This resonates a lot with me. Early on, I had a good mentor when going into a leadership position who basically told me: "Screw the biblical saying about the sick who need the doctors. Try to spend 80% of your time with the good ones. You'll have more fun and be more productive"

It sounded very harsh and emotionally wrong at the time, but I've learned the hard way that at least for the purpose of building a working team and business, he was spot on.

As a lead, I've learned my most precious resource is my time and attention and one thing I didn't realize until very recently is that I'm rewarding the high performers by spending it on them.

But negative attention is attention as well, and if my team gets the impression I'm rewarding the ones who don't pull their own weight with excessive nurturing and pampering, they will get demotivated and eventually move on.

This is still distinct from abandoning, as I try my best to give everyone an equal chance to get started. But I've regretted more than once investing heavily into employees who ended up quitting anyway over their perceived complaints.

Wanters will always find a way. Not-wanters will always find a reason.