Nursery World - Staff retention: part 2

Do staff leave the organisation or the leader? In the second of a
four-part series on staff retention, regional director of Childbase
Partnership Sarah Rotundo elaborates on how good leadership is a crucial
factor in whether your staff decide to stay or go

Being a good early years leader means systematically reflecting on the usefulness of what you are doing. When it comes to staff retention this self-reflection doesn't stop. Though when someone leaves, it may involve asking the difficult question, 'Is this something to do with me?'

When an employee joins an organisation you can assume they believed that it was the right move, and when they leave something has changed. It is unlikely that the location, pay, resources or the nature of the job have altered drastically, but the filter through which they view these things may have. That filter is shaped by the leader. A Gallup poll of one million workers in 2014 found the top reason people left a job was not pay, but bad leadership. When people talk about issues such as 'morale', 'poor communication' or 'lack of progression', leaders must ask to what extent they are responsible and how they can improve these factors.

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