People Dynamics: The power of letting go

You know that feeling when you sense you’ve struck employee gold. 

You’ve found “the one.” The one that is going to solve all your problems...

And then you wake up one day and everything changes. This once rock star performer has lost their mojo.

They are now simply showing up to do a job. 

Before you know it, they are out the door and onto the next best thing. 

Like a set of dominoes, other colleagues question their own loyalty and they begin to fall over one by one. In today’s landscape, this scenario is all too common.

According to Randstad, almost 45% of employees have either changed jobs in the last year or planning to do so in the next 12 months.

As a self-aware leader, you may naturally start to question your part in this adverse change of fortunes. This is a problem often associated with attachment.

When we attach ourselves to our own expectations of people’s loyalty, we risk setting ourselves up for disappointment. 

People’s circumstances and how they respond to them are inherently unpredictable. This is precisely the time when you need to come back to your purpose:

Why are you here in the first place—what is your vision of success?

More often than not, we get what we focus on. We can manifest our deepest fears by worrying and stewing on them, willing them into place.

As much as it takes two to tango, it only takes one to shift a dynamic.

A good gauge of one's communication is seen in the response they get. If our communication as leaders is attachment focused and riddled with insecurity, this will be self-evident in the response we see from our people.

The social awareness and empathy to understand that there may likely be deeper forces at work will serve to remove our attachment to expectation and disappointment.

One of the best ways to achieve this is through heeding the words of Stephen Covey’s fifth habit of highly effective people: Seek first to understand, then to be understood.

It’s no secret that training, listening to, and recognising the people of our organisations are three critical elements to engagement, performance, and retention. Investing in these areas is mandatory if you want to compete in today’s talent shortage environment.

Before we even progress to the realm of professional environments, let us wind the clock back to early childhood. This is where we first yearn to be trained, heard and recognised for our efforts.

Unfortunately, there is an old business mindset “what if we train our people and they leave” that still rings true today within many organisations.

In our experience, investing in your people can only be good for business.

We are often unconsciously attached to the energy we feel when interacting with these “irreplaceable” people. This is where letting go becomes difficult.

Sometimes letting things go is an act of far greater power than defending or hanging on ~ Eckhart Tolle

*Will you drop your people attachments and exercise the power to let go?