Lead like a gardener: 6 essentials for a team nobody wants to leave

Replacing one departed employee can cost between 50 and 200 percent of that person's annual salary, and the people most responsible for whether staff stay or go are rarely in the C-suite. They are the frontline supervisors. Gallup has long found that managers account for 70 percent of the variance in team engagement, and voluntary turnover tends to trace back to the relationship between an employee and a direct manager.

That leverage cuts both ways. Kristin Baird, MHA, BSN, president and CEO of the Baird Group, told attendees at the 2026 MGMA Summit that leaders tend to fall into one of two camps. Mechanics react: they wait for something to break, patch it and move to the next fire. Gardeners cultivate: they shape the conditions so problems are less likely to take root in the first place. In a health care labor market that has not loosened, Baird argued, the mechanic's approach leaves leaders permanently behind.

The gardener's mindset is learnable, and Baird breaks it into a sequence any practice leader can follow, from preparing the ground to pulling the weeds. The framework reframes retention as something a leader grows rather than something HR fixes. Here are the six essentials she says separate a team that drains you from one nobody wants to leave.