The War of Attrition
For my entire professional life I have both witnessed and experienced the constant exchange of blows between leaders and those they lead. Employers pressure employees to diminish their personal value in order to provide the company with more value. Employees intentionally sabotage teams, organizations, and processes in retaliation for their perceived mistreatment. Employers further constrict and control to regulate the negative effects their own people can have on their business, effectively treating their people with further distrust, disrespect, and disdain. Employees then find more creative ways of striking back, or they simply jump ship leaving the organization with extensive turnover cost and a gap in the processes required to deliver their value proposition.
This is the war of attrition that has been waged for decades, even centuries. Each side fighting for control of the battlegrounds otherwise known to us as offices, hospitals, factory lines, warehouses, construction sites, or any other place of work torn by a deteriorated relationship between leaders and the led. Each act of attrition enacted to reduce the strength of the other side in hopes of getting what they desire. With such consistent affliction, as is experienced in workplaces today, it is no wonder so many spend most of their workday discontent and wishing for greener pastures.
The root of this prolonged conflict? One could easily point to the human element. As great and wonderful as this element can be, it can also be equally detrimental and destructive. It is self-destructive even. It is at the heart of both sides of the battlefield and is what drives the engines of war used to wage such pointless conflict. Those engines being our decisions, behaviors, and habits.
The cause of this war? It is my belief that the cause of the war is a miscommunication between parties about what each really wants, combined with a failure to reach a point of mutual understanding, trust, and respect between parties. Employers often fail to communicate what they really desire out of a work force and instead turn to manipulative tactics to control the course of actions demonstrated by employees to meet the organization’s ends. Employees fail to clearly communicate what they really want out of a career and instead turn to deliberate insubordination and disengagement when they don’t get it.
This war of attrition between leaders and the led, this deteriorated relationship between these two forces, is the number one cause for lackluster results, poor engagement, high turnover, and a general poor quality of life among vast numbers of employees and employers alike. It is the number one contributor to what holds back organizations and individuals from reaching their greatest potential. The reality though, is that employees still depend on employers and the jobs they offer to satisfy many of their basic human needs. On the other side of the coin, employers still require resources to provide their value proposition to customers, one of those valuable resources being their people.
An organization’s workforce, its people, is arguably its most valuable resource. It is a resource organizations are constantly competing for. Organizations need talented individuals to cooperate in the same direction to deliver the organization’s committed value proposition to the customer. However, it’s not enough to simply have that raw resource. Like any other raw material, it is the way a company is able to forge that material into a tool, or finished product, that determines the true value of that raw resource. And it is difficult to turn a resource into a useful tool when you are constantly at odds with it.
So, how do you forge the human element into a tool to support your organization’s delivery of value to its customers? How do we overcome the driving factors of the human element contributing to the war of attrition? By its very nature, the human element is full of flaws, bias and fallacy, and self-serving motivations. It is also creative, compassionate, courageous, resilient, and desires to contribute to something greater than its individual self. How do you get the most value out of this human element without the pitfalls it comes with? How do you end the war of attrition that has been holding that human element in a constant state of duress for years so that it can thrive and elevate your organization rather than anchor it down?
Management practices of old, derived from industrialist philosophy, were an attempt to manipulate a workforce into a machine that simply needed to be monitored, controlled, and occasionally maintained. The idea was to stomp out the negative aspects of the human element through tight management processes and surveillance. Essentially manage people like machines, because machines are easy to manage, and management is easier than leadership. But we aren’t machines, and we know it. The average modern worker in the US is far more educated, aware, and powerful than the average worker of the early 20th century when these management practices were developed. How do you manage a machine that has transcended to a self-aware, autonomous being that has discovered free will? You don’t. Not without friction and push back that undermine the outcomes you hope to attain. What you get is further conflict.
