I was having a 1:1 with one of my star employees, Bob. Then he said something that blew my mind.

“As I sat down to look for another job over Christmas," Bob said, "I realized how much I love this one.”

First, wow. Words that every manager wants to hear. (Not the looking for another job part, but the other one.)

Second, it got me thinking. What is it that makes people want to stay, despite the heaping of corporate bullshit (RTO anyone?) they are forced to eat? How do we as managers navigate those corporate headwinds and get people to a point where they’re willing to put up with quite a lot for as long as their immediate environment stays positive?

Two major principles come into play here, and these are the ones I want to cover in this article.

Ownership

An engaged team member shouldn’t simply be given tasks to execute, but business problems to tackle, and the leeway to tackle them in the way they deem best. That doesn’t mean they should be encouraged to work in isolation; on the contrary, collaboration is a super-powerful force multiplier and retention aid.

Many managers instruct their employees to figure their problems out on their own and to ask less questions. This might feel like Ownership – own the problem, own the solution – but it’s ownership at high cost. Team morale suffers as your employees feel isolated and unsupported. Knowledge sharing is sparse at best, and so when key personnel leave (PTO, leave of absence, or just departures), the team finds themselves without key knowledge.

I hope we all get that Ownership without Collaboration is not cost-effective, and extreme cases (such as ‘figure it out on your own’) are rare.

But how many of you are on siloed teams? Meaning, does your team allocate a story per person, so everyone is working on their own thing? That’s a bad idea too, friends. Yes, it feels like it helps with ownership, but it discourages collaboration. 

And regarding that helping with ownership bit. I’d challenge even that. Why? Well, think of it this way. The fatal flaw of most engineers is that they too easily get lost in the weeds of whatever problem they’re solving. As an ex-developer myself, I can tell you how much fun it is to do that. I became a dev to make things work, not to think about customer impact or business value. It was only through years of building software that I realized there’s so much more to software engineering than a beautiful algorithm or an elegant database schema. 

When you have engineers working on something in isolation, they too often lose track of the overall business problem, letting themselves get carried away by the minutiae of their task. However, if they act the part of a Story Owner, acting as the lead on the story for a mini team of 2-3 engineers (or as many as the story can be parallelized into), then they’re thinking about the overall story, not just the next task. And that helps get them thinking about the larger business impact of what they’re doing.

And that, my friends, ultimately makes them happier, because it’s one thing to see the feature you built work and quite another to know your efforts have brought in six new customers or made an extra five million for the company.

Transparency

The second major principle is transparency. My boss calls me Mr. Full Transparency. He says it with a smile, but there’s a hint of discomfort in his voice. Transparency is uncomfortable. It’s scary. Because what if the direct you’re confiding in turns around and uses the information against you somehow? What if HR finds out you’ve been spilling manager-only secrets?  What if your leaning into transparency gets you into trouble?

Before we address those points, we must answer a logical question: transparency about what?  The simple answer is everything. Well, everything that’s work related, and that doesn’t harm someone else. For example, passing on negative feedback with the name attached. (I’ve made that mistake once.) But short of something that egregious, I’m talking transparency about performance evals and how they’re conducted, what your input into that process is as a manager and how your input can be overridden, and so on.

For example, as part of my org’s evaluation process, we must write what we call baseball cards for each direct. The baseball cards contain our recommended score, lists out the major projects the team member completed during this eval period and how they did on them, including both areas where they excelled and areas of weakness.

These baseball cards are then shared between managers in the org, with the intent of calibrating our scores across teams. These cards contain direct, unfiltered feedback on each team member, and I show each of my reports their card before I present it to the other managers. 

When I tell other managers that I do this, they generally shudder. And here we come to those what ifs we talked about earlier. What if such extreme transparency backfires?

Well, here’s the thing. The contents of the baseball card are never surprising to directs. It would be a disservice on my part if they were surprised. We’ve talked about everything there in our 1:1s. We’ve celebrated the positives, and we’ve worked on the negatives.

So, they aren’t surprised when they see those attributes written up. They do, however, get the chance to correct anything I got factually wrong or misunderstood. The result is they, effectively, get to play a role in their performance evaluation…  but isn’t that the point? Don’t we want the evals to be as objective and fair as possible? If so, why would we as managers not want to solicit our directs’ opinion on how we represent them? We can always discard their feedback if it’s too biased or lacks self-awareness, but at least we have a chance to correct our own biases. And every one of my direct reports appreciates the opportunity to participate in this way.

Conclusion

Ownership and Transparency both speak to the same thing: empowerment. You can’t be empowered without a sense of ownership over the work you do, and you also can’t be empowered without the knowledge you need to understand what’s happening around you. It’s literally that simple, folks. You know what’s another word for empowerment? Trust. Trust your people, treat them like adults, and they will almost always treat you the same way. And then, when the rest of the corporate behemoth loses its mind over some rule or another, your team becomes an oasis of sanity that your employees will cling to no matter the job market.