People Leave Managers Not Companies. Really?

People Leave Managers Not Companies. This is the statement that Marcus B is making in the book; ‘first, break all the rules’. This is also the philosophy that Gallup is pushing around. This statement is being applauded, quoted and communicated by many HR professionals. This is just another management jargon, one that is very convenient for the HR team in any organization. Bring on any ‘employee friendly’ policy, reorg experiments, compensation confusions and layer upon layer of abstractions in the HR processes and when attrition increases can blame (or at least share the blame) the managers. ‘Managers’ is a faceless entity when it is abstracted at the organization level, so you are blaming a faceless, generic group, rather than being specific and taking the bottom-line for the many failed initiatives -rather convenient isn't it?

This statement could possibly (only ever so slightly) be true if the lower requirements as indicated by the Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs get fulfilled. This maturity can only come in a developed job market where the national GDP is stable and salary for similar roles are fairly equal across organizations. In a developing country; where the needs at the lower levels of the pyramid are unfulfilled, the National GDP keeps fluctuating, salary levels uneven across organizations for similar roles, the reasons for people to leave an organization would be salary, position and location and in an organization of mostly freshers it could be even higher studies. Moreover the culture across these markets are radically different, people needs are very different.

Yes, it is a tough challenge if you get a really bad manager who is unreasonable, bad mouthed or unconcerned about the team and primarily after his own visibility. It is very frustrating to compete with your own manager. The only option would be to quit and move on. But concluding bad managers as the only or primary reason for people quitting organization is pushing the generalization a bit too far. It is sheer desperation and passing on the buck to faceless group of people or merely a matter of convenience.

Truth is, manager is just another cog in the organization wheel; larger the wheel (organization) smaller the cog (manager) becomes. With many standardized and normalization processes the role of a manager is becoming smaller and smaller; one has to just feed in the list and rest taken care by the xls (or an application if your organization has mature people practices :-)).

PS: Abraham Maslow's book ‘Motivation and Personality’, published in 1954 introduced the Hierarchy of Needs, which states that Human motivation moves up a pyramid as each level gets fulfilled and this is a concept that every MBA student is very much familiar with and used for various subjects, like psychology, HR, marketing, etc.