When New Hires Leave, What Should Leaders Be Asking?

Years ago, I came across a story about Google that has stuck with me. Google found that sending managers a simple email with a new-hire checklist helped new employees become effective 25% faster. What was on this magical checklist? Nothing particularly revolutionary. Managers were reminded to discuss roles and responsibilities, connect the new employee with a peer buddy, help them build their network, schedule regular check-ins, and encourage open dialogue.

In other words, many of the things we would expect a good leader to do. The research was shared several years ago, but the leadership lesson may be even more relevant today, especially as organizations continue to invest significant time and money recruiting people only to lose some of them shortly after they arrive.

Onboarding Is More Than Orientation

Too often, organizations treat onboarding as an HR function. Complete your paperwork. Watch the required videos. Learn how to access the systems. Read the handbook. Meet a few people. Maybe attend an orientation. Check, check, check.

But that’s orientation. It isn’t necessarily onboarding. True onboarding is the process of helping someone understand not only what they are supposed to do, but also how to be successful within the organization.

Gallup has reported that employees whose managers actively participate in onboarding are 3.4 times as likely to describe their onboarding as successful. Depending on the complexity of the role, it can also take approximately 12 months for an employee to reach their full performance potential. That makes me wonder why organizations sometimes expect a new employee to be fully acclimated within a few weeks.

Organizations Have a Responsibility, Too

When a new hire doesn’t work out, it’s easy to conclude that they weren’t a good fit, couldn’t keep up, or weren’t what the organization expected. Sometimes that assessment may be accurate, but leadership requires enough self-awareness to examine the other side of the equation as well.

Before deciding the employee was the problem, organizations should ask whether expectations were clear, training was adequate, managers were consistently involved, meaningful feedback was provided, and employees had a psychologically safe place to ask questions. They should also consider whether the job the employee actually encountered resembled the job they were recruited to perform.

Those questions aren’t about lowering performance expectations. They’re about making sure the organization has fulfilled its responsibility before deciding that an employee cannot fulfill theirs.

Leader Development and Leadership Development Are Not the Same Thing

One concept I have been studying is the distinction between leader development and leadership development. I think it is especially relevant to this conversation because organizations often invest in the first while assuming they have addressed the second.

Leader development focuses primarily on the individual. We develop a manager’s emotional intelligence, self-awareness, communication skills, coaching ability, conflict-management skills, and other individual capabilities. Assessments, training, executive coaching, mentoring, and individual development plans can all contribute to developing a better leader.

Leadership development is broader. It looks at leadership as something that happens within relationships and across an organizational system. It asks whether people can build trust, collaborate across boundaries, have difficult conversations, share information, challenge ideas, learn from one another, and work toward a common purpose.

That distinction matters because sending a struggling manager to a leadership class may develop the individual without changing the environment in which that person is expected to lead. If organizational norms reward the wrong behaviors, senior leaders fail to model expectations, employees don’t feel safe speaking up, or systems make collaboration unnecessarily difficult, individual development alone probably won’t solve the problem.

Organizations need both. We should develop capable individual leaders while also creating organizational conditions that allow effective leadership to happen.

Turnover Is Data

Turnover happens for many reasons. People retire, relocate, pursue higher compensation, change careers, find opportunities that better align with their goals, or simply decide a position isn’t right for them. One departure doesn’t necessarily tell us very much, which is why I am cautious about automatically attributing turnover to a manager.

Patterns, however, deserve attention. If multiple employees continue leaving the same department, team, or leader, particularly within relatively short periods, leaders should become curious rather than defensive.

Look at the data. Review exit interviews, conduct stay interviews, examine engagement results, pay attention to internal transfers, look at tenure patterns, and talk to employees. Most importantly, look for themes instead of treating every departure as an isolated event.

High turnover doesn’t automatically mean there is a leadership problem. Repeated, concentrated turnover can be a signal that there is something worth investigating.

What Happens When the Pattern Points Toward a Leader?

This is where organizations sometimes struggle because leadership development cannot mean development without accountability. If the evidence suggests that a leader’s behavior is contributing to turnover, disengagement, conflict, or an unhealthy team environment, ignoring the pattern doesn’t make it disappear.

The first option is to address it. Give the leader clear and specific feedback, establish behavioral expectations, provide coaching and development, identify measurable changes, and follow up. Hard feedback can be uncomfortable, but avoiding it isn’t helpful to the leader, the employees, or the organization.

The second option is essentially to do nothing. The organization can continue replacing employees, onboarding new people, and hoping the next hire works out differently. If the underlying conditions remain the same, however, it shouldn’t be surprising when the results remain the same.

Finally, there may be circumstances in which a leader has received clear expectations, feedback, coaching, development, and a reasonable opportunity to change, but the behavior continues. At that point, the organization may need to decide whether that person should continue leading people. Accountability is part of leadership development, too.

There Is a Cost to Getting This Wrong

Replacing employees isn’t inexpensive, although estimates vary considerably depending on the role and how replacement costs are calculated. SHRM’s 2025 benchmarking research reported an average cost per hire of $5,475 for nonexecutive positions and $35,879 for executives. Gallup has estimated that replacement costs can reach approximately 40% of salary for frontline employees, 80% for technical professionals, and as much as 200% for managers and leaders.

The financial numbers tell only part of the story. Organizations also lose institutional knowledge and productivity, while remaining employees absorb additional work and spend time training replacements. Customers may experience disruption, team relationships have to be rebuilt, and high performers may begin questioning whether they want to stay.

Eventually, repeated turnover can become part of an organization’s reputation. Recruiting another employee doesn’t fix the underlying problem if the employee is being brought back into the same experience that contributed to the previous person’s departure.

Leadership Requires Looking in the Mirror

Organizations should absolutely hold employees accountable for their performance, and employees have a responsibility to learn, communicate, seek feedback, and meet reasonable expectations. Organizations and their leaders have responsibilities in that relationship as well.

Effective onboarding is one of the first opportunities to demonstrate those responsibilities. Give people clear expectations, train them, check in with them, provide honest feedback, create space for questions, help them build relationships, and pay attention when something isn’t working. Then continue those behaviors long after the onboarding checklist has been completed.

When turnover starts becoming a pattern, instead of immediately asking what’s wrong with the people being hired, organizations should also be willing to examine the experience they are creating. Sometimes the answer will confirm that the organization and leader did everything reasonably expected of them, and sometimes the reflection will reveal an opportunity to do better. Strong leadership requires the willingness to find out.

How Lifelong Learning Lens Can Help

This is the kind of work I support through Lifelong Learning Lens. Leadership challenges are rarely solved by offering another training class without first understanding what is actually happening within the organization.

I work with organizations to strengthen both leader development and leadership development. That can include leadership assessments and coaching, emotional intelligence and self-awareness development, manager training, onboarding and leadership-development strategy, team effectiveness, psychological safety, employee engagement, and facilitated conversations that help organizations identify where leadership practices and the employee experience may not be aligned.

Sometimes the solution is developing an individual leader. Sometimes it is strengthening the relationships within a team. Other times, the systems, expectations, or organizational culture need attention. The important part is diagnosing the need before prescribing the solution.

Lifelong Learning Lens helps organizations develop better leaders, build stronger teams, and create healthier workplaces.