, “Well, I’m gonna do it anyway.” I did. I got them together, went through what I’d like to do for the year, and something happened that I never expected. The most senior person in the office — in my group, I should say, stood up, after I put it out there, she says, “Steve, we’re behind you, we want you to be successful.” That was a reflection of the relationships that we had with the folks. So, needless to say, it was a good start for the year. People are not stupid, for crying out loud. If you’ve got a really good idea — now, while you’re going through all this and I’m saying what I like to do, I’m also listening to what their input is because I have meetings with the group every month and we just exchange ideas. They know the job on a day-to-day basis. They know their job better than I do. I know what they’re supposed to do, I know what the result is supposed to be, but if they have challenges, I don’t know them. I don’t know that they’re having a problem with one person or another, whatever, whatever, so we have open dialogue. So if you have an issue, let me know what it is, let’s try to fix it. And when you do something for somebody when they brought it up, it’s worth gold. And all of this still comes back to creating an environment for people that makes them the most successful possible.
And it’s fascinating to hear this entire dialogue that we’re having kind of nationwide, globally, in some kind of capacity, kind of in response to some things like the great resignation, some in response to the fact that the Gallup Survey seems to be pretty stagnant as far as what percentage of employees are actually actively engaged in their job and we see that and how many people are either disengaged or actively disengaged, it’s such a high number so we’re having this conversation and it’s wonderful, I’m just kind of curious as to why, despite these conversations, there’s so much inertia around kind of the old way of doing things, what you talk about, you talk about making everything about numbers and metrics, you talk about not necessarily treating people like they’re fully human is what it seems like happens or happened in a lot of places and that’s kind of one of the things that — I remember this movie called Office Space where the main character, Peter Gibbons, actually says, “That’s only gonna make someone work just hard enough not to get fired,” and when I hear that statement, I think about this idea you’re kind of looking at the downside, “I need to avoid getting fired,” “I need to avoid getting punishment,” I need to avoid some sort of fate of being on the unemployment line, being broke, losing my mortgage, all that, as opposed to everything you’re talking about is kind of on the up and up, kind of like how do I become more successful, how do I grow bigger beyond the role I’m in now, I’m doing well but how do I grow beyond, how do I grow into something more. What’s it going to take to get most of our culture on board with this kind of more new, more updated way of handling our employment relations that you’ve been promoting?
That’s a really good question and the only way you ever change a leadership culture and culture in an organization is from the top. An individual manager person can do exactly what I said but if it doesn’t come from the top, it’s not going to impact everybody. It impacts that person’s working group. So, that can be done but that’s not my objective. My objective, our objective, really, is to reveal and show CEOs how they can change the way the leadership works in their organization and they will generate tremendous fruit. Now, CEOs, they have to pay attention to numbers that tells them whether they’re successful or not. To really catch a CEO’s attention, you have to talk about something that is sensitive to them. I can go up and I can have this conversation with any leader out there and if they happen to not have a real heart for employees in this regard because they just lived years or decades in the old way, the only way to get their attention is to talk about what they are sensitive to and this is where employee turnover comes in. So, the average turnover rate in the United States is 9.3 percent. If the only people we ever lost were due to retirement, it will be 2.2. That means 7 percent of the turnover is generated from some other cause. Now, some people will move on to better themselves. When I develop people, I try to do whatever I can in the organization to keep them because they’re good people. I don’t like losing people because they want to go someplace else, but it happens. But if you lose somebody because they want to go do something that you can’t provide them any longer, as much as I’d rather not lose them, those people are aces while they’re there, because they have the attitude of wanting to do better. That’s a good thing. But the average cost in the United States to replace an employee is $34,000.
Yeah, there’s a lot of institutional knowledge in a specialty role, it can be a lot more but, yeah.
So $34,000 on average. Now, that means that an organization of a thousand people will spend $3.2 million every year replacing people. Now, wouldn’t it make sense that you didn’t lose them in the first place?
Yeah, they want to cut that number in half.
Yeah. So if you cut it in half, save the 1.6 million, use that money to invest in the business as opposed to replacing people that should never have been lost in the first place, not only you have longer tenured people but the expertise, the skill level rose over time. Now, what happens when you have a workforce that has been around for a while, knows things, whether it’s a service or a product, doesn’t matter? It’s much easier to promote from within.
When you promote from within, you generate another reason for people to want to work hard. Click To TweetBecause I’ll tell you what, when I got started at UPS, what attracted me to UPS at that point, UPS did not cover the entire 48 states yet at this point, so I knew that UPS was going to continue to grow, expand geographically, to cover the 48 states, this was long before international got started, then Alaska and Hawaii got added, so that I knew there were opportunities out there and that intrigued me. And I also knew, because I could tell by the people around me that the people in management positions were good, they did good work. I’m just a young kid at that point in time but I see this. Then I knew that the day would come when UPS would have all 48 states covered and then they would get better because they will become more fine-tuned. That was another opportunity to be a part of it. But there was so much opportunity there that I wanted to stay there and contribute my piece to their success. Anytime somebody feels that they have the ability to lead the organization to higher places, that is a motivating place to be. I remember when I was at UPS when I was going to college, I looked forward to the day that all I had to do was go to work. That day came, obviously, but still —
It’s not that common to have that though.
I know it has always worked this way, I never heard it expressed like this so I got to give credit to Richard Branson for this statement. He said train people so well that they have the ability to leave but treat them so they don’t want to. And that’s it. That’s a very simple statement but very accurate.
So, if you were to talk to the average CEO and you were to tell them half your employees hate their job, what do you think would be their reaction? Would just that statement give them some sort of reaction or does it require, as you said before, the discussion of the bottom line, this is turnover, this is how much it’s costing us every year and stuff like that?
That’s a dangerous statement to make. I mean, I like the statement but it’s scary statement.
It is.
If the CEO says, “Yes, I know that,” that’s a problem. If he says, “I don’t know that,” that’s also a problem. So I don’t come at it from that perspective. I just come back to dollars and cents. If it’s worth 3.2 million for a company of a thousand people, how much do you think UPS could be losing with their 500,000 employees every year?
Yes, that gets — hundreds of millions, close to a billion, yeah.
But when you come at it from a number perspective, it just resonates more. Now, here’s the funny thing about turnover costs. It’s quite likely you could ask a CEO what their turnover cost is, they may not know the answer and it’s very easy not to know the answer because it is not a line item on the income statement.
The impact of turnover is reflected throughout everything in the business. Click To TweetIt’s reflected in productivity, it’s reflected in quality, in all of the training costs that goes into it. We happen to have a worksheet that helps people develop their turnover cost because it captures the little nuggets of the parts of the business that are impacted. So you can develop the number relatively accurately. And when you hear the number, it’s a scary number. So then you come down to this. How many times do I want to spend $34,000 for the wrong reason? Because I lost somebody I should never have lost. And people leave managers, they don’t leave companies. So every single one of those 7 percent example I gave, those 7 percent left a management person, and that’s the challenge. Now, we can retrain people to be people people. One of the big reasons why there’s so many people that don’t do it, they were never trained to do it.
Oh, yeah. Most people are not trained on how to be a manager, they’re just like you were the best at this job on the line and now we’re going to elevate you for that but you never thought about like how do you inspire people, how do you become a leader of a group. Do you see over the next 10-, 20-year horizon our work culture improving and some of these disengagement numbers finally starting to budge because they really haven’t for quite some time?
I think there’s going to be significant changes. The employees themselves, some of them are tired of it because they have the COVID season to experience the alternative. Now, here’s a couple of statistics as well in addition to this. If you ask high school students what’s their objective coming out of school?
Oh, half of them want to be influencers, right?
Sixty-seven percent of them will tell you they want to be in business for themselves.
Yeah, an influencer, I guess, is one of them but, yeah.
Now, when they actually come out of college or whatever their education system is, trade school, whatever, the number actually comes out to be about 57. But that’s still when you look at the labor force, our unemployment rate right now is probably about 3.5 percent. Four percent is considered full employment. That’s a very tight labor market. Only one country in the globe is going to have an overabundance of employees according to an organization that studies this, Korn Ferry is the name of the company, in the next three years, there’s only one country that’s going to have an excess number of people.
Oh, can I guess, is it Ghana?
And it’s India.
Oh.
So it’s India.
Okay, yeah.
So the Indians are going to be at a good place when it comes to this but nobody else is. You can’t afford to lose your people. You may not have the right ones you need so keep the ones you have. It just makes more sense.
So these market pressures alongside initiatives like yours, kind of retraining people on how to be leaders, retraining — reaching the CEOs on why it’s important to establish a culture that values that, is naturally going to make the workplace better. And so if we think about the workplace of 2035 or sometime in the future, what do you see as the primary difference between what we’re observing now, which in some ways is still similar to what we had been observing for that last 50 years, as I was mentioning, and what we’re going to be seeing 10 years from now?
