The Problem Isn't the People — It's the Patterns
For a long time, I thought I had a turnover problem.
What I actually had was a me problem.
I just couldn't see it yet.
I came up in retail. Twelve hour days were the baseline. Work hard, play hard — you know the culture. I wore my work ethic like a badge and, without ever saying it out loud, I measured everyone around me by the same standard. If you weren't all in, all the time, something was wrong with you.
I burned through a lot of people that way.
And every time someone left, I had an explanation. Wrong fit. Couldn't handle the pace. Not cut out for this industry. The story was always about them. The pattern — my pattern — stayed invisible because I kept finding new reasons that had nothing to do with me.
Then someone I loved like a friend resigned.
She was exceptional. The kind of person you build your future around. I had talked her out of leaving twice before — and looking back, I knew she was miserable both times. But she was so good at her job, and the gap she would leave felt unsurvivable, so I focused on that. What was best for me. What the business needed. Not what she needed.
She resigned by email.
She told me later that she knew if she said it to my face, I would talk her out of it again. That landed hard. Not because she was wrong — but because she was exactly right. I would have. I'd done it twice already. I had convinced her to stay in a situation that was costing her, because I couldn't see past the cost to me.
That was the moment the pattern finally had a face.
It wasn't a turnover problem. It wasn't a wrong fit problem. It was a what-works-for-Nancy problem dressed up as a standards problem.
High expectations are not the issue. I still have them. But I had zero respect for what people's lives looked like outside of work — and I had built a culture that quietly punished anyone who had one. I wasn't modeling anything different. Twelve hour days don't just set a pace. They set a message. And the message I was sending was: this is what devotion looks like, and anything less is a character flaw.
What shifted wasn't my standards. It was my aperture.
I started asking what was best for my team alongside what worked for the business — and discovered, slowly, that those two things weren't actually in conflict. That I could have high expectations AND create space for people's lives. That I could model something different and still get extraordinary results. That the best people don't need to be burned out to prove they care.
Her leaving cracked something open in me that probably needed to be cracked open for years.
I just wish it hadn't cost her so much for me to finally see it.
Here's what I know now, sitting with leaders every month in Vistage rooms: the pattern is almost never obvious to the person inside it. It can't be — that's what makes it a pattern rather than a choice. It lives in the blind spot by definition.
What breaks it open is rarely a book or a framework or a performance review.
It's usually a person. A resignation. A conversation that comes too late. A moment where the cost of the pattern finally becomes impossible to explain away.
The question worth asking — before that moment arrives — is this:
What story am I telling myself about why people keep leaving, struggling, or falling short — and what if that story is protecting me from something I need to see
Nancy Girres is an executive coach and Vistage Chair based in Fort Collins, Colorado. She works with leaders who are ready to stop explaining the pattern and start examining it.