By Francis Flair

Not long ago, I sat across from the CEO of a company that was scaling its operations bigger. He told me, “Retention? That’s our customer service department’s responsibility.” He meant it sincerely.

But the numbers told a different story – clients were leaving faster than they could replace them, and the frontline team was burning out. This CEO made a classic mistake – treating retention as a departmental task instead of a leadership strategy.

The Hidden Truth About Retention

Here’s what we discovered together – the frontline wasn’t failing, leadership was. The business lacked alignment, systems and cultural buy-in. Retention doesn’t break at the point of service, it breaks upstream, where leaders fail to design the systems that shape the experience.

Here is why retention is not a frontline job:

1. Retention is culture-driven. If leadership doesn’t model it, frontline staff won’t sustain it.
2. Retention requires infrastructure. Without systems, the best people still can’t deliver consistency.
3. Retention begins in the boardroom. Strategic decisions around hiring, training and accountability either fuel retention or kill it.

Think of retention like airline safety. Yes, the pilots and flight attendants carry it out, but the real responsibility lies with leadership designing the systems that make safe flights possible. The same is true for retention. If leaders don’t take ownership, no amount of frontline effort will make up the difference.

Southwest Airlines isn’t famous just for its frontline friendliness. Their retention success comes from leadership’s commitment to culture, consistency and systems that empower employees to deliver. Retention is not about having ‘nice employees’. It’s leadership deciding that this is who we are, how we work and how we treat clients, always.

Retention begins at the top. Treating it as a frontline job is like treating sales as the receptionist’s responsibility, it doesn’t work.

Leaders who scale retention treat it as a system, not a department.

---