In a time when unemployment in stubbornly high (counting those that left the labor market) and job prospects are slim, you might think that employees would be less likely to quit their jobs. If you thought that, like I did, you’d be wrong. In fact, according to Forbes and the BLS, the number of people quitting their jobs is higher now than at any point in the last 4 years.
In March, 2.475 million American quit their jobs. This has been steadily increasing recently from a low in late 2009 (just after the financial collapse finally bottomed out) from a monthly rate of 1.7 million quits per month.
Just think about that for a second. Even in the darkest days in the aftermath of the biggest financial meltdown since the Great Depression, 1.7 million Americans each month were willing to tell their bosses to “take this job and shove it.”
This begs the question, “Why are so many people quitting their jobs?” If you do a quick search, you’ll see a plethora of articles outlining the top reasons people quit. You’ll likely notice that among all of the top reasons, almost none of them are related to the company or job itself. Employees are quitting at such staggering rates, even with slim job prospects, because of the leadership (or lack thereof) in the company.
People don’t quit their job; they quit their boss.
What is the lack of leadership costing employers? According to studies on employee turnover, the average cost to replace a single employee is approximately 20% of that worker’s salary. Losing just one employee with a $40,000/yr salary (U.S. median income), will cost an employer $8,000 to find, hire, and train a replacement. In the end, it’s not leadership development that’s expensive, but leadership deficiency.
Many companies seem to think that providing continuing education centered on technical aspects of the job equates to leadership development. What many companies need to understand is that, while job specific proficiency is critical, it’s undermined by poor leadership and interpersonal skills.
This is where a specific, ongoing leadership development program comes in. Note that I mentioned ongoing. One-off seminars and retreats do not get the job done. Understanding leadership vs. management and skills such as how to cast a vision and get buy-in, conflict resolution, public speaking, change management, etc. all require ongoing training and development. They are not developed in a weekend at a conference or hanging from ropes.
With this understanding, LIFE Leadership put together a 6-month corporate leadership education program based off the Inc. Magazine internationally recognized leadership expertise of the company’s founders, Orrin Woodward and Chris Brady. The program is comprised of (4) audios and (1) book per month and covers a variety of topics ranging from interpersonal skills to the visionary process and building social capital. As for pricing, LIFE Leadership decided to undercut the established leadership development market by an order of magnitude. Costing only $50 per month, per employee with a 30-day money-back guarantee on all of their products, they’re aiming right at the jugular of the leadership development industry behemoths like John Maxwell and Tony Robbins. To be sure, LIFE Leadership is gobbling up market share. In just the first two years of business they put up over $120 million dollars in sales. I expect that they’ll continue to disrupt the marketplace and put up impressive numbers as they sign on corporate customers with their new program. Time will tell if my prediction is correct.
If you want to dig into more about their corporate leadership series, see below for one of their sales fliers. Sale of the LIFE Leadership program is not available to the general public on their website. If you want to learn more, leave a comment with your contact information (I won’t post it publicly) and we can chat.
God Bless,
Clint Fix