In this modern world we live in, in the wake of the 4th great Industrial Revolution, many organizations seek to solve this dilemma by replacing as much of the human element their AI tools and machines will allow them to. I can’t really blame them though. If you can achieve the same reliable results, or even more so at times, from automated software and hardware at a lower cost, then it makes great business sense to do so. But even with these fascinating tools of the modern age, most organizations cannot deliver their value proposition, or operate for that matter, without at least some presence of this human element; that human element that won’t be so easily managed as the new automated tools adopted by industry.
As a growing number of employees recognize their collective power, companies are starting to experience the repercussions of their persistent disregard for the human element and the increasing influence of an evolving workforce. Instead, many organizations still cling to their bureaucratic processes and ineffective management practices they have grown so comfortable with. Bureaucracy is a method to protect from incompetence, but it easily becomes what protects the incompetent from the effective. The bureaucratic structures and processes developed over the last hundred or more years to manage people were developed to protect the organization from incompetent people, but have often served only to protect incompetent leaders from accountability for their responsibilities as leaders. When bureaucracy is used to protect people from accountability, it ceases to be an effective tool of industry.
It is because of these age-old management practices and bureaucratic processes, combined with an evolving workforce, that companies in every industry are experiencing difficulty keeping their workforce engaged and keeping them from leaving for better opportunities. The Great Resignation of 2020-2021 in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic is a great example of the general workforce exercising their combined power to apply pressure on employers to make a change. It was a large-scale attack on employers who had held leverage in this war of attrition for so very long. When employees realized they had power, they leveraged that power to send a message to employers; “we are on the short end of an unfair exchange, and we have been taken advantage of and manipulated for far too long. We're out.”
The Great Resignation took many employers by surprise, and many even seemed to be clueless as to why they were losing employees. Suddenly there was a ferocious outcry of employers with understaffed organizations pointing blame at their workforce, or lack thereof, for all of their problems. Some shifted blame to the rise of remote work and the desire of their people to implement work from home or hybrid schedules. Some chose to believe that “people just don’t want to work anymore.” For all the directions blame had been cast, all were a projection of blame away from the real source of the problem: leadership.
Though there are some valid points to be made to cast blame outside of leadership, when you look at the most common reasons people leave their jobs and what is commonly considered most important to employees, leadership is at the root of each. The expression “people don’t leave companies, they leave managers” could not be more true. It simply brings us back to the deteriorated relationship between leaders and the led. When the relationship falters to a certain point, people leave.
So why do employees leave their job? In an article titled “6 Reasons Your Employees Will Leave Their Jobs in 2025,” author Marcel Schwantes gives us some clues as to how to answer this question. The 6 Reasons suggested in this article are as follows: their work is boring, they’re burning out, they’re not learning, their workplace is toxic, they seek more flexibility, and/or they don’t get along with their boss. Notice that pay is not among the list. Though pay has always been a large factor for employees to leave, it is also not uncommon for people to leave a higher paying job for a lower paying job that better satisfies other employee needs as suggested in Schwantes’ article.
I would argue that employees tend not to search for a new job until they begin to be dissatisfied with the company or leadership they work for. Them finding a position that pays more is just an easy excuse to justify the leap they contemplated already when other needs were not satisfied. In other words, there is a problem with leadership followed by a search for something that better satisfies the needs of the employee, and once a better opportunity arises the employee makes the leap.
Though voluntary turnover rates have fallen significantly since The Great Resignation, they are still high overall with the US average at around 13%, and still significantly high in certain industries and job fields such as professional services, healthcare, construction, and sales. According to some, we may see yet another spike in attrition even this year (2025). In a Forbes article by Roberta Matuson, the author refers to a survey by ResumeTemplates.com stating that 56% of full-time employees in the U.S. want a new job in 2025, and 27% have already started searching. 1 in 3 plan to quit their current job next year, even if they don’t have one lined up.
On the other hand, the job market is tight. Tremendous layoffs both from government agencies and private industry have flooded the job market with job seekers, many of whom have to settle for positions they dislike just to keep bills paid. The trends in AI have led to many jobs being replaced by technology, contributing further to the vast numbers of resumes being submitted to recruiters. Poor economic conditions over the past several years have made employees more cautious about leaving positions even when they are deeply unsatisfied. And volatile conditions due to recent government regulations have made companies cautious about hiring. In fact, the call back to the office early this year was proven to be a ploy by many organizations to urge employees to quit to avoid layoffs. When the number of voluntary departures wasn’t as high as expected, many of these organizations turned to layoffs to reduce their workforce, and as a result their bottom line.
So, on one hand you have a lot of unhappy employees that want to find better opportunities, and on the other you have a tight job market with the balance of power leaning further back into the hands of employers. On the surface, a business owner or manager can wash their hands clean of the problem recognizing they have the power to behave how they wish with certainty that employees won’t leave because of the difficult conditions employees face in the job market. Wrong.
An employee with one foot out of the door is not an engaged employee, which means they are not going to provide the level of results you expect from your people. As Matuson points out, hanging onto these people gives them an opportunity to convince otherwise engaged employees to reconsider how they feel about your organization and its leadership. It is just another act of attrition that fuels the flames of war. Often times, these employees can be high performers, critical personnel in the organization and its operations, or managers at various levels of the organization. So, you have an individual you can’t afford to lose but also can’t afford to keep. What do you do?
My suggestion for finding the answers to the questions posed thus far is to look inward and upward. Many of the problems presented here, especially the war of attrition, are deeply rooted in the leadership of the organization. I’m not talking about front line supervisors and managers. Though much of the direct issues employees experience can be a result of the decisions and behaviors those front line managers display, it is up to the upper echelons of the organization to set the standards of management and leadership practices to be used in the organization and hold individuals accountable for their decisions and behaviors. At the end of the day, the higher you are in the organization, the more responsibility you are accountable for and the more important your influence is on the organization and its culture. Do you own your responsibilities? Do you use your position of influence for the betterment of the organization or to undermine its success?
So how do we harness the power of the human element and limit the effect its negative aspects have on the organization? First, we have to understand that motivation is driven internally. Behind every decision made and behavior engaged, is a motive. People do things for their own reasons. They are motivated by their own wants and needs. Their motives are reinforced by the outcomes they have experienced from prior decisions and behaviors. Though you can inspire people, you cannot motivate them. You can only create the conditions for them to activate their own internally driven motivation. You can also easily create the conditions that stifle their motivation.
In essence, you have to give your people a reason, a why, to join and stay with your organization. You have to provide them with the conditions to be motivated to engage with their work, their leaders, and with the organization’s culture.
Start by considering what your employees want. Simply put, people want the best job ever. Seth Godin, author of “The Song of Significance” conducted a survey in which he asked 10,000 people in 90 countries to describe the conditions at the best job they ever had. The top four results were overwhelmingly ahead of the rest:
I surprised myself with what I could accomplish
I could work independently
The team built something important
People treated me with respect.
Godin states: “Once their basic needs are met, workers are very clear about what they want from work. It’s not more stock options or a fancier office. It’s much more fundamental: agency and dignity.” (Godin, “The Song of Significance”, pg.13)
Godin makes the connection between work that matters and the satisfaction of our basic human desire to feel significant. He claims that it is work that matters and this sense of significance that motivates people to do the work that can’t be automated, mechanized, or outsourced.
If the goal of the organization is to attract and retain the best talent, then knowing what those talented individuals want gives you pretty clear direction on how to develop a “reason why” they should work with you. If you want to further harness the competitive advantage those talented people offer your organization, you have to create a strong culture based on exemplified leadership that keeps them engaged. It comes down to transitioning from the transactional leadership of the past to a transformational style of leadership that better aligns with the wants and needs of the people within the organization. Let’s take a deeper look into these characteristics of a job people want.
