When Lee Caraher’s employees leave her company for another, she sees it not as a failure but as an opportunity. She encourages her past employees to grow, she keeps in touch with them on social media, and she sends them gifts. Yes, that’s right, gifts. And, when the timing is right, she invites them to work for her again. Not surprisingly, many of them do.
A nationally-recognized communications expert and critically-acclaimed author, Lee Caraher is the president of the successful PR firm Double Forte. In her book, The Boomerang Principle, Caraher encourages business leaders to rethink and reapply their ideas of loyalty and employee retention before they get stuck in stale corporate traditions that yield negative outcomes.
“The idea that a company could hold a person for their whole lives is outrageous,” Caraher said in a podcast we did together.
“We should not be casting people out of our circles just because they are pursuing their own goals. Instead, if we can keep people loyal to us and connected to us for their whole careers, this is where companies and organizations will have an advantage.”
Rather than unrealistically expecting her employees to stick around until they retire, Caraher sees each employee as an investment, and when a good investment leaves to grow on someone else’s dime, she keeps her doors open so that she can get in on the return.
Caraher recognizes the clear and very real gap between Millennials and their Generation X and Baby Boomer colleagues. After conducting over 500 interviews with Millennials, Caraher found that they are at their best when they feel involved in the process of a company, they have personal guidance from their superiors, and they have opportunities to grow. This is in contrast to older generations believing that they must know everything about a single line of work, and that once they’re set in that line of work, they must remain loyal to it for the rest of their careers.
During our podcast, Caraher pointed out the impossibility of knowing everything and how know-it-all attitudes lead to complacency. Complacency, she warned, is “contagious, and it’s deathly.” Companies that want to stay relevant and successful need to provide employees with opportunities to grow and to feel like they’re contributing to something greater than their positions.
As someone on the upper end of the Millennial cut-off, I get this. I didn’t start my career thinking I’d be a podcaster, and I’m grateful to live in a time when I can make a new career idea a profitable reality. Like most Millennials, I also seek a healthy and happy work-life balance and fear the extremes of getting stale or becoming unnecessarily overwhelmed. When I mentioned this to Caraher, she argued that this desire is true for everybody, regardless of generation, and I agree with her. Staying relevant and fulfilled is, and always has been, an integral part of being human. “Being human is messy,” Caraher pointed out, and being human is finally being recognized in the workplace as an asset and not as a distraction.
This doesn’t mean that employers should cater to entitlement and laziness. As Caraher put it, “If a person doesn’t learn along, it’s not that company’s responsibility to drag them along.”
Caraher’s attitude about loyalty and how it’s not a transaction but a mindset is particularly inspiring. It’s also the key to bridging the gap between generations at work. “Loyalty is an act of doing something for somebody else when you’re not expecting a quid pro quo,” she said in our podcast. “To equate loyalty with staying with the company or organization is a false equivalency because I am paying you. While I pay, that’s a transaction. That’s not loyalty.”
For the modern workforce, culture trumps job security. A culture of open and clear communication with plenty of opportunities to contribute and grow will inspire employees to stay with a company longer and return to it later. Caraher emphasizes this in the first pages of her book: “What businesses small, medium, and large need today is a proportional growing army of former employees who remain advocates, consumers, and friends of our companies.” She also asserts that “organizations that allow and encourage former employees to return have a strategic advantage over those who don’t.”
Caraher’s final message to me and my listeners was clear and clearly the most important part of our time together: “Work doesn’t have to suck. It does require a change.”
This is only a glimpse of what I’ve learned from Lee Caraher and only the highlights of my podcast with her, Good Things Come Back Around. If you’d like to know more, then check it out. You can also listen to my first podcast with Caraher, during which she discusses her book Millennials and Management.
Learn more about Caraher on her website, and connect with her on Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn.