What If You Do Not Train Them
And They Stay?
Every leader worries about developing someone who then leaves. Almost nobody worries about the far more common outcome.
I run healthcare staffing organisations, which means I am in the business of people moving.
Movement is the product. Clinicians take assignments, finish them, and go somewhere else. My entire industry exists because people do not stay in one building for forty years any more.
And I still have to build teams that stay.
That tension has made me think about development differently than I would have otherwise, because I cannot pretend the exit does not exist. In my world it is not a risk. It is a certainty on a timeline.
So when a leader tells me they are hesitant to invest in someone because that person might leave, I understand the instinct completely. I just think it is the wrong thing to be frightened of.
The question people ask, and the better one
The worry is always phrased the same way. What if I train them and they leave?
Fair enough. But turn it over.
What if you do not train them and they stay?
Now picture that team in three years. Same people, same capability, doing the same work at the same level while everything around them has moved. Nobody left, and nobody got better either. That is not a stable team. That is a slowly obsolescing one, and it is a much more likely outcome than the one that keeps leaders up at night.
The old line is still the right one. Train them well enough that they could leave. Treat them well enough that they do not want to.
People do not always leave
because they dislike it here.
They leave because they cannot
see where they are going.
The thing that actually drives them out
Here is what I have watched happen more times than I can count, and it is rarely dramatic.
Somebody does not dislike where they are. They just cannot see where they are going. And once a person cannot picture a future for themselves inside your organisation, they eventually start picturing one somewhere else.
That is not disloyalty. It is imagination doing what imagination does when you leave it nothing to work with.
Which makes growth a retention strategy rather than a nice extra. If they are not growing, they are eventually going.
LinkedIn’s Workplace Learning Report found that 94 percent of employees say they would stay at a company longer if it invested in helping them learn. Not a raise. Learning.
The Work Institute’s retention research found roughly 37 percent of people who quit cited a lack of career development opportunity as the reason.
And LinkedIn’s data shows employees who feel their skills are not being used in their current role are around ten times more likely to be looking for another job than those who feel they are.
LinkedIn put the mechanism in one sentence that is hard to improve on. When employees do not move ahead, they leave and take their skills elsewhere.
Read those together and the maths gets uncomfortable. The thing leaders withhold to prevent departures is one of the main reasons departures happen.
Development is a message before it is a skill
What I underestimated for years is that the training itself is not the main event.
When you invest in someone you are telling them three things, and they hear all of them clearly.
We see more in you than what you are currently doing. You have a future here. We are willing to put money and time into who you are becoming, not just what you produce this quarter.
People stay longer in places where they believe they are becoming more valuable. That belief is the product. The skill is almost a side effect.
And it is worth being honest that the return is not only capability. It is loyalty, confidence, and pride, which is a considerably better list than most line items deliver.
The trait I watch for
When I am assessing someone, the thing I pay most attention to is not talent or experience. It is whether they are open to learning.
Talent matters and experience matters. But if somebody is not genuinely open to learning, their growth flattens out at some point and nothing you do fixes it.
There are three mindsets that block it, and they need completely different responses from you.
The cynic
Does not care enough to learn. They have decided the organisation is not worth their investment, usually because of something real that happened. What they need first is accountability, and honestly, an answer to whatever created the cynicism.
The fearful
Cares a great deal, and is too frightened to try. This is the most common and the most recoverable. They do not need more information. They need confidence, and usually a first attempt that is small enough to survive.
The know-it-all
Cannot learn because they have already concluded there is nothing left to learn. This one needs humility, and it is the hardest to reach, because everything you offer gets filed as unnecessary before it lands.
The white belt
There is a story about Kano Jigoro, who founded judo, that I keep coming back to.
Near the end of his life he asked to be buried in a white belt. Not the black belt he had earned and by every measure deserved. A white belt, which is what a beginner wears.
After everything he had built and everything he had mastered, he still thought of himself as a student.
That is the mindset worth hiring for and worth modelling. The best learners never stop being beginners at something, and a leader who has visibly stopped learning gives everyone underneath them permission to stop as well.
Development that does not need a budget line
- Have a future conversation. Not a performance review, not a correction. A conversation about where this could go. What skill could they build, what would stretch them, what belief do they need from you. Most people stay longer simply because somebody helped them see what was possible.
- Give the work before the title. Scope is development and it is free. Hand somebody a piece of the thing they are not quite ready for and stay close enough to catch it.
- Name what you see. If you think somebody could run a department in four years, say so out loud. People cannot aim at a future nobody has described to them.
- Develop the ones you expect to lose. Especially those. A person who leaves well, having grown here, becomes the most credible recruiter you will ever have, and the industry is smaller than anyone thinks.
What I have come round to
Being in an industry built on movement has taken most of the fear out of this for me.
People leave. That is the actual baseline, whatever your handbook implies. The only real choice is what happened to them while they were with you, and whether they got better or just got older.
The leaders I admire most have alumni. People who moved on, did well, and still say the thing they say about that manager. That is not a failure of retention. It is the most durable version of a reputation there is, and it fills roles for you for years afterwards.
Hoarding talent gets you one round of it. Building people gets you a pipeline.
The fear is developing someone who then leaves. The far more likely outcome is not developing them and having them stay, which produces a team that is stable and slowly falling behind. Ninety-four percent of employees say they would stay longer somewhere that invested in their learning, and about a third of people who quit cite lack of development as the reason. The thing leaders withhold to prevent departures is one of the main causes of them.
Keynotes and
workshops.
Chris speaks to companies, associations, and healthcare organizations on ownership, developing people, and building teams nobody wants to leave. Every program is built around your audience and your goals.
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