If Money Is Why They Stay, Money Is Why They'll Leave.
By Derek Neighbors on December 2, 2025
I watched one of my best engineers leave for a startup paying 30% less than we were.
Same week, I had to make a counter-offer to someone who was leaving for 15% more. He accepted. Stayed six months. Left anyway.
Two departures. Opposite salary directions. Same underlying problem.
The engineer who left for less money wasn’t irrational. She’d found meaning, ownership, and a team that needed her to build something that mattered. We’d been paying her to stay. We forgot to give her a reason to care.
The guy who took the counter-offer never really stayed. His body was in the chair. His commitment had already walked out the door the moment he entertained the other offer. We bought six months of attendance. We got zero months of engagement.
I learned something that year that changed how I think about teams: compensation is table stakes, not strategy. If money is why they stay, money is why they’ll leave.
The Myth
The logic sounds airtight: pay people well and they’ll stay. Pay them more and they’ll work harder. Match the competitor’s offer and you’ll keep your talent. Simple supply and demand.
Every retention conversation starts here. “We need to be competitive on comp.” “It’s a compensation problem.” “If we’d matched the offer, she would have stayed.” The annual raise becomes the primary retention tool. The counter-offer becomes standard practice. And slowly, compensation becomes the only conversation.
People work for money. Markets price talent. Competitors poach with higher offers. Everyone says they want more money when you ask what would make them happier.
Simple. Measurable. Directly controllable. And wrong about what actually drives people to stay or leave.
The Reality Check
Counter-offers buy you six months. Then they leave anyway. Multiple studies across industries show the same pattern: somewhere between 50-80% of people who accept counter-offers are gone within a year. Not because the money wasn’t enough. Because money was never the real issue. The counter-offer addressed the symptom. The disease kept spreading.
The highest-paid person on the team isn’t always the most engaged. Often they’re the most transactional. They’ve been trained that the relationship is financial. They act accordingly.
Meanwhile, people leave high-paying jobs for lower-paying ones with better culture. Every day. Not because they’re bad at math. Because they’ve calculated something beyond the paycheck: whether their work matters, whether they’re growing, whether they belong.
Aristotle had a concept for this: ergon. The proper function of a thing. A knife’s ergon is to cut well. A team’s ergon isn’t to maximize compensation. It’s to pursue excellence together. To build something that matters. To develop each other’s capabilities.
When compensation becomes the purpose, the real purpose atrophies. The ergon gets replaced by the reward. And a team without purpose is a collection of people waiting for better contracts.
The Hidden Cost
Watch what happens when money becomes the primary lever:
Every decision filters through self-interest. Why collaborate if my bonus doesn’t reward it? Why share knowledge if information is currency? Why help a colleague if their win doesn’t improve my numbers? The team becomes a collection of individual contractors who happen to share an office. Competition replaces cohesion. Hoarding replaces helping.
External rewards crowd out internal drive. This is documented extensively in psychology research. When you emphasize extrinsic motivation, intrinsic motivation fades. The work becomes a means, not an end. Craftsmanship dies when compensation is the only metric. Excellence becomes “above the minimum required to get the bonus.”
You become a bidder in an endless auction. Every retention conversation becomes a negotiation. People learn that threatening to leave is the raise strategy. The budget becomes hostage to whoever’s shopping their resume. Loyalty becomes a lease, renewed annually at higher rates.
The Greeks had a word for this: pleonexia. The insatiable desire for more that’s never satisfied. Compensation-focused cultures train people toward pleonexia. Every raise creates expectation for the next one. Every bonus becomes baseline. The hedonic treadmill makes lasting satisfaction impossible.
You’re not building a team. You’re feeding an appetite that only grows.
The Truth
Pay fairly and then shut up about it.
Compensation should remove the money question from the table, not put it at the center of every conversation. When people aren’t worried about money, they can focus on the work. When money is the constant topic, it becomes the only topic.
What actually creates retention that doesn’t require annual bidding wars? Not tactics. These map to how humans are constituted to flourish. We’re oriented toward the Good. Meaning isn’t a preference. It’s what we are. Money satisfies appetites. Purpose satisfies the soul.
