For Effective Leadership, Never Make Assumptions About Your Team
Why Millennial Women Leave Their Jobs [it’s not what you think]
Effective leadership means always asking and never assuming when it comes to your team’s satisfaction levels at work. But you’d be surprised to learn that leaders around the world have it all wrong when it comes to understanding why women are leaving their companies. They haven’t asked…only assumed the reasons.
This expert on Millennials has some advice…
Leading Millennial expert Christie Hunter Arscott cites a recent global ICEDR study that revealed some pretty surprising facts about why Millennial women leave their jobs. It makes clear that more leaders need to start asking questions when their employees leave for other jobs- it may give them insight on how to retain future employees, especially women in their 30s.
Leaders are making the wrong assumptions.
The global study by ICEDR tells us that leaders are making a mistake. Most believe that, when a woman in her thirties leaves her job, it’s because she is planning to have kids or because she’s trying to find a better work-life balance.
But when men leave, they believe, it’s for a higher-paying job.
However, their assumptions for women are simply not true for the most part.
What the study found was that, contrary to what leaders believed, the majority of Millennial women leave jobs because of pay. Not only that, but they were actually more likely to leave for that reason than men!
What this means for effective leadership: communication is key, as always!
So if the research is telling us that women place a high degree of importance on pay, and that they leave their jobs for very much the same reasons as men, what does this mean for effective leadership?
For starters, it means leaders should stop making assumptions about their employees and start communicating instead! Speaking with women in particular about why they leave (or want to leave) will help leaders develop strategies for retaining them in the future.
Secondly, although talented women do value life-work balance and often leave to raise families, motherhood is not the main reason that Millennial women leave their jobs. Since the reasons men and women leave jobs are very similar, perhaps with some leadership strategies, gender issues don’t need a seat at table.
The takeaway.
Leaders should focus on priorities that encourage their employees to stay with their company…these include clear communication, opportunity for development, and of course: good pay. Making assumptions about why their team members are dissatisfied leads to the wrong conclusions and sometimes even ill-advised organizational strategies. Once again, it all boils down to good communication…for effective leadership, you can’t survive without it.
