WEDNESDAY - August 4, 2026

HUMPDAY

Weekly Insight & Inspiration for Purposeful Leaders

THIS WEEK’S FOCUS

The Loyalty You Can’t Buy

What keeps your best people isn’t the number on their paycheck - it’s what happens after they cash it.

Money gets people in the door. It rarely convinces them to stay in the room.

The Sous Chef That Turned Down $30K

I love food! So much that my husband and I literally make vacation plans around great restaurants we hear about. If you know anything about great restaurants you know about New York’s famous Eleven Madison Park and their once general manager responsible for their success, Will Guidara. I’ve never eaten at Eleven Madison Park, but I recently attended Will’s conference, Unreasonable Hospitality. It was a leadership conference based on his book with the same title focused on the experience of the customer. If you haven’t read it, I highly recommend it. I went to the conference because I think we can all learn a lot from leaders outside of our individual industries. It was - as expected - an awesome conference. I had the pleasure of meeting a young sous chef who works in a small, not very well know restaurant in Los Angeles. She lit up when she talked about the restaurant that she’d been at for almost three years. Not knowing what the upward mobility looks like for the culinary industry, I asked her what came next for her in her career. I anticipated her to say something like, “I want to work in a well-known restaurant with a famous head chef”. But that’s not what she said. She actually shared with me that a well-known restaurant had recently reached out to her and offered her $30K more than she was currently making to come and be their sous chef. That’s not a small amount of money! She turned it down. Why? She said her current head chef has given her the autonomy to design and launch her own tasting menu. She also is asked to sit in on every hiring decision for her section. And when she pitched a change to the winter menu last year; it didn’t just get a nod, it was added to the menu with her name attached to it as its creator. The new restaurant was offering her more money to do the same job. Her current one was offering her a bigger job.

That’s the whole story. And if you lead people - in a hospital, a health system, a department, a team of any kind - it should make you a little uneasy, because it means the raise you’re planning for your best performer might not be the thing that actually keeps them.

The Myth of the Golden Handcuff

Leaders reach for compensation first because it’s the lever that’s easiest to pull. It’s concrete, it’s fast, and it feels generous. But pay operates on a strange asymmetry: it can absolutely push someone out the door if it falls too far behind the market, yet it rarely holds someone who has other reasons to leave. A raise treats the departure like a pricing problem. Most of the time it isn’t. What actually predicts whether a high performer stays has less to do with the number on the paycheck and more to do with three quieter things: whether they’re still growing, whether they have real ownership over something that matters, and whether their work is genuinely seen. Take any one of those away for long enough, and a competitor doesn’t even need to outbid you. They just need to offer what you stopped offering.

This is precisely why agency premium pay, sign-on bonuses, and market adjustments - all necessary tools - so often fail to solve a retention problem on their own. They may fill the void temporarily, but rarely are they the actual issue that needs addressing.

A 2024 study of more than 14,000 US employees found that opportunities for growth and development were the single strongest workplace predictor of reduced turnover intention - outweighing salary, tenure, and every other factor measured (1).

What High Performers Are Actually Listening For

Your strongest people are rarely the ones complaining the loudest, which is exactly why they’re easy to overlook until the resignation letter is already signed. They’re not scanning for perks. They’re listening for signals - and they pick up on these four faster than anyone else on your team:

A visible next step. Not a vague “you’re doing great, keep it up”, but a real answer to “what does the next two years look like for me”. Top performers stay where the path forward is concrete and promises of that path forward are kept.

Real ownership, not more tasks. There’s a meaningful difference between being handed additional work and being handed genuine decision-making authority. High performers can feel that difference immediately, and only one of the two builds loyalty. A 2024 systematic review of nurse manager retention identified decision authority and autonomy as factors that consistently predicted intent to stay across the studies reviewed (2).

Being trusted with the hard truth. Your best people don’t want you to manage around them. They want to be told what’s really going on - budget pressures, strategic shifts, honest feedback on performance - and treated as someone capable of handling it.

Recognition that names what they actually did. “Great job this quarter” evaporates on contact. “The way you restructured huddles cut our late starts in half, we should implement this department wide” does not.

What High Performers Are Actually Listening For

Here’s the uncomfortable math: almost any competitor can match or beat salary. Very few can replicate a culture where someone is trusted, growing, and seen. When a leader over-indexes on compensation as the retention strategy, they’re competing on the one dimension where they’re most easily outbid and neglecting the dimensions where they could actually be unbeatable.

This shows up everywhere leadership happens. The nurse who’s brilliant with patients but has been passed over for a charge nurse position more than once. The department manager who never gets pulled into the budget conversation even though his instincts about the unit are better than the spreadsheet’s. The high performer on any team who keeps hearing “we’ll revisit that next cycle” about the growth conversation they asked for eight months ago. None of them are leaving because of money. They’re leaving because somewhere else finally offered them what you kept postponing.

3 PRACTICES FOR RETAINING TOP TALENT

1. Have the growth conversation before they ask twice. Sit down with your strongest performers and ask directly where they want to be in two years. Then build a concrete step toward it this quarter

2. Hand over something real. Give your top performers visible ownership of a decisions, project, or initiative with genuine authority attached - not just a longer task list.

3. Make your recognition specific. Replace generic praise with a precise account of what they did and the impact it had. Say it publicly at least once this month.

A Final Thought

The head chef over the sous chef in that small LA restaurant was also at the conference. He shared with me that he heard about the competing offer several months after she had declined it. “She’s brilliant” he said, “and it’s my job to make sure she knows that”.

I asked the sous chef what it would take to pull her away from her current restaurant. She smiled and said, “the only reason I would leave would be if my head chef left and I would leave to follow him. I’d follow him anywhere.”

Compensation buys a delayed departure. Growth, trust and meaning buys commitment.

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This week ask your highest performers one question, “What would make you stay another five years?” Act on what they tell you.

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Sources:

1.  Hur, Y. (2024). Assessing the effects of workplace contextual factors on turnover intention: Evidence from U.S. federal employees. Public Organization Review, 25, 193–213. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11115-024-00784-y

2.  Penconek, T., et al. (2024). Factors influencing nurse manager retention, intent to stay or leave and turnover: A systematic review update. Journal of Advanced Nursing. https://doi.org/10.1111/jan.16227

I’d love to hear from you. Please reach out and share if you found this insight helpful, if you’d like to talk about it more, or if there’s a topic you’d like to see in a future Humpday. Stacie@LumisLeadership.com

~ Stacie

The “Humpday” was an e-mail originally created by a great leader and mentor - Marc Strode. He used the Humpday to bring insight and inspiration to his team every week. With his permission and at his request to Keep the Spirit - the Humpday lives on. Marc, thank you for being a leader worth following. Despite your love for camels, you truly are the GOAT!