The most useful metric to gauge how you're building teams.

I have found that there is one metric that is most useful to rate how you're building teams.

• It's not engagement results.
• It's not a retention rate %.
• It's not a diversity number.

The core metric is how many people leave your team unexpectedly.

This is someone walking in and out of the blue saying, "I'm leaving".

These events should push us to reflect internally on what we could do better, what we're missing, etc. We can only control what we can control. So, this helps us focus on solving that.

Many reasons can cause this, but if you have a high level of unexpected leavers, this indicates:

• They are disconnected from you.
• They aren't solving the problem with you.
• They don't trust you.

These are all on a spectrum; they're not binary.

This is expensive.

• They consume our time as we scramble to react to things.
• The opportunity cost of not creating value but putting out spot fires.
• Impact on the rest of the team’s morale and mindset.
• Impacts your appetite to invest in people because they might leave.
• Frustration that something could have been done if you knew about the problem.
• Poor handovers that aren’t smooth because we aren’t prepared, and we aren’t working collaboratively.
• The list goes on.

The foundation of any relationship is trust. Low trust leads to high unexpected events. How do you build trust with your team?