|
Assured Velocity
The Velocity Brief
Straight talk on transformation, technology, AI, data and people leadership for mid-market operators. No vendor spin. No consultant waffle. Just what actually works.
|
|
This Month
Why your best people are leaving - and it is not about the money.
|
|
In This Issue
|
01 The Hard Truth
02 The 6 Structural Retention Killers
03 Real World Case Study
|
04 Joe Kay: People and Operational Structure
05 Richard Danks: Technology and Talent
06 Brian Ford: Change and People Risk
07 Tom Henry: Process and People
|
|
|
|
01 The Hard Truth
Talent exits are a lagging indicator. By the time your best person hands in their notice, the structural problem that caused it has been present for 12 to 18 months.
Every mid-market MD has sat across the table from a high performer and heard a version of the same sentence. "It is not about the money. I just feel like I cannot make an impact here." That sentence is not an HR problem. It is a structural diagnosis. The person in front of you has been trying to do good work inside a structure that has been working against them. Eventually they stopped trying.
The research on voluntary exit from high performers is consistent across sectors. The top four reasons cited are: lack of clarity about role and authority, inability to see the impact of their work, poor quality of direct leadership, and absence of genuine career progression. Notice what is not on that list. Pay is rarely the primary driver for the people you most want to keep.
|
What high performers actually say when they are about to leave
"I spend more time in meetings about work than actually doing it."
"I cannot get a decision made without going to three people who all have a different view."
"I was brought in to change things. But nothing actually changes here."
"The technology is so poor that I spend half my day working around it instead of doing my job."
|
Each of these statements describes a structural problem - in the operating model, in the governance, in the technology, in the change capability of the business. They are not complaints about pay. They are complaints about the environment the business has created for the people it is trying to retain. And they are solvable - but not through salary reviews.
|
|
|
02 The Framework
6 Structural Retention Killers in Mid-Market Businesses
These are not culture problems or management style problems. Each one is a structural condition that makes it harder for capable people to do good work. Fix the structure and the retention follows.
|
1
|
Unclear Authority
The role exists. The person is capable. But the authority to act is never quite clear enough to move without checking. Every initiative requires buy-in from people who were not consulted when the initiative was scoped. The capable person spends more time managing upward than delivering. Eventually they stop bringing the initiatives.
Fix: A written decision authority matrix, agreed at board level, published to all senior roles.
|
|
2
|
Invisible Impact
High performers need to see that their work makes a difference. In businesses without clear performance data - where the reporting is inconsistent, the metrics are disputed and the link between individual effort and business outcome is opaque - capable people cannot tell whether what they do matters. That uncertainty is corrosive. It does not take long to feel pointless.
Fix: Role-level metrics that connect individual output to business outcome - not activity metrics.
|
|
3
|
Broken Technology
Capable people have a low tolerance for tools that do not work. Not because they are impatient - because they can see exactly how much time is being wasted and exactly what they could be doing with it. A senior hire who spends two hours a day working around inadequate systems is a senior hire who is spending 25% of their time not doing the job they were hired for. They notice. And they compare it to environments where the tools work.
Fix: A technology estate review from the user perspective - not the IT perspective.
|
|
4
|
Change That Never Arrives
Many high performers are hired specifically to drive change. They arrive with energy and ideas. They quickly discover that the organisation's change capability - the ability to actually implement something new and make it stick - is far lower than the ambition that was described in the interview. Initiatives start and stall. Decisions get revisited. Progress is measured in conversations rather than outcomes. The high performer who was hired to make things different concludes that things here do not change.
Fix: A structured change delivery capability - with programme governance, named ownership and measurable milestones.
|
|
5
|
Process That Frustrates Rather Than Enables
When the processes that surround a role are poorly designed - too many steps, too many approvals, too many handoffs that add delay without adding value - capable people experience the process as an obstacle to doing their job well. They spend energy navigating the process rather than performing the role. Over time the energy required to fight the friction exceeds the satisfaction of the work itself.
Fix: A process review from the perspective of the role - what does this person need to be able to do and what is currently stopping them?
|
|
6
|
No Visible Path Forward
In mid-market businesses the leadership layer is often thin and relatively stable. The people directly below the leadership team can see clearly that the path to progression is narrow, slow or dependent on someone else leaving. Without a visible and credible development pathway, the capable person begins to look externally - not because the current role is wrong, but because they cannot see what comes next inside this business.