We’re going to see a greater appreciation for the individual. And there’s going to be another piece of this puzzle, which I haven’t talked about hardly anywhere. I envision there’s going to be a change in the way that compensation structure is put together.
Interesting.
That there’s going to be multiple pieces of the compensation puzzle. So, just take it real simple. Instead of being simply dollar, so much an hour, time for money, there’s going to be an element of money for accomplishment. And that may be a little harder nut to swallow but I think it’s coming. There’s just too many people that are starting to realize that wealth is accomplished through multiple income streams so if you have a compensation plan that’s made up of multiple pieces, you actually introduce people to the way to increase their personal wealth. Now, there’s lots of numbers behind all that stuff so we’re not going to get into that here. This whole instruction has to move all the way down into the schools.
The money for accomplishment does make more sense for a, quote-unquote, “post-industrial world,” because rather than you’re on the assembly line and your value is the number of hours that you’re standing in that place, what is it that you’re doing that’s creating value and it could all come at once or it could come slowly over time and different settings for different people.
Well, there are, just strictly looking at it from a conceptual perspective, profit sharing is valuable. Now, it has to be put together correctly for the business, but when people realize that they are going to be compensated for the success of the organization, there’s a motivation to work a little harder because there’s a chance. And there’s no question about that. It’s just that people are afraid to go there. It’s just easier, time for money, it’s an easier calculation. Granted, the profit sharing and things of that nature are a little more sophisticated but are people worth some sophistication? I think so.
I think so too and I really hope that some of these changes come about because, as I had mentioned in some of the previous episodes, the very fact that someone disliking their job is so built into our culture that we have deals based on the Sunday scaries, Wednesday hump day, thank God, it’s Friday, everything in our culture is based on this idea that people don’t want to be going to their job, yet it’s still the thing that they spend more of their waking hours doing than anything else. So definitely something needs to be changing and I definitely hope that some of these changes come about. Steven, thank you so much for joining us today on Action’s Antidotes, for telling us all about what we can do to not only be better leaders but also kind of reach some of the people who are really in the positions to make these changes happen for a large number of people, because you have your group of 12 and it’s great that you’ve become a better leader of your group of 12, 15, 24, whichever, but once you start reaching the CEOs of some of these budding companies or already established big companies, you start to make a significant portion of the population’s life better.
Exactly. Exactly. This is one of the tests. If the management person can do this or hope their employees might do this, when they go home at night, they walk in the front door and their spouse or significant other says, “How was your day, dear?” how do you answer the question? Because if it’s positive, the rest of the night is going to be fun. If it’s negative, you’re going to throw up on your spouse. I assure you, the first way is a whole lot better than the second one.
A hundred percent, for sure. Maybe you don’t need to have a drink or two every single night, maybe you’re going to go take part in some activity that’s going to further enhance you, go for a walk, go do something fun together rather than that axe throwing or smashing stuff that people who are angry are starting to do more and more. Excellent. Well, I love that message. I love that conversation. I would also love to thank everyone out there for listening today, tuning into Action’s Antidotes. Hopefully you’re inspired. Hopefully you’re inspired to figure out how to become a better leader, a better leader of yourself, better leader of the people around you, and just to treat people the way that people need to be treated.
Exactly.
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About Steven Turner
Steven Turner is President of Flow Business Solution and COO of Beyond Resilience LLC (a new company).
He graduated from the University of Wisconsin with a degree in Business Administration. This, along with his appreciation and respect for UPS, where he was on the management team while attending college, launched his business career on a leadership journey of success!
Steven has a proven 34-year management career with UPS. He provided leadership in the diverse environments of Operations, Finance & Accounting, and Technology at District, Region, and Corporate levels. This included five years in Europe at the beginning of UPS’ global expansion, where he was a Finance Director with responsibilities in 10 countries. Upon his return to the USA, he moved into UPS Information Services leading groups that designed, built, and deployed UPS financial systems for worldwide use.
His management career took him through 7 relocations across the USA and Europe. His responsibilities in the countries he covered globally solidified an important fact…cultures vary, but hearts do not. No matter where he went, he experienced the same reality. Employees will follow those who care about them, train them for success and appreciate who they are as individuals. His dedication to the individual lives of his employees and the value they provided in his business groups yielded him success in every position he held. He demonstrated the value of leading employees as opposed to managing them. “Systems, processes, and procedures should be managed. Employees should be led.”