The 3-step conversation that retains your best employees

How to keep employees from quitting rarely comes down to money. Gallup found 42% of voluntary employee turnover is preventable, and most of it traces back to one conversation that never happened. In this episode, Lia breaks down the retention conversation to have with your best person before they start looking, and tells two stories from her own career where 30 minutes would have kept her in a job she loved.

In this episode you will learn:

• Why the person about to quit almost never tells their manager first, and what they do instead
• What made a promotion conversation at Google land as nothing, and the version that would have kept her on the team
• What to say when the answer is no and you can't change it, so the no doesn't end the relationship
• The 3 steps of The Sit-Down applied to employee retention, including the words to open with
• Why waiting for your team to raise a concern first never works, even for approachable leaders
• The signals a good employee sends for months before the resignation lands

Download my FREE guide to making hard conversations with your team easier at liagarvin.com/convo

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© 2026 Lia Garvin / Managing Made Simple