Name Someone You Cannot
Afford To Lose. Do They Know?
Most of the people who are about to leave your organisation are not unhappy about pay. They have simply never been told they matter.
There is a moment I use in almost every room I speak in, and it works the same way every single time.
I ask people to raise a hand if they have ever had a leader make them feel genuinely valued. Most hands go up. Then I ask them to keep their hand up if the reason was money.
Almost every hand drops.
I have done this in front of hospital leaders, association boards, and rooms full of executives, and I have never once had a room where the hands stayed up. Whatever that moment was for them, it was not compensation. It was somebody noticing something.
Then I ask a harder question. Think of one person on your team right now who you absolutely cannot afford to lose. Most people have a name immediately.
Now: do they know that?
That is where the room goes quiet. Because most leaders are certain the person knows, and almost none of them can point to the last time they said it.
The assumption that costs you people
Nearly every leader I have worked with believes their best people know how valued they are. It seems obvious from the inside. You gave them the hard project. You defended them in a meeting they never heard about. You have been protecting their headcount for two budget cycles.
None of that is visible to them.
What they can see is whether anyone said anything. And most of the time nobody did, because you assumed it was already understood.
Most leaders are certain
their best person knows.
Almost none can say when
they last told them.
Gallup and Workhuman tracked the careers of more than 3,400 employees between 2022 and 2024. Those who had received high quality recognition at the start were 45 percent less likely to have left two years later. Recognition that met four or more quality markers cut the likelihood of actively job hunting by around 65 percent.
The gap is the part worth sitting with. More than half of US employees, around 55 percent, report receiving no recognition at all, or recognition so generic it satisfies none of those markers.
Which means the single most reliable retention lever available is also the one most organisations are simply not using.
Read that alongside what happens in my sessions. People remember being valued, it almost never had to do with money, and more than half of them are not currently getting any of it.
You do not have a compensation problem as often as you think. You have a noticing problem.
Why most appreciation does not land
Here is where a lot of well-intentioned leaders go wrong. They treat appreciation as something they deliver rather than something the other person receives.
Appreciation is about the person receiving it. Not about how it felt to say, not about whether it was on the agenda, and definitely not about whether the programme has a name and a logo.
Strong appreciation has three qualities, and generic praise has none of them.
It is specific. Great job this week is noise. Naming the actual thing they did, and what it made possible, is the entire difference. The person needs to know you were paying attention closely enough to see it.
It is timely. Recognition attached to something that happened four months ago reads as an administrative exercise. Close to the moment, it reads as attention.
It is personal. Some people want it publicly. Some people would rather be quietly told and left alone. Getting that wrong turns a good intention into an uncomfortable experience, which is worse than nothing.
None of it works without the relationship underneath
This is the part I think gets missed most, and it is why recognition programmes so often fail in organisations that genuinely mean well.
Appreciation, support, and feedback all land completely differently depending on whether there is a relationship already there.
If people do not believe you see them as a human being, your appreciation feels like a tactic. Your support feels like management. Your feedback feels like criticism. Same words, same intent, entirely different reception.
The person on your team is not their title. They are carrying a whole life outside the building. They might be caring for a parent, raising kids, going through something hard, trying to prove themselves, trying not to let anybody down. You will not know any of that unless you have built the kind of relationship where it comes up.
Relationships are the foundation everything else sits on. And people stay where they feel known, not just where they feel needed.
People stay where
they feel known,
not just where
they feel needed.
What this actually costs
The reason I like this as a leadership subject is that it is one of the few areas where the constraint is not budget.
Every leader I meet is working with less than they need. Fewer people, tighter margins, a hiring market that is not cooperating. Most of the levers that would help are outside their control.
This one is not. The moments people remember cost attention and intention. They cost a leader slowing down long enough to notice something and then saying it out loud.
That is genuinely available to you this week, regardless of what your budget looks like.
Start with the name you already thought of
- Tell the person you pictured. You had a name within two seconds of reading the title. Tell them this week, specifically, what they do that the organisation would struggle without.
- Name the behaviour, not the outcome. Good quarter is about results. What you did in that meeting when the family was upset is about them. Only one of those tells someone you were watching.
- Ask how they like to be recognised. It takes one question and it prevents the most common own goal in this whole area, which is recognising a private person publicly.
- Learn one thing outside work. Not as a technique. Because appreciation from someone who does not know you is worth very little, and you cannot fake the foundation.
The question that stays with people
Of everything I put in front of a room, that one question is the one people come up to me about afterwards. Not the data. Not the framework.
Just: think of the person you cannot afford to lose, and then be honest about whether they have any idea.
Most of the time the honest answer is no. And the gap between how much you value someone and how much they know it is where good people quietly decide to take the call from a recruiter.
You are probably one conversation away from changing that.
Ask a room who has felt truly valued by a leader and most hands go up. Ask whether the reason was money and almost all of them drop. Yet more than half of employees currently receive no meaningful recognition at all, and the ones who do are far less likely to leave. The gap is not budget and it is not effort. It is that leaders assume their best people already know. Pick the name you thought of, and tell them specifically this week.
Keynotes and
workshops.
Chris runs national healthcare staffing organizations and speaks to companies, associations, and health systems on culture, retention, and building workplaces people do not want to leave.
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