Fix: Explicit career architecture - where the senior roles are going, what the criteria are, and what development is being actively supported.
|
|
The Diagnostic
Count how many of the six are present in your business. One or two is manageable. Three or more means your structural environment is actively working against retention of the people you most want to keep. A pay review will not fix this. A structural review will. The cost of getting this right is significantly lower than the cost of replacing a senior hire - which typically runs at 1.5 to 2 times annual salary when you include recruitment, onboarding and the productivity gap during transition.
|
|
|
|
03 Real World
The £70M Distribution Business That Lost Four Senior Leaders in 14 Months - and Finally Understood Why
Anonymised for client confidentiality
The business had grown fast. Four acquisitions in six years. Revenue from £22m to £70m. The senior team had been rebuilt twice. The HR director's explanation was consistent: the market is competitive and our salaries are slightly below benchmark. The board approved two salary reviews. The exits continued.
|
"We have raised salaries twice. We are still losing people. The money is not the problem."
CEO, on initial engagement
|
What exit interviews and a structural review revealed:
|
Authority: Four acquisitions had created four parallel leadership structures. Nobody had defined the decision authority across the combined business. Every cross-functional decision required sign-off from two or three people in different legacy structures who had never been formally integrated.
Technology: Each acquired business had its own systems. Four ERP instances, three CRM platforms, two HR systems. Senior leaders were maintaining manual reconciliations to get a picture of their own area of the business. Two hours a day. Every day.
Change: Three transformation initiatives had been announced in 18 months. None had been completed. Each had stalled when a key decision could not be made quickly enough. The senior team had stopped taking new initiatives seriously.
Career path: The combined leadership structure had created a layer of directors who were doing similar work with similar titles in different parts of the business. There was no articulated path to the group leadership level. Two of the four people who left had been explicitly told there was no clear timeline for their progression.
|
What changed over 16 weeks:
|
Single integrated leadership structure replacing four legacy hierarchies
Decision authority matrix published - 75% of operational decisions now made without group leadership involvement
Technology rationalisation roadmap agreed - ERP consolidation to single instance within 12 months
Career architecture published for all director-level roles with explicit criteria for progression
Zero voluntary exits at director level in the 12 months following structural changes
|
|
Cost of 4 Senior Exits
£480,000
Recruitment, onboarding, productivity gap
|
vs |
Cost of Structural Fix
£54,000
Zero exits in following 12 months
|
|
|
|
Partner Articles
From the Front Line
All four partners on people and retention - from operational structure, technology, change delivery and process. Because the talent problem is never just one thing.
|
|
Joe Kay
Partner · Process and Operational Excellence · Lean Six Sigma Master Black Belt
|
The Best Operational People Leave When the Operation Will Not Let Them Be Good At Their Jobs.
I have spent 25 years in operational environments. The thing that retains exceptional operational talent is not the salary and it is not the perks. It is the ability to see a problem clearly, have the authority to address it, and watch the improvement take hold. Take away any one of those three things and the exceptional operator starts looking for somewhere they can have all three.
The most damaging environment for operational talent is one where the problems are visible, the solutions are obvious, and the organisation's change capability is too low to implement them. This is more common than it should be. The operator can see exactly what is wrong. They have the skill to fix it. But the approval process, the competing priorities, the absence of decision authority, or the lack of programme governance means nothing actually moves. The operator concludes - correctly - that their skills are being wasted.
|
Operational talent is retained by operational effectiveness. Give people the tools, the authority and the structure to do excellent work - and the vast majority of them will stay to do it.
|
The practical question for any MD concerned about operational retention is not: are we paying enough? It is: are we giving our best operational people the conditions to be excellent? That means clear accountability, effective tools, a process environment that enables rather than obstructs, and a governance structure that allows good decisions to be made at the right level.
Get those conditions right and you will find that the salary conversation rarely comes up. Get them wrong and no salary will be high enough.
Joe Kay has delivered over £100m in operational savings across 100+ programmes including Network Rail, BCG, Aviva and HSBC. Connect on LinkedIn
|
|
|
Richard Danks
Partner · Technology, Governance and CTO Recovery · DBA, MBA
|
Poor Technology Is a Talent Tax. Your Best People Are Paying It Every Day.
In every technology recovery engagement I have led, there is a people story alongside the technology story. The capable CTO who has been fighting an inadequate platform for three years and has run out of energy for the battle. The senior analyst who builds brilliant insight but cannot get reliable data to build it from. The operations director who has automated workarounds for five different system limitations and now spends more time maintaining the workarounds than doing the actual job.
Technology quality is a direct retention lever for technical and senior operational talent. People who are good at what they do have a clear view of what adequate tools look like - and a clear sense of how much of their time is being consumed by tools that fall short. The business sees a technology cost. The senior person sees their professional effectiveness being limited by an investment decision the business made five years ago and has not revisited.
|
Every hour a senior person spends working around inadequate technology is an hour the business has chosen not to invest in - and the senior person knows it.
|
The practical implication is that technology investment decisions should include a talent retention calculation alongside the operational efficiency case. What is the cost of losing a senior technical or operational leader because the tools do not support the standard of work they expect to do? In most cases that cost exceeds the cost of the technology investment by a significant margin.
