Here is an excerpt from an article written by Lori Goler, Janelle Gale,,Brynn Harrington, and Adam Grant for Harvard Business Review and the HBR Blog Network. To read the complete article, check out the wealth of free resources, obtain subscription information, and receive HBR email alerts, please click here.

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People don’t quit a job, the saying goes — they quit a boss. We’ve heard it so many times that when we started tracking why employees leave Facebook, all bets were on managers. But our engagement survey results told a different story: When we wanted to keep people and they left anyway, it wasn’t because of their manager…at least not in the way we expected.

Of course, people are more likely to jump ship when they have a horrible boss. But we’ve spent years working to select and develop great managers at Facebook, and most of our respondents said they were happy with theirs. The decision to exit was because of the work. They left when their job wasn’t enjoyable, their strengths weren’t being used, and they weren’t growing in their careers.

At Facebook, people don’t quit a boss — they quit a job. And who’s responsible for what that job is like? Managers.

If you want to keep your people — especially your stars — it’s time to pay more attention to how you design their work. Most companies design jobs and then slot people into them. Our best managers sometimes do the opposite: When they find talented people, they’re open to creating jobs around them.

Working with our People Analytics team, we crunched our survey data to predict who would stay or leave in the next six months, and in the process we learned something interesting about those who eventually stayed. They found their work enjoyable 31% more often, used their strengths 33% more often, and expressed 37% more confidence that they were gaining the skills and experiences they need to develop their careers. This highlights three key ways that managers can customize experiences for their people: enable them to do work they enjoy, help them play to their strengths, and carve a path for career development that accommodates personal priorities.

Crafting Jobs for Enjoyment

Many of us have unanswered callings at work — passions that we didn’t get to pursue in our careers. Whether we lacked the talent, the opportunity, or the means to make them our occupations, landing in a different career doesn’t make these passions disappear. They linger, like the professional version of the one who got away. And since we spend the majority of our waking hours at work, there isn’t always time to pursue these unanswered callings as hobbies. So we look for ways to bring our passions into our jobs. Personally, we know a lawyer who missed his dream of being a pilot and so sought out aviation cases, and a teacher who walked away from a music career but brings a guitar to class. But inside organizations, people often need support to craft their jobs.

Managers can play a major role in designing motivating, meaningful jobs. The best go out of their way to help people do work they enjoy — even if it means rotating them out of roles where they’re excelling. A few years ago, one of Facebook’s directors, Cynthia, was leading a large team of HR business partners. She realized that she wasn’t spending her time doing what she enjoyed most: solving problems with her clients. She had taken on more responsibilities managing a large team because of her strength as a trusted adviser to some of Facebook’s key leaders. But once she was in the job, she realized it meant doing less of the work that energized her.

With her manager’s support, Cynthia hired someone new onto the team, with the long-term vision of asking her to run the team and then moving back to an individual contributor role. Cynthia wasn’t just hiring a direct report; she was hiring her future boss. Once the new hire was ramped up, and it was clear that she enjoyed the organizational and people management elements of her job, she and Cynthia made the switch. Cynthia is now thriving, solving problems with the clients she loves so much, and her new hire is leading the team. Keeping Cynthia at Facebook was much more important to her manager than keeping her in a particular role.

Too often, managers don’t know enough about what work people enjoy. It spills out in exit interviews — a standard practice in every HR department to find out why talented people are leaving and what would have convinced them to stick around. But why wait until they’re on their way out the door? One of us, Adam, has worked with companies in multiple industries to design entry interviews. In the first week on the job, managers sit down with their new hires and ask them about their favorite projects they’ve done, the moments when they’ve felt most energized at work, the times when they’ve found themselves totally immersed in a state of flow, and the passions they have outside their jobs. Armed with that knowledge, managers can build engaging roles from the start.

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