The last few pieces I’ve shared here have tied topics I covered in What’s KILLING Your Profitability? (It ALL Boils Down to Leadership!) to situations nearly everyone deals with just as frequently in personal situations, whether we ever connect it to the idea of profitability or not. With the majority of that book being focused on the business world, there were a few chapters that I didn’t think could be connected to the personal relationships this column has always been geared toward. One of those was chapter five, The Cost of High Turnover. But as I recently dug through some resources for the new book I’m working on, I realized just how important long-standing relationships are and how high the cost really is when there’s constant turnover in our personal circle.
The fourth chapter of this new book walks readers through specific steps they can take to define exactly why they’re willing to lead others. That caused me to re-read a book I first picked up more than twenty years ago, The Master Key to Riches. First published in 1965, Napoleon Hill explains “The Major Advantages of Definiteness of Purpose” by saying that “it makes one more alert in the recognition of opportunities related to one’s major purpose” and he went on to emphasize that “it inspires the co-operation of other people.” Later in the book, Hill revisits this idea by saying, “For it is obvious for all who think accurately that no man ever attains a high degree of enduring success without the friendly co-operation of others; nor does any many ever attain enduring success without helping others.”
I’ve never considered myself to be very smart, and I’d guess the majority of you reading this who know me personally wholeheartedly agree with that statement! I was an average carpenter and a fairly good press operator, but I’ve been incredibly intentional about applying the work ethic I learned at very young age to building strong relationships. And because of that, there are very few days that go by where Cindy and I don’t talk about how blessed we’ve been to develop friendships with so many amazing people. (One of those who speaks to and trains leaders all over the world will be joining us for an event in Harrisonburg on June 13, 2025 to help us celebrate our 10th business anniversary, but that’s a story for another day.)
Here’s where all that connects back to the cost of high turnover… Our best or most valuable relationships never fall into place overnight; those take YEARS to build. I’m the first to admit that I have a significant lack of patience, and one of the things that tests what little I do have the most is dishonesty. Right or wrong, I have very few close relationships at this point in my life where I don’t trust someone implicitly. But in the ones where there is a significant level of trust, there’s just no way I could explain how much I value the individual.
What I’ll challenge you to consider here is just how important your strongest relationships are to you… How much better is your life because of each? Where could you work to deepen any one of those relationships? And what kind of costs have you experienced from situations where the “turnover” in your relationships with friends or family was high? In the workplace, statistics show that it generally costs one-half to five times an employee’s annual salary to replace them. In our personal lives, it’s even higher because many of those relationships can never be replaced!
