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When I first came into the work force, I was very young, around 11 years old. My job was to stand outside a Southern California grocery store selling the local newspaper. I’m sure you’re thinking the same thing I was: Couldn’t they just buy it from the machine? Yes, they could. In fact, the newspaper machine was right in front of me.

You may be asking why I was needed – along with dozens of other 11-year-olds doing the same thing. The answer is simple. People would rather buy from people. People enjoy the relationship aspect of doing business with a person as opposed to a machine.

I really enjoyed that job. I loved the relational aspect, and it taught me the importance of listening, being dependable and responsible. And I made a little coin, which didn’t hurt either. As I got older and started to take other jobs, I had a lot of realizations about the relational aspect of “work.” My first discovery was that the most important relationship is the one you have with your manager. A manager can make or break your desire to work for a company.

Over the years, I’ve been asked how I developed my managerial style. My answer: I developed it from all the bad managers I’ve had in my life. I’ve tried to do the opposite of what they did. Recently, Yahoo Inc. released a study that backs up my way of thinking. They put numbers to my theory and added detail to help understand the effect bad managers can have.

According to the study, 72 percent of employees are open to new career opportunities in 2008. More than four out of 10 employees (43 percent) blame either their dislike of their boss’s management style or the lack of company mentorship as the reason they’d be willing to leave their current job. The results of that study are staggering. Based on experience and conversations, those results are 100 percent accurate.

If that isn’t enough, the study also found that 55 percent of all respondents agree that “people don’t leave companies, they leave managers.” Think about it for a second. Let that marinate in your mind on what that means to the bottom line of a company when good people are leaving for a very controllable reason. Retention is key to the success and enhanced profitability of any company. And with all the talk and need for work-life balance and enhanced benefit packages, the largest number of respondents (32 percent) say having a good boss or supervisor ranks first in determining long-term job happiness.

I don’t believe most bad managers are bad on purpose. I do believe they haven’t been trained how to manage properly. Think about how many people are promoted into that position and then never taught how to properly motivate, manage, give recognition, etc. Unfortunately, this is how most companies operate.

I can’t encourage you enough to hold exit interviews and find out why people are leaving. Better yet, implement a training program for new managers with yearly refreshers. Adding a 360 review into the mix would also enhance the chance for a manager to change before losing his or her staff. If you think it’s expensive to train people and have them leave, try not training them and having them stay.