1. I surprised myself with what I could accomplish
Employees need the freedom to grow, but with the guidance of a mentor or a coach. That is not to say you need to hold their hand and burn sage throughout the office, but they need to be challenged within the constraints of a respectful relationship. They need to be offered the freedom of agency to expand to their greatest potential without constraints of their boss’s ego.
This means that resources need to be allocated toward the development and growth of employees and their skillsets. Richard Branson famously stated “Train people well enough so they can leave, treat them well enough so they don’t want to.” Help your people grow. Give them the tools they need to accomplish more than they ever thought they could. Forge them into a highly valuable resource, but treat them so well that they can’t imagine working for someone else.
2. I could work independently
Working independently isn’t just an introverted desire by individuals with poor social skills. Some people simply work best on their own. Working independently is really about the human desire for autonomy. On a basic level, humans thrive when balanced between autonomy and connection. Humans seek connection, but they also desire free will. As Godin puts it, people want agency, not to be controlled. Agency, however, is inconvenient for managers who seek to control rather than guide their people to great outcomes.
Working independently can also be about having the agency to decide for themselves the environment they work best in, within reason. Flexibility is becoming increasingly important in conversations related to what employees want, with the lack thereof as a top reason why employees quit their jobs. Managers consistently rob employees of the agency to choose their environments even when the job can be done from just about anywhere, because it is easier for them to manage people in the office than at home.
Working independently can be about employees being treated with dignity by managers who trust them to do their jobs rather than being stifled by constant surveillance and micro-management practices produced by tyrants obsessed with control. If you can’t trust your employees to do their job, it is more likely a reflection of your inability to train them and hold them accountable to standards than their inability or refusal to actually do the job right.
3. The team built something important
Godin refers to peoples’ need to feel significance in their lives, and particularly with their work. People want to feel like the work they do matters. When roughly 50% of the waking hours of your life are spent working, you want to feel that the value of time and effort is greater than just a paycheck that may or may not be sufficient to provide a comfortable life outside of work.
In the book “Selling With Noble Purpose” author Lisa McLeod argues that the best sales professionals with the greatest performance within the organization achieve this only by truly believing in what they do. They truly believe their product serves a greater purpose than just getting the rep a sales commission. Because of my sales experience I can confirm the sense of significance from seeing the greater purpose behind the sales I made. The work feels significant, and so I felt a greater sense of fulfillment from the personal resources I had to spend to do the job. This perception of a fair exchange of value and fulfillment from the time and effort spent on the job is a powerful contributor to employee satisfaction and engagement.
Help your employees find the greater purpose to their work. It helps if your purpose as a business owner or manager is greater than just seeing positive numbers on a spreadsheet. What value does your organization offer the world? Help your employees see how their contribution to the organization contributes to that greater purpose.
4. People treated me with respect.
Respect is closely related to dignity. You don’t get dignity without respect, both self-respect and being treated with respect by others. Dignity is like the armor we wear around our identity. It’s the force that enforces boundaries and respect. The problem is when you force employees into a situation where they have to accept disrespect, which is a huge blow to that armor, they lose dignity and pride in themselves. You essentially diminish the person and their identity. How do you expect your people to perform at their highest level if you consistently force them to settle for a lesser version of themselves?
The common scenario I have experienced myself and have heard from so many others is that employers and managers demand respect but so often fail to reciprocate. For many that do reciprocate, they expect the respect from employees to come first. It is the leader’s responsibility to set the example. It is really as simple as the golden rule: treat others the way you wish to be treated. If you wish for your employees to respect your boundaries and your sense of dignity and pride, then it is your responsibility to do so for your employees first. Then it is the leader that depends on reciprocation by enforcing accountability to the standards the leader sets with the culture they cultivate. That is one of the many responsibilities of a leadership role.
