There was a certain hour in Tom’s building when the light dimmed and seemed to turn strangely honest.

While everyone else loved the “golden hour” Tom had mixed feelings. He felt like he was at his favorite party, and it was about to end.

His company had risen the way new, incredible fortunes do. Far too quickly.

They had gone from a handful of believers to a hundred employees in less time than it took Tom’s contractors to paint his heavily mortgaged house.

Each quarter arrived with its own chart pointing confidently upward. Revenue, users, press mentions - everything seemed to be growing.

But there was one awkward problem. The people. Turnover was a huge issue.

Tom had his theory about all this. It was simple, and it let him sleep at night: people just weren’t loyal anymore.

He said it in board meetings with a practiced shrug. “It’s generational,” he would say, as if he were identifying a weather pattern. “They get bored. They want to leave before they’ve really started.”

“When my father started working when he was young, everyone stayed at their company for 30 years.”

“Loyalty” was such a convenient villain. It didn’t talk back.

The members of the board would shift in their chairs and look at the ceiling in the way polite people do when they’re deciding whether to argue. No one did. After all, the numbers on the other slides were SO very good.

The problem went completely unaddressed for 9 months.

The reckoning arrived on a Tuesday that looked exactly like every other Tuesday.

Tom walked into the boardroom with his usual slides and usual story. Growth, expansion, awards, with a thin slice of panic tucked between bullet points.

He was halfway through his explanation when the CFO cleared her throat.

“Tom, at this rate turnover is costing us 4.2 million dollars per year.” This cannot continue.

Tom bristled. He was about to jump in with an anecdote about fickle twenty-somethings and modern attention spans, but stopped.

For the first time, he felt something give way inside the explanation he had been leaning on for years.

If this wasn’t about loyalty, then it might be about him. Or at least about something he had built and never quite finished.

The room went still. Someone shifted a pen. Outside the glass wall, an assistant hurried by carrying a box with a plant sticking out of the top.

For the first time, Tom asked himself a dangerous question:

“Is there something here I’ve been unwilling to see?”

After the board meeting, he sat in his executive chair longer than his calendar allowed staring at the city below.

He thought of all the people whose names he’d already forgotten: developers, project managers, designers - people whose first week he could picture but whose last day had blurred into a kind of anonymous funeral of well wishes and goodbyes.

What if they hadn’t left because they were restless, he wondered, but because I’ve given them nowhere to go?

He began to piece it together. Managers had been promoted because they were good at their last job, not because anyone had trained them for the next one.

Career paths lived mostly in hopeful conversations, not in anything real. New hires were rushed through an onboarding process that felt more like a legal disclaimer and not something to actually help them succeed.

Tom knew it was time to MFD. (Make a f*cking decision)

The next morning he arrived early, the office still drifting awake.

If the problem was structural, then the apology had to be structural too.

No one had sworn an oath to him. They had simply come looking for a place to grow and discovered only smoke and mirrors.

He started with something simple, something most companies overlook because it doesn’t feel urgent on a spreadsheet.

He decided to teach people how to lead before expecting them to lead. What took shape wasn’t a corporate training module or another set of slides.

It was a real development environment: rooms where managers could admit what they didn’t understand, ask the questions they had been pretending to know, and learn without feeling like their jobs were at risk.

Then he turned to the invisible gap that had quietly pushed so many people out the door: the absence of a clear future. He asked his team to build career paths that were real, not “we’ll figure it out later.”

They mapped out the steps, the skills, and the milestones so employees could see what growth looked like instead of guessing.

Onboarding shifted, too. It stopped being a rushed checklist and became a meaningful introduction to the company’s expectations, values, and opportunities. People weren’t just told what to do; they were shown how they could matter long term.

Tom thought back to all the quiet exits he had taken as a personal slight, all the parting emails he’d read as evidence of a world that no longer understood loyalty.

It occurred to him that they had simply left in search of a future he hadn’t bothered to communicate.

They hadn’t been betraying him.

They had been answering a question he had never thought to ask:

What happens to me if I stay?

THIS WEEK'S MFD CHALLENGE

Before you decide that people aren’t loyal, pause long enough to ask a less flattering question:

Have you given them a real reason and a real path to stay?

Know someone solving the wrong problem perfectly?
Forward this issue to as many people as you want!

Until next Tuesday,

Kevin D. St.Clergy
Author & Podcast Host of Beyond Blind Blaming
Creator of the Blind Blaming Specialist™ Certification