When we were young the future was so bright
The old neighborhood was so alive
And every kid on the whole damn street
Was gonna make it big and not be beat

Now the neighborhood's cracked and torn
The kids are grown up but their lives are worn
How can one little street
Swallow so many lives

--The Kids Aren't Alright by The Offspring

Stop and think about it.  There's a lot of people that have come through your company in the last three years.  You've had some great hires, for sure.  But you've also had some people you thought were great that didn't work out.

What happened to them?  Like the poets known as The Offspring riff on above, they came in bright eyed and ready to dominate.  Then #### went wrong.  They left or we fired them.  Maybe they left before we fired them. Of course, they have accountability for what happened as well, right?  Consider some of the case by case details:

Jamie had a chance, well she really did
Instead she dropped out and had a couple of kids
Mark still lives at home cause he's got no job
He just plays guitar and smokes a lot of pot

Jay committed suicide
Brandon OD'd and died
What the hell is going on
The cruelest dream, reality

The Offspring aren't talking about your hiring misses. But take a look at the video of this song below (email subscribers click through for video) - I like it because it portrays a bunch of people with broken lives coming through a single apartment.  Your company is a lot like this apartment - people come and go, and like the saying goes, there are eight million stories in the naked city.

What's interesting to me about this video is its connection to your company.  There's no question that in a lot of cases, the hiring misses you have are the responsibility of the employee in question.  They had a broken life, behavioral characteristics that became huge flaws in the workplace and a assortment of dysfunctions you couldn't overcome as a company.

But that's the easy way out. You and I both know that in a significant percentage of the voluntary turnover cases in your company, your managers could have made a difference by acting like they actually gave a sh*t about the employee in question.  Maybe they could have displayed a trace of empathy. Maybe they could have been interested in the person behind the employee, and that would have caused the employee to value your company over other options in the marketplace.

But your manager treated them like a commodity - a tenet in a run down apartment with a month to month lease.

That kind of sucks. Hit the chorus:

Chances thrown
Nothing's free
Longing for what used to be
Still it's hard
Hard to see
Fragile lives, shattered dreams

The company with the best managers of people wins...