Your Best People Are Leaving. Here’s What Your Strategy Has to Do With It.

Talented people want to work on something that matters and can see where it is going. Most strategies give them neither.

You are losing your best people.

And here’s the uncomfortable part: the exit interviews are not telling you why.

They say “better opportunity.” They say “career progression.” They say “work-life balance.” These are real, and they are also incomplete. Underneath every one of those explanations sits a question that most departing employees are too polite to say:

What exactly am I building here, and why should I believe it will matter in five years?

If your strategy cannot answer that question in plain language, your retention problem is a strategy problem. Full stop. No amount of compensation adjustment, engagement surveys, or employer brand campaigns will fix it.

Let me show you why, and more importantly, what to do about it.

What your best people actually need from you

The research on employee motivation has been converging on the same answer for decades. Daniel Pink synthesised it in Drive. Deci and Ryan built the empirical foundation in self-determination theory. Beyond a threshold of fair compensation, three things drive engagement: purpose, autonomy, and mastery. The work matters. I have agency over how I do it. I am getting better at something valuable.

This is important: your strategy determines whether your firm can deliver on any of these.

Think about what happens when your strategy is organised around three or four long-term structural changes happening outside your firm. Say you are building around the shift to automated distribution, the growth of emerging markets, and the transition to sustainable supply chains. Purpose becomes obvious: we are positioning this firm for the next decade of change, and your work is part of that. Autonomy becomes possible: if you understand what we are building around, you can evaluate decisions yourself without escalating every choice to your manager. And mastery becomes directional: the skills you are developing are aligned to where the world is heading, which means they appreciate over time.

Now think about what happens when your strategy is organised around cost reduction, operational efficiency, and quarterly earnings targets. Purpose becomes “hit the number.” Autonomy disappears because there is no strategic logic to guide decisions, so everything gets escalated. And the skills you are developing serve the current operation, which may not be the one that matters in five years.

Which firm would you stay at?

The Nokia warning

When INSEAD researchers Quy Huy and Timo Vuori studied Nokia’s decline, they found something the market narrative had missed entirely. The conventional story was that Nokia failed because Apple’s technology was better. Huy and Vuori interviewed 76 Nokia managers and engineers. What they found was a culture of fear.

Middle managers were afraid to deliver bad news because senior leaders had a reputation for impatience with anyone not delivering results. Senior leaders were afraid of external competition and of missing quarterly targets. Fear flowed in both directions, and information stopped moving upward. Strategic problems were hidden rather than solved.

Here is what that meant for talent. Nokia’s best engineers knew that the Symbian operating system was inferior to what Apple was building. They could see the shift happening. But the internal culture gave them no way to act on what they saw. No framework connecting their expertise to a strategic response. No confidence that raising the alarm would produce anything other than punishment.

The people closest to the problem had the clearest view of the solution. The organisation ensured that view never reached the people who could act on it.

Let’s be very clear: this is what happens when strategy is organised around internal metrics rather than external changes. The direction of your leadership team’s attention shapes your culture. And your culture determines whether talented people stay, speak up, and contribute their best thinking, or leave, stay silent, and protect themselves.

Nokia’s annual reports across 20 years confirmed the pattern. More strategic language devoted to financial management and workforce administration than to any growth-oriented external change. The institutional voice mirrored the fear culture that Huy and Vuori documented. Nokia went from 56% of its industry’s profits to 7%. Not because it lacked talented people. Because its strategy and culture made those people unable to do what they were capable of.

You might be thinking, “That’s an extreme case. We don’t have a fear culture.” Maybe not. But ask yourself this: when was the last time a mid-level manager in your firm told the leadership team something they didn’t want to hear about the strategy? If you cannot remember, the culture may be quieter than Nokia’s but the effect is the same. Your people are not contributing what they know. Some of them are leaving instead.

What the opposite looks like

When Paul Polman arrived at Unilever in 2009, one of his first acts was to abolish quarterly earnings guidance. The signal to investors was clear: short-term targets encourage bad decisions. But the signal to Unilever’s 128,000 employees was equally important: this firm is playing a longer game, and your work is part of something that compounds over years, not something that resets every 90 days.

He then launched the Sustainable Living Plan, making sustainability the organising logic of the entire company. A brand manager in Jakarta developing a new product could connect her work to a direction that was structural, visible, and growing. A supply chain manager in São Paulo evaluating suppliers could apply a clear criterion without escalating the decision.

The strategy created both the purpose and the autonomy that drive retention. Over Polman’s ten-year tenure, Unilever delivered 290% shareholder return whilst consistently ranking among the most attractive employers in its sector.

Genuine Parts, the auto parts distributor that captured 48% of its industry’s profits, is a less glamorous but equally powerful example. Its investment in warehouse automation, digital ordering, and global expansion gave 60,000 employees a trajectory they could see and contribute to. A warehouse technician learning to operate robotic picking systems was developing skills that would be more valuable each year as automated distribution accelerated. The strategy made the work feel directional rather than repetitive.

So what do you do about it?

Three things. And you can start all of them this week.

First, test your strategy for clarity. Find ten employees at random, across different levels and functions, and ask them to describe what the firm is building around and why it matters. No corporate jargon allowed. If they can do it, your strategic narrative is working. If they cannot, you have found the root of your retention problem.

Second, build the employee story. Your strategy needs a version that answers three questions for every employee: what is changing in our industry and why does it matter? How is this firm positioning itself around those changes? And what does that mean for my role, my skills, and my career over the next three to five years? I wrote about the five-stories framework in an earlier piece. The employee story is the version most firms never write. Write it.

Third, make the connection between individual work and strategic direction visible. Not once a year at a town hall. Constantly. When you explain a restructuring, connect it to the external changes you are building around. When you announce a hire, explain how it strengthens your positioning. When you review performance, ask whether the work served the direction. The firms in my research that maintained their strategic commitment over decades did not just have better strategies. They were places where the work had a visible trajectory, where individual decisions connected to a larger logic, and where the skills being developed pointed toward a future that was growing rather than shrinking.

What next?

Your best people are not looking for a better package. They are looking for a better answer to one question: what am I building here, and why should I believe it will matter?

If your strategy can answer that in plain language, you have a retention advantage that no competitor can buy. If it cannot, the exits will continue, and the exit interviews will keep telling you everything except the truth.

You know what to do. Start this week.