Do you feel like the problem has gone away or gotten better, or is it just that it got boring to talk about in the media and so they've moved on?

Well, you're really asking two different things.

So let's start with engagement because that's another thing.

And I can send you this graph, but it's done by Gallup polling employee engagement.

They've got a splash pad, a splash page for that.

And they've got a graph that shows engagement over the last like 30 or 40 years.

Okay.

And I'm sure both bosses equally throw around the word integrity.

So tell us a little bit about your background and how you got into talking about turnover and writing books about it and speaking all about it.

Okay.

So I'm actually a finance guy and I got a finance degree from the University of Texas and MBA from A&M.

And I was working for an industrial service company, a publicly held industrial service company down in Houston.

I was one of those Texans that never was going to live in Houston.

I ended up there for 20 years.

But I was working in the finance department of this company, and I was kind of doing some special projects for the CEO, and we'd gotten some good results and all that kind of thing.

If you don't mind sharing, what were the HR rules? I think I know, but what were the HR rules that you were supposedly breaking?

Different people, different roles, different expectations, right?

Right.

And, and so one of the things I talk a lot about in regard to compensation and all that is again, I'm against time served.

That has nothing to do with anything.

It's just artificial dates being thrown around, has nothing to do with the goals of the company.

And just about every company I've ever worked for had a development program in place.

And okay, so we're gonna take in this person who just graduated from an accounting degree, and we want them to be a senior partner one day.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So will you please share with our audience your leadership story and why you choose to do what you're doing today.

So I graduated from the University of Texas with a finance degree.

I've always been a numbers kind of guy.

I like numbers.

One plus one equals two every time.

You can kind of trust on them.

And I then got an MBA from A&M.

skill

And so I'd love to hear what you've seen works and maybe doesn't work in terms of creating a really... culturally aligned, high-performing environment within a company?

So there's a couple of stories that I think about.

And one of them involved a situation, again, kind of back to the toxic employee.

They came up with an answer to that problem.

And he was a lawyer for a large company.

And what they literally did was they dismissed him from the company and They bought him an office up in the tower.

We were in a large corporate tower and his one and only client was us.

And so I'm curious from your perspective, from the HR perspective and the organization as a whole, how can we best leverage AI? Or is it becoming more of a distraction and hurting us in terms of finding the right people? Is there a balance here in using it?

Now, the question is, how are those issues actually connected?

So when the CEO first asked me what did I think was wrong within the company and what was going wrong in HR, As I said, number one, we're losing senior technicians like they're going out of style.

And it takes us a long time to build one of those guys.

The second problem is we were not having a good opportunity to staff those people because nobody wants to go work for a high turnover company.

If you're known as a high turnover company, that's one of the reasons why you're not getting a lot of the good resumes from the good people.

And that's another thing that I say is the better the person, the better employees do not want to work for a high turnover company.

And what happens is if you're losing your best people and you're not being able to replace them, then what happens is your skills gap goes through the roof.

Now, why do you challenge that idea? And what becomes possible when leaders stop treating turnover as injustice?

And I'd gone to work for a company in

Houston.

And I'd done a couple of things for my CEO, and he was really happy with the results.

And one day he asked me to have a cup of coffee.

And I was so young at that time, I thought we were just having a cup of coffee.

And he said, what do you think is the biggest problem we have right now? I said, well, number one, we're losing senior technicians like they're going out of style.

And they were the backbone of our company.

have an office in Dallas.

Tell us about it.

So I'm actually a finance guy, and I graduated from the University of Texas.

I like numbers because one plus one equals two every time.

People are not that way.

And I ended up working for an industrial service company in Houston.

I'd done a couple of projects for the CEO.

He was happy.

They

Okay.

Do I agree with some of the things that HR says about leadership, that they see us wrong, et cetera, et cetera? And at the same time, I think that part of it, too, is that, in my humble opinion— One of the issues is that needs to hold HR accountable for turnover.

Turnover is your first thing you have to work on.

If you make turnover better, it makes everything else better, okay? So it's easier to recruit if you're losing less people, right? So if you cut your turnover by 50%, then you're recruiting half as much and that all of a sudden that makes it a lot easier, okay? And so that's the first thing that I think that leadership should hold HR accountable to the fact that what are you doing about turnover? And again, I'm saying in my experience, That a good half of the turnover is not being caused by leadership.

It's being called by processes and things that HR does have control over.

OK, and let me give you a good example, because this is really important.

And this is one of those things that I'm getting a lot of pushback on LinkedIn about this as I push this idea that turnover has to be job one.

Okay.

So why do you think that's so important to have your to value your employer identity, let's say, or to to understand what you what it is?

Yeah.

When you're recruiting people and all that, generally they know nothing about your company other than maybe if they've looked at the website or something like that, and they don't really understand who you are and what you're doing.

The problem I run into is, again, when I walk in the door and I ask the CEO, why do people work here? Why do they work here versus all the other places they could work in this area? And it's amazing how many times that the CEO cannot do a very good job of detailing that quickly.

And in a good, concise way.

And so one of the things that I do and what I suggest people do, I mean, my book is based on the idea of the process that I use to get the results that I get.

And one of the things is I go and ask the employees, what are the five reasons why you come work here? Why are you working here versus somewhere else? Now, you take this health care organization I work for currently.

So what is it and why is it so powerful for the employee retention?

What they don't like is feeling like you're not treating me very well and you think that I can be bought for pizza.

Right.

So I've got a great I got a great story if you want to hear it.

And that is back for our technicians in the first company.

We had a bunch of work, refineries work on a six to four time schedule.

And then everybody's kicked out of the plant.

But that doesn't mean there's not still work being done, emergency work.

We'll have dinner a little bit

So tell me a little bit more about that from your perspective on what are those drivers and how did you address that in trying to solve this problem that you were facing?

The biggest issue we had was not actually how much they were being paid, but how they were being paid.

For instance, I believe most companies out there pay on what I call time served.

Okay, so you're here for six months.

We're going to evaluate you and give you a pay raise and all that kind of thing.

What I talk about is what's called a value path.

And what we had in that situation, and it works really well, especially as you're developing people, these guys were coming in, they had a mechanical aptitude, but they knew really nothing else about what we did.

Tell me a little bit about the book itself and what are the core principles?