The Hidden Keys to Retaining Top Talent Before It’s Too Late

Most leaders lose top talent because they’re reactive rather than proactive—waiting until key players leave to ask, “What went wrong?” Brandon Thornhill, a former Navy SEAL turned elite CEO coach, reveals the insider playbook to retaining high performers before it’s too late. In this episode, Brandon exposes the root causes of top talent attrition—trends, data, and the critical leadership failures that push your best people out the door. You’ll discover: 

• How neglecting leadership fundamentals can cause your high performers to coast or exit
• The “Five C’s of Trust” essential for building loyalty—from character to consistency
• Why standards are the backbone of a winning culture and how casualness kills retention
• The proven process to attract, develop, and keep top talent (so you never feel the pain of losing your best again)
• Practical tips for fostering radical integrity, accountability, and a championship environment

 If you’re a CEO, team builder, or executive who’s tired of seeing your star performers walk away, this episode is your urgent wake-up call. Don’t wait until the damage is done—transform your leadership and secure the future of your organization. Brandon Thornhill is now helping top CEOs and entrepreneurs dominate their industries. His insights are built on real-world success, and this episode delivers the strategic blueprint you need to keep your lions in the jungle. Perfect for growth-minded leaders ready to reinforce their culture and ignite loyalty. Listen now—your top performers depend on it.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Welcome back to the Journey to Win. It's been a minute. Excited to be back here. I want to pour into you guys and give you guys the keys to the kingdom today. I get a lot of questions around this one specific area. And it says, Brandon, I am losing a lot of my top six and seven figure earners. What's the problem? Well, I'm going to give you the answer on how you can uh retain top talent. Okay, so maybe you're a top six and seven figure team builder, maybe you're the CEO of your own company, and you come to me and you say, Hey, Brandon, I'm I'm losing some of my top talent. What do I need to do to retain them? Well, listen, if you're coming to me already and telling me that you're losing top talent right now, then you're asking me, you know, how do I get rid of this disease when it's already at stage four cancer or something like that? Like you're very late in the game. What you should be doing, a better question is we need to figure out and ask way before on how can we prevent these things, build standards that become our culture that ultimately protects these things from happening in the first place. But listen, you're here, you're asking the question, and so it's good. The Bible says, seeking you shall find. So you're here and you're seeking, you're, you're, you're looking for growth, and that's the most important part. So I'm still going to give you the keys to the kingdom. But remember, Jim Rohn said one week of neglect will cause a year of repair. So our job as leaders is to um constantly be, you know, weeding the garden. It's to constantly keep our finger on the pulse of our organization because ultimately, you know, we can lead up an organization, give people, you know, the reins, but we can't, we can delegate responsibility, but we can't delegate accountability. Ultimately, we are accountable to our organization as a whole. Okay, so no matter what's happening, we're accountable. And so we can't delegate that. Now, there's two sides of this. So if you're, you have to remember, if you are out there and you have leaders leaving, the easy thing is to do is to look at them and say they're the problem. The hard thing to do is look internally and say, hey, what can I have done better to lead these people? How am I at fault here? How could I have been a better leader for all the people in the organization? It's very easy just to look externally and say they're the problem, they're the problem. But listen, we have to look for trends and we have to look at data and let them tell us a story of what's actually happened and have radical integrity, okay? Of looking internally first before we go and project externally as leaders. And so I think the first and most highest form of leadership is self-leadership, is looking internally and saying, okay, maybe we're the problem. Did the trends tell me this? Am I when they're leaving, are they pointing the fingers at me? Are they pointing the fingers at the culture and saying, listen, I just don't want to be a part of the culture that you have here? That's a possibility. Okay, so number one, when you're looking at um retaining top talent, is you have to be the leader that people want to follow. Okay, everything rises and falls on leadership at the end of the day. So we have to be able to build trust with our leaders. Trust is the highest form of currency. And I call it the five C's of trust. Number one is you have to be a person of high character. Character will keep you where talent can't keep you. Talent can take you places, but it won't keep you places because time always promotes or exposes a leader in their true character. So we have to be men and women of high character when we're leading effectively in organization. Number two is we got to be competent. Like you don't have to necessarily be the most competent sales guy or girl if you're in sales or the most competent dev person. Like if you're the CEO, you're hiring the best in those areas, but you got to be a competent leader, right? Leadership is a skill. And so you still got to be an effective communicator. You got to be an empowerer, you have to, you know, understand how to resolve conflict. Like all these little things matter. And how you communicate with your organization, 90% of the problems that you're going to have in your organization comes from, at the root, communication problems. And we also have to remember that about 70% of the people in the workforce feel undervalued. And so we as leaders, we have to constantly be making people feel like they're a part of our vision, right? And that they're a valued member of our organization. What they're doing matters. Their voice, they feel they feel heard, they feel respected. Like I can't tell you how many times I've worked with six, seven-figure team voters and executives, and they tell me I'm looking to leave because I just don't feel like my voice matters here anymore. I've seen seven-figure yearly earners leave an organization because they feel undervalued or they feel not respected by their leadership. And a lot of times what's crazy about it is their leaders do genuinely care, but the way that they communicate it to them, it doesn't feel like they care. It's very transactional. And when you're transactional, people don't think that you actually