{"id":5054,"date":"2019-06-13T06:23:41","date_gmt":"2019-06-13T11:23:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/flevy.com\/blog\/?p=5054"},"modified":"2019-05-21T16:32:10","modified_gmt":"2019-05-21T21:32:10","slug":"employees-quit-managers-not-companies-as-proved-by-google","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/flevy.com\/blog\/employees-quit-managers-not-companies-as-proved-by-google\/","title":{"rendered":"Employees Quit Managers, not Companies (as Proved by Google)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Editor\u2019s Note: The author, Dwight\u00a0Mihalicz, is a subject expert matter on effective management and hosting a free\u00a0webinar for Flevy\u2019s audience on Empowerment 4.0<\/a>.\u00a0 \u00a0The focus of Empowerment 4.0 is to help managers of managers understand the elements that need to be in place for effective teams.\u00a0 Most management training focuses on the \u201csoft skills,\u201d whereas the teachings of Empowerment 4.0 are more fundamental and can help managers deal with root-cause issues of why they are not getting the team performance they desire and should be able to expect.\u00a0\u00a0You can sign up for the free webinar here.<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

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\"\"Most of our information on manager effectiveness comes from\u00a0surveys<\/a>\u00a0and monitoring workplace metrics. However, it is a problematic category of data to evaluate and analyze, because while good management practices exist, a lot will depend on what the employees perceive as beneficial.<\/p>\n

But can a manager\u2019s effectiveness at his job significantly affect whether an employee will stay with the company or quit? To answer this, we can take a look at Google\u2019s Project Oxygen, which set out to prove that managers weren\u2019t necessary, especially for a company with\u00a0a flat organization<\/a>. However, they managed to show the opposite.<\/span><\/p>\n

Google\u2019s Project Oxygen<\/b><\/h2>\n

Google started their\u00a0Project Oxygen<\/a>\u00a0in 2008 as a way to measure whether their engineers benefited from managemer effectiveness. However, over the years the project turned into an effort to identify good management practices and describe them comprehensively and measurably. It has significantly contributed to the company culture while keeping it unchanged at its core.<\/p>\n

Even though the project was carried out by Google, using only their stats and for their use; it still provided some insights that managers in any industry could use. The decade-long project identified traits that good managers possessed and bad ones didn\u2019t. It clearly showed that the absence of these traits could make an employee want to leave.<\/p>\n

How Employees Describe a Good Manager<\/b><\/h2>\n

It comes as no surprise that these positive traits had the manager-employee relationship at their core. Google found that an effective manager is:<\/p>\n