THE GREAT CORPORATE BAKE OFF: week 1:Why Your Retention Strategy is All Icing and No Bake

I’ll admit something upfront: I am a terrible baker.

Now, don't get me wrong, I absolutely love to watch a bit of Bake Off on the TV. But when it comes to my own kitchen? Shock horror, please don't tell anyone, but my daughters' birthday cakes are bought pre-made. Luckily, my husband is a fantastic cook, and I have great friends who are master bakers (you know who you are!).

Because I know my limitations, I leave complex celebration cakes to the specialists.

Yet, in the corporate world, I see highly intelligent, well-intentioned leaders playing "head baker" with their infrastructure every day. They try to fix systemic exhaustion by adding a beautiful layer of buttercream icing: mindfulness apps, wellness webinars, and free fruit baskets.

But let’s look at the actual chemistry of the mix:

If your underlying operational recipe requires a 60 hour workload to hit a 40 hour contract baseline, the cake is fundamentally raw in the middle.

When a cake tastes horrible, it isn't because your people lack a good attitude, and it certainly isn't because you don't care. New Zealand executives are trying incredibly hard right now under immense pressure.

It’s simply that the internal recipe is buried under invisible layers of structural complexity, like conflicting KPIs, fragmented communication channels, and unrealistic capacity models.

You cannot fix a fundamental structural mix with cosmetic icing.

Over the next four weeks, we are stepping into the tent for The Great Corporate Bake Off series to look at why these structural recipes fail, why we accidentally blame the bakers for a bad formula, and what a sustainable mix actually looks like.

What ideas do you have to make the operational recipe sustainable? Let's start a conversation in the comments below.

Originally published on Linkedin