UpTrajectory Review

Marcel Schwantes at Inc. Magazine identifies a structural blind spot in how companies diagnose turnover: the instinct to blame departing talent rather than examine the manager directly above them. The framing is deliberately provocative—'the problem may be sitting one level above them'—but it lands on a well-documented phenomenon that organizations still underinvest in fixing. Most small businesses lack HR infrastructure to track managerial effectiveness, which means toxic or simply incompetent management persists until key employees have already walked out. Schwantes is not breaking new academic ground here; the Gallup finding that managers account for 70% of variance in employee engagement has circulated for years. What matters is the translation into observable, correctable behaviors.

For a small-business operator, this carries sharper stakes than it does at a Fortune 500 company with bench depth. A single disengaged salesperson, developer, or craftsperson in a twenty-person operation can crater a product line or client relationship. Replacement costs bite harder when recruitment budgets are thin and tribal knowledge walks out the door. More critically, small businesses often promote their best individual contributor into management without training, then wonder why the team erodes. The owner-operator is frequently the worst offender—still doing the work instead of managing the people, or mistaking availability for leadership. Schwantes's piece, even in excerpt, signals behaviors worth auditing against your own operation before the next quarterly review cycle.

What is genuinely useful here is the behavioral specificity Schwantes promises—five identifiable management patterns rather than vague 'bad culture' diagnoses. Too much management writing defaults to personality critiques or unactionable abstractions like 'be more empathetic.' Observable behaviors are audit-able: you can survey for them, spot them in skip-level conversations, or catch them in customer escalations that trace back to internal breakdowns. Where we remain skeptical is the one-directional causality implied in the headline. Some disengagement stems from market pressure, compensation misalignment, or personal life factors no manager can fix. Framing every departure as a management failure risks infantilizing employees and letting organizational strategy off the hook. The behaviors matter, but they are not the whole equation.

The downstream effects of managerial disengagement-drivers cascade unevenly. Your highest-performers typically leave first—they have options, and their departure signals to remaining staff that competence is not rewarded with stability. Mid-tier employees may stay but calcify into compliance rather than contribution, the quiet quitting that drains operational energy without triggering immediate crisis. Customers notice secondhand: delayed responses, quality slips, account manager turnover that breaks relationship continuity. For the owner who is themselves the problematic manager, the cost is compounded by denial—without peer feedback structures, the blind spot persists until financial metrics force confrontation, often too late.

Watch for whether Schwantes's five behaviors overlap with patterns you can already half-identify in your own organization. The test is whether you can name specific instances from the last ninety days, not whether the concepts feel familiar. If you cannot, you are not paying close enough attention. Actionable next steps: institute brief, structured exit interviews conducted by someone other than the departing employee's manager; run a quarterly anonymous pulse survey with questions tied to managerial behaviors, not generic satisfaction; and most critically, audit your own calendar—if you are spending less than 40% of your time on people development, you are likely the bottleneck Schwantes describes. The link below expands the five behaviors; use it as a diagnostic, not a confession.

“When talented people disengage, the problem may be sitting one level above them.” — Inc. Magazine

Takeaway: Audit your last three departures for managerial causality before your next hire, and schedule a skip-level conversation this week.