Observation #2
One observation from 25 years of building businesses and leading teams.
27 July 2026
I was once travelling on a particularly hot afternoon and stopped at a roadside kiosk to buy a bottle of juice.
Standing next to me was a labour contractor buying multiple two-litre bottles of cold drink.
Curious, I asked if there was some celebration.
He smiled.
“No sir. My workers have been out in the sun since morning.”
Then he added something that has stayed with me ever since.
“These are the people who help me run my house. I don’t have a big bank balance or even a house of my own. The trust and confidence of these people is all I have.”
It wasn’t a polished leadership quote.
It wasn’t something he had learnt in a management programme.
It was simply how he looked at the people around him.
Ironically, in the corporate world, we have a far more polished version of the same thought.
“People are our biggest asset.”
It’s probably one of the most repeated statements in annual reports, leadership town halls, strategy meetings and company value statements.
I’ve said it myself countless times over the last twenty-five years.
And I genuinely believe most leaders mean it when they say it.
Which is perhaps why something has always intrigued me.
If people are truly our biggest asset, why do conversations about them often become louder only when attrition starts increasing?
I remember attending a leadership offsite where we were working on the Annual Operating Plan.
As was our practice, every proposed initiative was followed by a discussion on possible roadblocks.
One business leader repeatedly raised the same concern.
“Attrition.”
“If people leave, our numbers will suffer.”
There was nothing unusual about the concern.
I’d heard the same discussion during earlier quarterly reviews.
As expected, the room quickly moved towards solutions.
Higher compensation.
Recognition programmes.
Retention bonuses.
Career progression.
Every suggestion had merit.
Then someone asked a question that quietly changed the conversation.
“How much time does your calendar show you’ve spent with your people?”
Not project reviews.
Not business meetings.
Not performance discussions.
Just conversations.
The kind that don’t necessarily end with an action item.
Nobody argued.
Nobody defended themselves.
The room simply became quieter.
It’s easy to declare priorities. It’s much harder to make time for them.
That question stayed with me.
A few years later, I noticed another interesting pattern.
A company was going through one of its toughest phases of attrition.
The explanation appeared obvious.
A new competitor had entered the market offering salary hikes of forty to fifty percent. Annual appraisals had just concluded, making those offers even more attractive.
Leadership started analysing the exits.
Department by department.
Region by region.
Eventually, manager by manager.
One pattern stood out.
A handful of managers consistently had significantly lower attrition than everyone else.
The compensation policy was the same.
The market was the same.
The competition was the same.
So what was different?
There wasn’t one dramatic initiative.
No special retention programme.
No extraordinary incentive.
Just something remarkably ordinary.
These managers seemed to know their people a little better.
Not because they had access to different reports.
But because they had invested in regular conversations, long before there was a reason to have one.
That observation quietly stayed with me.
Some years later, while speaking to a friend in a leadership role at another organisation, I came across the same idea from a completely different perspective.
The company had lost some of its largest clients.
Business was under pressure.
Competitors had naturally started approaching many of their top performers.
Everything suggested that key people would leave.
Surprisingly, many of them stayed.
When I asked him what had worked, I expected to hear about compensation corrections or matching offers.
Instead, he smiled and said,
“We may not have every external certification that recognises great workplaces. But we’ve always tried to act as if our people mattered, long before we had to convince them that they mattered.”
For some reason, that sentence immediately reminded me of the labour contractor outside that roadside kiosk.
Completely different worlds.
Different scale.
Different vocabulary.
One never referred to his workers as assets.
The other often did.
Yet both seemed to understand something that doesn’t always find its way into presentations.
Over the years, I have found myself paying less attention to vision statements and a little more attention to calendars.
Not because calendars tell us what leaders believe.
They probably don’t.
But they quietly reveal where time repeatedly goes.
Perhaps every organisation genuinely believes people are its biggest asset.
Perhaps every leader genuinely means it when they say it.
I certainly did.
The thought that stays with me is slightly different.
If someone looked only at our calendars—and never read our vision statement, leadership speeches or company values—would they arrive at the same conclusion?
I don’t know.
I simply found the thought interesting enough to write about.
Just an observation.