genuinely care about them. So another C of trust is you have to genuinely care about your people. The depth of your relationships is going to be the depth of your attention in your organization. So you want to build genuinely caring relationships with the people and show that you actually care about them and they're not just there to a means to an end for you, right? They're not just there to, you know, build your business or build your income. They need to feel like they're a part of a mission with you, man. And they're they're important part of your life, right? When you do that, I'm telling you, your people will run through the wall for you. Trust me. So you have character, you have competence, you got to be a high competent leader. You have to be a great communicator. Okay, you got to genuinely care and you got to be consistent. Like what version of you are they getting today? Are they walking on eggshells when they walk into the building? Because typically what's going to happen is they're going to want to avoid you. And just like any relationship, if you have a wife or a husband, eventually, if you're not consistent, if you don't care, if you don't know how to communicate, if you don't have high character, and if you're not a competent leader of your home, what are they going to eventually do in any relationship? They're going to eventually find someone who genuinely does care, who knows how to communicate and make them feel valued, respected, loved, cared for, right? Makes them feel certain in that relationship with you. So all of this stuff seems like common sense. It's a lot easier to talk about, a lot harder to go and execute. But at least you have a roadmap now. And maybe this is giving you a look behind the veil so that you guys understand the game that you're playing. Leadership is about relationships. It's about caring about your people. Okay, so once you get these individuals, you're going to attract them into your business. You're going to recruit them. Okay. Then once you get them in, you got to develop them, right? You have to develop in them whatever job, particular job that they're going to do for your organization. We're going to continue to over-deliver for them, right? We're going to underpromise, over-deliver to them. We're going to over-deliver on our ability to communicate to them and make them feel valued, seen, respected, like to have a seat at the table with us. It's so crucial that you constantly overdiver. Let me give you an example. Maybe you got a boyfriend or girlfriend, going back to this. Are you still dating them? You've been in the game maybe with them. You've been in a relationship with them for four or five years, maybe 10, 11 years. Are you still dating them? If you're not, most likely your relationship has grown stale. And so the law of familiarity can kick in. And what typically tends to happen is humans tend to create division, division, two visions. They begin to grow separate. And eventually there's they don't even there's no connection anymore. And so when when your relationship is like that, it's natural that eventually, most likely, unless you continue to get intentional and pour back into that and connect, eventually you're going to disconnect and you're going to go get a divorce, create a separation, or go find another partner. That's that's how that works, right? It's the same thing in business, it's the same thing in any type of relationship. So we got to continue to over-deliver to our top performers. Uh build a championship culture. Man, I can't tell you how many times I talk to top CEOs, executives, team builders, and I say, hey, what's do you have values in your organization? They say yes. Do you have standards? We do. Okay, so what are they? Can you tell me what your standards are in your organization? Yeah, hold on, hold on a second. Let me go find them. Brother, sister, you don't have standards. You have recommendations. And when when people feel like they're just recommendations and they don't have to truly live by them, that's what you get. You get a casual culture. Casualness creates casualties. You can't be casual with the standards because the standards become your culture. This is the game of inches that most people just don't understand. What is a standard? Whether it's a standard operating procedure that every single person follows, no matter what you're doing inside that system, or a culture, everybody needs to know the standards or the values, everybody needs to do it, and everybody needs to protect it. That's what ultimately becomes your cap your culture. So you can't just have top leaders that are out there projecting and holding people to the standards and the values of what you guys have written down, but then they're out doing their own thing. You just build a culture of hypocrisy. People will see you through that, and maybe that's why you can't retain top talent because certain individuals don't want to be a part of that. Right? So you have to live the standards. You have to know them, live them, protect it by ensuring that everybody else is meeting those standards. And if they don't, you can remove them out of your culture because they're not a good fit. Right? Jim Rohn says you got to nurture it like a mother, but protect it like a father. You got to protect your culture, but continue to nurture your people. Okay, so listen, if you want to retain top performers, you just I just gave you guys gold on how to do so. Nobody's really talking about this in the marketplace because most of the people haven't done this. I mean, our systems that we've built, not only did we do it in the direct selling space, but now I'm helping other companies and insurance and door-to-door and many different spaces, they're doing it. And so this system has scaled to 30,000 plus people in 25 countries. And we've had extremely high retention at our peak, by the way. We had around 92% retention over a six-month period at our peak, which is insane in the direct selling industry. So I'm giving you guys the keys of the kingdom to help you understand how to increase retention, retain top talent, so you never have to continue to feel like people are just leaving and going to the next opportunity because sometimes maybe it's us, maybe it's the culture we've created, but sometimes sure it can be them. But you have to look at the trends of data and let it tell you the story. Okay, so if this brought value to you today, make sure you comment, make sure you share, make sure you get this in the hands of somebody who needs this that's going to help them build a championship culture and help help them retain top talent. Okay. Follow and like and do all the things because I'm giving this to you guys for free. Now listen, my name is Brandon Thorneau, former Navy SEAL, helping CEOs, seven figure team builders become elite. Excited to be on this journey with you guys. I'll see you on the next episode.