Aristotle called this eudaimonia: human flourishing. The individual’s ergon is to actualize their rational capacity through excellent work. These four elements aren’t arbitrary. They’re what the soul requires to do that.
Purpose that transcends pay. Aristotle’s ergon applies to people too. When the work connects to meaning, when impact is visible and felt, when contribution matters beyond the quarterly numbers, people stay for reasons that can’t be counter-offered. You can always find someone to pay more. You can’t always find purpose.
Autonomy that signals trust. Control over how work gets done. Ownership of decisions and outcomes. Freedom to experiment and improve. Autonomy says “we believe in your judgment.” Micromanagement says “you’re a cost to be managed.” People don’t leave autonomy for money. They leave money for autonomy.
Mastery that satisfies the craftsman. Continuous skill development. Progressive challenge. Recognition of growth, not just results. The deep human need to get better at things that matter. Compensation can’t buy the satisfaction of genuine mastery. And without it, no amount of money feels like enough.
Belonging that creates stake. Genuine relationships, not professional networks. Investment in each other’s success. Shared identity and values. The kind of connection that makes leaving feel like loss, not just transition.
None of these have market rates. None can be matched by a competitor’s offer letter. None disappear when a recruiter calls with a bigger number.
Can a competitor offer meaningful work? Sure. But they can’t offer the meaning someone has already built here. The relationships forged. The stake earned. The investment made. Purpose isn’t about the work’s objective features. It’s about connection to this team, this mission, this thing we’re building together. That’s not transferable.
The Shift
Stop making compensation the first conversation about retention. When someone’s disengaged, don’t ask what it would take to keep them. Ask what they’re working on that matters. Ask what they’re learning. Ask who’s investing in their growth.
When the resignation comes, resist the counter-offer. It usually fails, and when it works short-term, it poisons long-term. The person who stayed for money will always be calculating whether they’re getting enough. They’ve revealed their lever. They’ll use it again.
Start asking different questions in one-on-ones. Not “are you happy with your compensation?” but “what would you miss if you left that has nothing to do with your paycheck?” If they can’t answer that, you know exactly what you haven’t built.
Connect daily work to larger purpose explicitly. Don’t assume people see the meaning. Show them. Regularly. Connect the tasks to the impact. Connect the impact to something worth caring about.
Give autonomy before being asked for it. Trust first. Let people own their decisions and outcomes. The leaders who wait to be asked for autonomy are the leaders whose best people are already interviewing elsewhere.
Expect some departures. When money stops being the lever, the people who only stayed for money will leave. Let them. They were already gone. The ones who stay will stay differently. Their engagement will be about the work, not the negotiation. Their loyalty will be about belonging, not bidding.
This goes both ways. If you’re on a team where leadership refuses to offer purpose, autonomy, or investment in your growth, you owe yourself the pursuit of meaningful work. The obligation isn’t only on leaders. It’s on everyone who wants to flourish. And if you can’t leave yet, excellence is still owed. Bad leadership doesn’t excuse mediocre work. Epictetus was a slave. He didn’t wait for ideal conditions to pursue virtue.
The Diagnostic
Here’s the test: if everyone on your team got an offer for 20% more tomorrow, what besides money would make them stay?
If you can name three things immediately, you’ve built something real.
If you’re struggling to name one, the next departure shouldn’t surprise you.
Stop asking “are we paying enough to keep them?” Start asking “what besides money would they miss if they left?”
The answer reveals whether you’ve built a team or assembled a collection of contractors waiting for better contracts.
Final Thoughts
The engineer who left for 30% less sent me an email two years later. She’d helped build something that mattered. She’d grown more in that time than in her previous five years. She thanked me for paying her well enough that she wasn’t desperate. And she said she’d never been happier.
I think about her often when retention conversations drift toward compensation. She didn’t leave for money. She didn’t stay for money. Money was table stakes. Purpose was the game.
If money is why they stay, money is why they’ll leave. Someone will always pay more. The question is whether you’ve built something worth staying for beyond the paycheck.
Purpose can’t be counter-offered. Neither can belonging. Neither can genuine investment in someone’s growth.
Those are the retention strategies that don’t require annual bidding wars.
Ready to build teams that stay for the right reasons? MasteryLab provides frameworks and community for leaders who are done buying loyalty and ready to earn it.
