By Clark A. Ingram
Peter Drucker is famous for the line “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” He was right. But after more than thirty years fighting turnover across dozens of organizations, I’d add a second course: employee turnover eats culture for lunch.
Here’s why. You cannot build a stable, thriving culture on a revolving door. If your people don’t stay long enough to absorb what your company stands for, the culture you describe in the handbook and the culture your employees actually live every day drift apart until they’re two different things. Leaders spend enormous energy crafting values statements and strategic plans, and turnover quietly devours both while they’re not looking. Fix the turnover, and culture and strategy finally get a chance to take hold.
The first thing I hear when I walk into a struggling organization is almost never a plan. It’s a shrug. “Forty percent turnover is average for our industry; that’s just the way it is.” I’ve heard versions of that sentence in nearly every industry, state, and company size there is. I call it resigned defeat, and it’s the number one symptom of a turnover problem. People have tried a few things, watched them fail, and concluded the situation is simply their fate.
But listen closely to that sentence, because it contains its own cure. The key word is “average.” If your turnover is average, then by definition some organizations are doing worse, and some are doing far better. It’s a bell curve, and the good news about a bell curve is that the upside is real and reachable. The only question worth asking is how to move from the middle of the curve to the good end of it.
I can tell you how the companies on the good end got there, because I’ve studied them and I’ve replicated it. Not one of them got lucky. I have never in my career found an organization that simply stumbled into low turnover. Every single one had to understand its own specific problems and manage deliberately to solve them. Low turnover is not an accident of a nice location or a generous market. Low turnover happens when, and only when, you manage for it.
The organizations that pull it off share a handful of convictions, and they’re worth adopting wholesale. First, the goal is always zero, understood within the context of your own organization. Not “a little better.” Zero is the direction you point everything. Second, they attack the real root causes rather than the symptoms, because treating symptoms doesn’t just fail to fix the problem; it usually creates new ones. Third, they make substantive changes to all the issues driving people out; cosmetic tweaks and a pizza party won’t move anything. And fourth, they stay humble: there are no silver bullets, and even after things improve, the problem can come back if you stop paying attention.
That last point is where most companies fall short, and it’s a matter of ambition. In my experience, the majority of organizations will happily accept a 5 to 10 percent reduction in turnover, declare victory, and move on. I work differently, because I refuse to aim at “slightly less bad.” When you set the bar at zero and manage relentlessly toward it, you don’t just retain more people; you finally give your culture and your strategy room to do the work they were designed to do.
Four Ways to Stop Turnover From Eating Your Culture
1. Ban “that’s just the way it is.” The moment you accept your turnover rate as an industry given, you stop looking for the cause. Treat “average” as evidence that better is possible, because somewhere, someone in your field is already doing it.
2. Aim at zero, not “a little better.” Set your target within the context of your organization, but set it high. Companies that aim for a 5 percent improvement get a 5 percent improvement. Companies that aim for zero get transformation.
3. Fix causes, not symptoms, all of them. Resist the pizza-party reflex. Identify what’s actually driving people out and make substantive changes to every one of those issues. Cosmetic fixes create new problems while leaving the real ones in place.
4. Stay vigilant after it improves. There’s no silver bullet and no finish line. When turnover drops, keep watching, the monster returns the moment you stop managing against it.
Culture may eat strategy for breakfast, but turnover will eat both for lunch if you let it. The companies that thrive aren’t the lucky ones; they’re the ones who decided that “average” wasn’t good enough and managed, deliberately and relentlessly, for something better.
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Clark A. Ingram is the Founder and President of People Profits, LLC, which focuses on the three greatest human capital problems affecting organizations: employee turnover, chronically open positions, and skills gap. He consults with a spectrum of companies on workforce stability, compensation design, and recruitment. His new book is Churn: Proven Strategies to Overcome Failing Conventional Talent Management and Achieve Zero Turnover(People Profits, March 26, 2026). Learn more at peopleprofits.com.