There are obviously other characteristics that contribute to this idea of the best job ever, but these four are a great place to start. The most important aspect of creating these conditions in your organization is cultivating a strong culture. Culture is the collective mindset of the individuals throughout the organization. It is the glue that brings people together and allows them to move toward shared goals. It drives success factors such as discipline, motivation, accountability and commitment throughout the team or organization.
Culture is what leads when no one is watching. You see, I find that the reason leaders turn to micro management is that they feel they can’t trust their employees to make the right decisions or engage the right behaviors without constant direct supervision. This is a clear sign that the team or organization has a weak culture. Micro-management is daunting for everyone, including the manager themself. No one particularly loves to micro-manage. It is the assurance of particular results that makes the practice attractive.
To remove the practice, you have to replace it with different controls. The same goes for overly bureaucratic processes. They have been put into place to accommodate incompetence and a lack of accountability of those involved with the process. You have to create a strong culture that encourages accountability and excellence at all levels. Creating this strong culture starts at the top.
The higher your position is within the structure of the organization, the more influence you have to steer that culture. As written in “Above The Line” by Urban Meyer, culture is experienced through behavior. More specifically, employees experience the culture of the team or organization through the behavior of their leader. This is the essence of leading by example. Set clear expectations and standards. Then hold yourself accountable to those standards before holding anyone else accountable. Be the example for the culture you want to cultivate for your team or organization. Behave above the line, and your people will follow.
I once worked for an organization that tried to develop its culture around the principles in “Extreme Ownership,” a popular book written by Jocko Willink and Leaf Babin of Echelon Front. I love the book. I learned many of those principles in leadership training when I was in the Navy. I believe in those concepts. The problem was that the leaders in the organization I was part of did not implement the principles into their culture correctly. Rather than practice the principles themselves to set the example for their subordinates, they preached the material (many did so without having read the book) down the chain of command. Their expectation was for the front line employees and managers to follow the concepts so they didn’t have to take ownership themselves.
This brings me to a very important topic. The culture you think you have created as a leader may not actually be the culture that is experienced and practiced within your team or organization. I have heard many leaders talk about their company culture as the greatest workplace culture on the planet, but when you talk to their employees you discover that is far from the truth. The “great” culture you preach means nothing if your people are not engaged in it. Nothing deters employee engagement with the desired culture more than them experiencing their leaders behave below the standards set by that culture they themselves created and attempt to enforce.
Once a strong culture is in place, leaders are more free to lead. When a leader is not overwhelmed by micro-management practices and bureaucratic processes, they have more time and effort to offer transformational leadership qualities that add further momentum to a strong culture. It is a way of leading people as people with dignity rather than as cogs in a machine with their personal value diminished to the results of the task they perform. This is not to say transactional leadership qualities have no place in an organization with a strong culture, but there is a balance to be had. That balance largely depends on the type of organization and the work it does. It is this balance of leadership that will contribute to peace between parties and mutual understanding, trust, and respect between leaders and the led.
It is transformational leadership that allows leaders to harness the power of the human element while also safeguarding the organization and its culture from the pitfalls that element comes with. It is this focus on mutual trust, respect, and understanding that transformational leadership encourages that will halt the grinding wheel of attrition that has deteriorated the important relationship between leaders and those they lead. Both parties are responsible for the war, but it is the responsibility of leaders to end it.
References:
Godin, S. (2023). The song of significance: A new manifesto for teams. Portfolio/Penguin.
Matuson, R. (2024, December 19). The great resignation 2025: Why workers are quitting again. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/robertamatuson/2024/12/16/great-resignation-2025-worker-exodus/
McLeod, L. E. (2020). Selling with noble purpose: How to drive revenue and do work that makes you proud. John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Meyer, U. (2015). Above the line. Penguin Publishing Group.
Schwantes, M. (2024, December 17). 6 good reasons your employees will leave their jobs in ... INC.com. https://www.inc.com/marcel-schwantes/6-good-reasons-why-your-employees-will-leave-their-jobs-in-2025/91066718