It was a summer day, I was sitting at a conference table in Houston at a client meeting. On a break, I checked my phone for messages. There was a text for me to call the office as soon as possible. One of the people on my team left his ID badge on his desk and walked out.

Brandon, not his real name, had left the building, and since you can't get back in the door without your badge, it's clear that Brandon wasn't coming back.

I was shocked that Brandon had left so abrubtly, except…not really.

For over 20 years I've worked as a manager of people. For most of it I worked at a big company. I've built very engaged teams. Some of the most engaged teams that the organizations where I've worked have ever seen. That's what the surveys said.

There was other evidence that I had highly engaged teams. People tend to gravitate to my teams. but that's not about me. Hiring right and forming teams that have high trust, respect and accountability is important, but there's more. It's about the team and the environment we built together. But that's not the whole story.

The whole story can’t be told without Brandon, the guy who left his badge on the desk and walked out, never to return.

When you think about every employee who has ever quit your team or organization, one thing is common to all of them, before they quit, they quit.

What I mean is, long before the employee gives their notice to terminate, there is a reduction in effort, a diminishing of results, a general disengagement. It has to be this way. That’s a normal human response. Even in the extremely rare case where “a job finds the employee” at some point, they disengage from the one they’re doing as they anticipate newer, greener, more inviting pastures.

That was the case with Brandon too. So yeah, I was shocked for about one minute, because I’d been traveling the road of Brandon’s disengagement for a few months.

Brandon was in over his head. I could see he probably wasn’t a good fit for the job, but it's deeper than that. I wasn't meeting his needs. I think I could have done more. Now I understand sometimes people take jobs they are ill-suited for and no matter how much training and mentoring they get, they made a bad choice. Brandon came highly recommended from another area of the company. But as I would find out later, he'd been struggling for a long time. Whatever the case, Brandon, was disengaged. He had given up, he was doing the minimum to look busy until he could make his break. Before he quit, he quit.

Employee disengagement is rooted in many things and managers like to play the blame game because we don’t like to think that we ever fail. The truth is, we fail a lot. We all do, it’s part of being human, and managers are human.

So, even me, the guy who built some of the most engaged teams ever, failed to engage everyone. Brandon, for one, but there were others. Sure, I can come up with excuses, that these employees were a bad fit, that they didn’t have the skill or the determination. But all that is beside the point, because what the best studies of employee engagement tell us, and rightly so, is that as much as 70% of the variance in employee engagement is attributable to the employees’ direct manager.

Most managers don’t know what engagement is. That’s because most organizations don’t know what engagement is. We hear of work cultures that provide free soda, ping pong tables and work-from-home days all in the name of employee engagement. Don’t get me wrong, I like all of those things, but they are not employee engagement initiatives.

70% of the variance in employee engagement is on the manager. Before employees quit, they quit. They quit when they become disengaged. Even if they are going through the motions, they are lacking productivity, energy, attention to detail and alertness. That’s why when you focus on employee engagement productivity, profitability, client satisfaction, safety and quality are positively impacted.

So What Can You Do?

Stop dividing your time inappropriately.

One of the main impediments to managers engaging employees is time. Managers divide their time inappropriately and disproportionately in favor of projects and initiatives while time coaching their employees takes a distant back seat. I mean way, way back. Like the back seat of one of those extra-long, bend-in-the-middle slinky buses. I once posed a question in the Harvard Business Review group on LinkedIn. I asked managers, “What proportion of your time do you spend on projects and initiatives versus coaching your team?" Responses varied a little from 90/10 to 60/40, all in favor of projects and initiatives. The most common response was 80/20, again, in favor of projects and initiatives.

If you’re a manager, you’re thinking, “Yeah, that’s about right, but what’s wrong with that?” What’s wrong with it, is it’s backward. You should be coaching your team 80% of the time and working projects and initiatives 20% of the time. Now, you think I’m crazy, but hear me out. You have a team of people. And THEY should be spending time working those projects and initiatives. You don’t have to be the doer. You just need to ensure those projects and initiative get done. “But,” you say, “they all have their day jobs, the things that are core to the business to accomplish, they can’t possibly do more.” They can do more, they want to do more. What's more, I met a leader from a big company last week and they're doing it. But that's a story for another day.

Go have a heart to heart with YOUR boss about some of those initiatives. I’m not saying, make demands and refuse to do projects that don’t fit your core mission. I’m saying, have the conversation so that your boss can either help you understand how they are core to the mission, or that through the conversation, your boss will see that those initiatives are just busy work. That’s part of your job. Stop saluting and taking on more, because there will always be more work than you can do, so start communicating. You’ll find you’re more engaged too.

Discover your employees’ talents and put them to use every day.

It’s easy to find out the talents of each of your team members. You use the Clifton StrengthsFinder. It’s an assessment of talent that was produced and is made available by Gallup, you know, the polling people. They happen to be the world’s foremost experts on talent and how to find it. The assessment is 15 bucks per person and it will tell you more about your employees than you’ll get in a year of one on ones. Of course, taking the assessment is only the beginning. You’ll need a coach to help you get the most out of the assessments. I’m one, but if my style doesn’t resonate with you, there are about 1,000 others like me that you can find on Gallup’s Coaches directory at GallupStrengthsCenter.com.

Before employees quit, they quit. 70% of resolving this is on you, their direct manager. Are you ready to take on the responsibility of that 70%, or are you going to go on letting your people hate getting up in the morning? Because, 70% of U.S. workers hate getting up in the morning. That’s the proportion of the U.S. workforce that are not engaged. Worldwide, it’s 87%.

Before they quit, they quit.