What If I Asked Your Employees These Four Questions?
Let me try something. Imagine I walked into your company tomorrow and asked every single one of your employees just four questions about the person they report to:
Does your manager give you high challenge — does he or she get the best out of you?
Does your manager care about you as a person?
Has your manager caught you doing something great and told you about it in the last 30 days?
If it were based on your manager alone, would you leave or stay in your current position?
Now here's my real question: do you know what the answers would be?
Most owners I talk to don't. And I understand why — but the research on what those answers cost you is hard to ignore.
Why Those Four Answers Matter So Much
Gallup has studied this for decades, and the findings are remarkable:
Managers account for at least 70% of the variance in team engagement. When a manager is disengaged, the team follows.
At least 75% of the reasons people voluntarily quit are things a manager can influence.
42% of people who left voluntarily say their manager or company could have done something to keep them.
And here's the one that stops me cold: 45% of those leavers say that in their final three months, nobody — not a manager, not another leader — proactively talked with them about their job satisfaction, their performance, or their future.
Nearly half of the people who walked out the door had no one ask how it was going. That's not a people problem. That's a management-visibility problem.
There's more. When a manager has one meaningful conversation a week with each direct report, employees are four times as likely to be highly engaged. And when Gallup asked departing employees what would have kept them, 70% named something about how they were managed day to day — not compensation.
So Why Aren't We Asking?
Usually it isn't neglect. It's logistics. There's simply no mechanism in most companies to ask these questions.
Think about how review season actually works. We review the people who report to us. Information flows one direction — down. But if managers drive 70% of engagement and 75% of the reasons people quit, shouldn't we be gathering input on our leaders from the people who report to them?
You can't fix what you don't know about.
This Is Where 360-Degree Feedback Comes In
The concept is simple. When you evaluate a leader, you still give your own assessment as their supervisor — just like normal. But you add feedback from their peers and their direct reports. It's typically anonymous, and it should be a regular part of your culture, not a tool you suddenly break out when something has gone wrong.
When we help clients ask employees to review their managers on a regular cadence, a few things happen consistently:
Problem areas surface early — while they're still fixable.
Leaders become more accountable, because they know feedback is coming from every direction.
Engagement goes up, because people see that their experience actually counts.
Leaders get better at leading. This is the part I love most. Most struggling managers aren't bad people — they've just never been told what isn't working.
I'll be straight with you: there are nuances, and a few situations where I'd advise against it. Tiny teams where anonymity is impossible. Organizations in the middle of upheaval, where feedback gets weaponized. Companies that aren't prepared to act on what they hear — because collecting feedback and then ignoring it does more damage than never asking.
Done right, though, implementing this is often a huge win.
Make It a Priority This Year
If your managers shape three-quarters of the reasons your people leave, and you have no structured way to hear how those managers are actually doing, that's a real gap — and a fixable one. I'd put it near the top of the list.
You can absolutely build this internally. But if you don't have the resources to develop it, this is exactly the kind of thing our Director-level HR professionals implement for clients. They've seen what works, what backfires, and how to roll it out so you get a great outcome instead of a mess.
Curious what your employees would say about their managers? Let's find out together. Grab a free 30-minute session with one of our HR experts — no pressure, just a clear next step.