Who Are You Really Telling to Stay?
By Clark A. Ingram
Every organization has good employees and bad ones, and here’s an uncomfortable truth I’ve watched play out for more than thirty years: your day-to-day decisions are constantly sending a message about which group you want to keep. Most leaders never realize they’re sending it, and most are sending the wrong one.
The mechanism is simple. If you fail to discipline your bad employees and fail to reward your good ones, the bad ones stay and the good ones leave. You’ve told your worst people, in the only language that counts, action, that they’re welcome to stick around. Meanwhile your best people, who notice everything, hear the opposite. Over time you’re left with a roster you never would have chosen. Worse, you’ve been feeding the very turnover monster you’re trying to slay.
The good news is that the reverse is just as reliable. Discipline the poor performers and reward the strong ones, and you end up with fewer bad employees and more good ones, and some of those marginal performers will actually convert, because they finally see that good work gets rewarded. Your people already know exactly who the good and bad employees are. How you treat each group is what decides who stays.
Solving turnover is what buys you the freedom to do this. When turnover is high, you’re trapped: you keep people you know aren’t productive because you need warm bodies in the building. You can’t afford standards. Once you stabilize your workforce, you finally gain the flexibility to deal honestly with your less-productive employees instead of clinging to anyone with a pulse.
Second chances have limits, too. One company I worked with was so desperate for warm bodies that it kept rehiring the same former employees over and over. The pattern was obvious once we looked at the record: people rehired once often worked out, because they’d learned the grass wasn’t greener elsewhere, while those rehired more than once failed almost every time. So we set a simple rule, we’d rehire someone exactly once. That policy sent its own message: we’ll give you a genuine second chance, but we won’t be taken advantage of.
But I’ll warn you about what happens the moment you start making changes. Every organization has what I call THAT issue, a problem everyone knows about, everyone talks about, and management ignores. It might be the owner’s brother-in-law who’s the worst supervisor in the building and refuses to be coached. It might be favoritism, or managers who play by their own rules, or the “open door” that everyone knows is theater. THAT issue has been quietly generating turnover for years, and the monster will fight hardest to keep you from touching it, because it’s the real problem. You cannot fix your turnover while stepping around the thing actually causing it.
Underneath all of this sits a cost most leaders badly underestimate: hopelessness. The most disheartening conversations of my career were with employees I knew were excellent- people who worked late, demanded quality, trained the new hires- who had quietly concluded that nothing would ever change. “It is what it is.” That fatalism is a cancer on your culture, and it’s infinitely expensive. When one of those good people finally leaves, morale collapses and everyone else dusts off a résumé.
Here’s the encouraging part, and it’s the whole reason I do this work: hopelessness reverses fast. When you identify the real root causes, announce a plan that actually makes sense, and deliver a concrete, visible change that touches people’s everyday work, the mood shifts almost immediately. The good employees are the first to jump in; they’ve been waiting for someone to make it better. Excitement, it turns out, is as contagious as despair, and it’s infinitely more profitable. I once had an employee stop me in the hallway and whisper, “It’s getting better”, afraid she’d jinx it. That whisper is the sound of a workforce deciding to stay.
Four Ways to Send the Right Message
1. Audit the message your actions send. Look honestly at who gets rewarded and who gets tolerated. If your best people are carrying your worst and nothing changes, you’re telling the wrong group you want them to stay. Reverse it deliberately.
2. Deal with marginal performers proactively. Don’t wait for the next blowup. Sit down with the employee, agree on objective, specific behavior improvements and a timetable, and follow through. People act only when they know you’re serious.
3. Name THAT issue and fix it. Identify the known-but-ignored problem everyone in the building talks about and management avoids. Put it on the table. You cannot reduce turnover while protecting its root cause.
4. Deliver a visible early win. Announce a plan that makes sense, then produce one concrete change employees feel in their daily work. Nothing dispels hopelessness faster than proof that things are actually moving.
You are always telling someone to stay. The only question is whether it’s the people who make your company better or the people quietly driving it into the ground. Decide on purpose, and let your best people hear it loud and clear.
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Clark A. Ingram is the Founder and President of People Profits, LLC, which focuses on the three greatest human capital problems affecting organizations: employee turnover, chronically open positions, and skills gap. He consults with a spectrum of companies and has consistently reduced turnover by more than 40 percent in the first year and achieved staffing at more than 90 percent. His new book is Churn: Proven Strategies to Overcome Failing Conventional Talent Management and Achieve Zero Turnover (People Profits, March 26, 2026). Learn more at peopleprofits.com.
