Typically, I thrive in fast growth or fast changing environments. It’s exhilarating, it’s exciting. Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about high-turnover environments.
I’ve found a blind spot in high-turnover companies: what turnover does to the Human Resources team. (Or maybe I’ve known this all along but put on my “Pollyanna” face. Maybe I conflated fast-growth and fast-change because I wanted a HR consulting project to succeed so much.)
Fast growth and fast change aren’t the same circle on a Venn diagram. Fast growth is always a fast-changing environment, but not every fast-changing environment is fast growth.
Fast growth is forgiving. The momentum of success can outrun the shortcomings of leadership and talent, and companies often win despite themselves. Fast change without growth doesn’t have that cushion. Turnover runs high, and senior leaders and boards come to expect it.
The turnover gets planned for. The toll on the people absorbing it doesn’t.
I see it most in the people working in HR operations and in organizational and leadership effectiveness. They onboard and offboard. They run the leadership training. They coach and counsel. Then the people they developed leave, and they start over.
These teams came into this work to make an impact and keep improving what employees can do. I’ve watched growth-minded people realize their efforts aren’t leading to a lasting result, and it can turn high performers into frustrated hamsters on a wheel.
HR leaders want to build repeatable, scalable solutions as teams grow. The challenge comes when the company isn’t growing and turnover is high, whether from up-leveling talent, unexpected business and industry changes, or the realities of an earlier-stage company. The headcount stays flat while the people keep changing.
Here’s what I’ve realized about leading in these environments.
Review more often. Revisit your processes and programs, their expected return on investment, your metrics of success, and your expectations more frequently than you would in a stable company. Be willing to refine, change, or discard them. Every new hire arrives without knowing why a program matters to the business, so what worked for the last group may not land with this one.
Throw out the playbook. Getting to stability sometimes means working through change differently. What the business needs won’t come from a playbook, so be open to letting go of past beliefs on productivity, impact, and leadership.
And remember, it’s usually not personal. People aren’t rejecting your programs and investments. They’re new, they replaced someone who just left, and they have no context. What feels like repetition to you is onboarding for them.