A technology estate review from the user perspective - not the IT perspective - will tell you where the talent tax is highest. That is where to invest first.
Richard Danks specialises in technology governance, CTO recovery and regulatory remediation across banking, defence and SaaS. Connect on LinkedIn
|
|
|
Brian Ford
Partner · Programme Recovery and Delivery Assurance · PRINCE2 Practitioner
|
Change Programmes That Do Not Deliver Destroy the Confidence of the People Who Were Supposed to Lead Them.
I have recovered programmes in some of the largest financial institutions in Europe. The human cost of a failed programme is something that rarely appears in the post-mortem. But it is real and it is significant. The senior leader who was accountable for a programme that stalled has their professional credibility attached to that outcome. The team that invested 18 months in something that did not deliver carries the frustration of that failure forward into the next initiative.
In mid-market businesses the stakes are proportionally higher because the leadership team is smaller. One failed transformation programme is a significant event. Two failed programmes in succession can destroy the organisation's belief in its own ability to change - and the capable people who were brought in to drive that change will not stay for a third attempt without compelling evidence that the conditions are different this time.
|
Delivery credibility is a retention asset. When the business can point to programmes that were scoped well, governed properly and delivered what they promised - capable people believe their effort will produce results. That belief is what keeps them.
|
The practical implication is that programme governance is not just a delivery tool. It is a talent retention tool. Businesses that deliver on their commitments - that scope programmes honestly, govern them rigorously and report on them transparently - create an environment where talented people believe that change is possible. That belief is worth more than any retention package.
If your change record is patchy - if the initiatives announced at the start of the year rarely look the same by the end of it - address that before you address the salary benchmark. The capable people you want to retain are watching the delivery record more closely than the pay scale.
Brian Ford led the largest banking transformation in Europe at Bank of Ireland and has delivered programmes at EY, Capgemini, Barclays Capital and JPMorgan. Connect on LinkedIn
|
|
|
Tom Henry
Partner · Process Transformation and Operations Excellence · Lean Black Belt L2A
|
When the Process Is the Problem, the Person Takes the Blame. That Is When They Start Looking Elsewhere.
Process transformation work takes me inside organisations at the point where something has stopped working. Often what I find is a capable person in a role where the process around them has made it structurally impossible to succeed - and nobody has recognised that the process is the problem. They think the person is the problem. Sometimes the person has started to believe it too.
This is one of the most damaging dynamics in mid-market businesses. A high performer is placed in a role. The role sits inside a broken process - too many handoffs, unclear ownership, inconsistent inputs from upstream teams. The person cannot hit the outcomes they were hired to hit because the process does not allow it. Performance conversations focus on the individual rather than the process. The person's confidence erodes. They leave - often described internally as "not quite the right fit."
|
Before you conclude that a person is not performing, map the process they are performing inside. In my experience the process is the constraint more often than the person.
|
The practical diagnostic is straightforward. Take the role where performance is the concern. Map every process the person depends on to do their job effectively. Identify the steps that add delay, the handoffs that are inconsistent, the inputs that arrive late or incomplete. Then ask honestly: could anyone succeed in this role with this process? If the answer is no, you have found your problem. And it is not the person.
Fixing the process before the exit interview is significantly cheaper than fixing it after. And the capable person who was about to leave - given a process that actually enables them to do excellent work - will almost always choose to stay.
Tom Henry has delivered 50% lead time reductions and double-digit FTE savings across financial services, legal and energy sectors. Connect on LinkedIn
|
|
|
The One Thing - Do This This Month
Ask your three most capable people what is making their job harder than it should be.
Not a formal review. A direct conversation. Listen for the structural answers - authority, tools, process, change delivery, visibility of impact. The answers will tell you more about your retention risk than any salary benchmark report.
If the answers point to structural problems across more than one domain - or if you have had more than one unexpected senior exit in the last 18 months - a People and Change Rapid Triage with Assured Velocity is 30 minutes. We will give you a clear view of the structural conditions driving your retention risk and what it would take to change them. No pitch. No pressure.
|
|
Next Month in The Velocity Brief
"The integration you did not finish is now your biggest risk."
Post-acquisition integration failures in mid-market businesses - the six things that are almost never completed properly, and the compounding cost of leaving them unresolved.
|
|
Assured Velocity
Fractional Transformation Office for Mid-Market Businesses (£10M to £100M)
Independent · Vendor-Neutral · Embedded in your execution
Transformation Domains
| Strategy |
Technology |
Data |
AI |
Process |
People |
Delivery |
Governance Domains
| Technology Gov. |
Programme Gov. |
Project Gov. |
Business Gov. |
UK-based · Midlands and Nationwide assured-velocity.co.uk hello@assured-velocity.co.uk
You are receiving The Velocity Brief because you signed up or connected with us on LinkedIn.
Unsubscribe ·
Forward to a colleague ·
View online
|
|