Shannon Ross
VP of Human Resources, Home Health
Amedisys
Episode 207
Why your best people leave: The critical role of connected leadership.
Current chapter: Built by People podcast features insights from world's top HR leaders
Built By PeopleMay 2, 2025 · 12:27
Thesis
“Effective leadership, grounded in clear direction, genuine connection, consistent feedback, and active career development, is fundamental for fostering employee engagement, retention, and organizational success, particularly in specialized and evolving work environments.”
Show notes
When Amanda Graor joined her organization, she found teams that were technically exceptional and leadership-ready by title alone. Engineers, scientists, and specialists promoted for their expertise — but with almost no preparation for what leading people actually requires. The result: high turnover, low engagement, and a culture that had never been deliberately designed. Fixing it required going back to basics, starting with leadership itself.
Amanda's playbook, shaped by formative years at GE and refined across the medical device and life sciences space, centers on one principle: you can't lead people you don't know. That's not a soft aspiration — it's an organizational design requirement. Her leadership development programs are cohort-based, tied to real projects, and built around communication as a core curriculum. The approach she returns to again and again is over-communication: not just informing people of what's changing, but explaining why, repeatedly, until it lands. That one habit, she's found, shifts behavior faster than any training program.
She's equally direct about who owns career development. Managers do — not HR. When leaders began delegating compensation, promotion, and performance conversations to the HR function, Amanda pulled them back. The relationship between an employee and their manager is the critical thread, and HR's job is to make those managers excellent, not to substitute for them.
- Building leadership capability in technical organizations — how to develop people who were promoted for expertise, not leadership skills
- The power of over-communication — why explaining the "why" is more effective than any engagement initiative
- Connecting with people as individuals — why "you can't lead people you don't know" is a design principle, not a platitude
- Who owns career conversations — how Amanda returned accountability for pay, promotion, and performance to direct managers
- Improving cross-functional performance — how shared purpose transforms siloed technical teams into true partners
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What you'll take away
- 1Implement leadership development programs that are tailored to organizational needs, cohort-based, and integrate coaching with practical projects.
- 2Practice 'over-communication,' especially by explaining the 'why' behind changes, to build employee buy-in and enhance retention.
- 3Leaders must proactively connect with team members beyond work tasks, understanding that 'you can't lead people you don't know' for effective leadership.
- 4Provide early and frequent feedback, and ensure direct managers own all career discussions including pay, promotions, and performance ratings.
- 5Improve cross-functional team performance by identifying a shared purpose ('the why') and fostering partnerships at every level between specialized groups.
What most organizations get wrong
- •Many leaders are stepping away from having career discussions with their employees, but direct managers should own everything related to an employee's career discussion, including pay, promotions, and performance.
In Shannon's words
“I always joke that I moved 4 times in 4 years with GE. I had various roles, specialists, generalists, all part of the healthcare business, but really got some broad exposure to HR and then moved from GE to Biogen...”
Highlights a career journey focused on gaining diverse HR experience through varied roles and company transitions.
“Wicked technical with almost no leadership experience. And so when I joined the organization, quickly identified we had this kind of middle manager group, like many organizations do, that just didn't have a ton of training in what good leadership looked like.”
Describes a common challenge in tech-heavy startups where technical experts are promoted without adequate leadership training.
“I can't say that enough. It sounds so simple, but communicating with people about what good looks like, that behavior was just as important as the outputs.”
Emphasizes the often-underestimated power of clear communication regarding behavioral expectations alongside performance metrics.
“One of my mentors always said, you can't lead people you don't know.”
A concise and profound statement underscoring the necessity of personal connection for effective leadership and team buy-in.
“I have found where leaders were stepping away from having career discussions with their employees and allowing an HR person or a compensation person or insert someone else here to have a career discussion. And as a leader, people should be owning Everything related to a career discussion, pay, promotions, performance rating, a bonus or not, getting a new job or not.”
Advocates for direct managers taking full ownership of employee career development, challenging the trend of delegating these crucial conversations.
The problems this episode addresses
- •Organizations struggle with high turnover and disengagement when technically proficient employees are promoted to leadership without sufficient soft skills training.
- •Acquired companies or satellite sites often face poor employee engagement and high turnover due to inadequate communication, especially regarding the 'why' of changes and behavioral expectations.
- •Highly specialized internal teams (e.g., biostatisticians) may excel technically but fail in cross-functional partnering, leading to inefficiencies and unfulfilled client needs.
- •A growing trend of leaders delegating career, compensation, and promotion discussions to HR, leaving employees feeling disconnected from their growth and development paths within the company.
In this episode
Built by People podcast features insights from world's top HR leaders
Built by People
Shannon Miller is a 20-year HR veteran at Amedisys
Amedisys VP of HR introduction
Can you share a specific example of a leadership development initiative that you implemented
Initiating a Leadership Development Initiative
Effective leadership can directly impact employee retention, according to Michael Miller
How Effective Leadership Affects Employee Retention
Shannon says leaders' influence significantly improve team performance
Leaders' influence
As a leader, you should be direction, connection, feedback and career
Shannon On The 4 Things Leaders Need to Have
Topics covered
Organizations and entities mentioned
Full transcript
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