Are you tired of working with good employees? Looking for ways to ensure that your best people leave? Follow these 10 easy steps to guarantee your best people quit.

10. Make your onboarding program an exercise in tedium. Employees are most impressionable during the first week on the job. Every bit of information gathered during this time will either reinforce your new hire's "buying decision" (to take the job) or lead to "new hire's remorse." If onboarding and training are mind-numbing, how committed will your new hire be by week's end?

9. Treat everyone equally. This may sound good in theory, but your employees are not equal. Some prefer hands-on management, while others would rather take the ball and run with it. The key, then, is not to treat them equally, but to treat everyone fairly and with respect.

8. Insist on dumb rules. Great employees want to have guidelines and direction, but they don't want to deal with rules that get in the way of doing their jobs or that conflict with the company's stated values.

7. Don't recognize outstanding performance. If you do, their egos will simply run amok. They might even demand raises.

6. Don't keep your people informed. Tell them as little as possible. Just let them engage in wild speculation via the rumor mill.

5. Don't develop an employee retention strategy. It's inevitable some good and great people will leave. It’s the way the games played.

4. Tolerate mediocrity. There's no reason to make the hard decisions and let the underperformers go. After all, Bob may be the owner's cousin, and Betty has been here seven years. It doesn't hurt to carry a little dead weight.

3. Don't do employee-retention interviews. Wait until a great employee is walking out the door instead and conduct an exit interview to see what you could have done differently to keep them on board.

2. Don't have any fun at work. Yours is a serious business, and it must be taken seriously. Anyway, a person who enjoys their work and is having fun doing it must be nuts.

1. Micromanage. Squash creativity and innovation in the bud by telling them what they need to do and exactly how to do it. Don't tell them why it needs doing or why their contributions are important. And, above all, don't ask for their input on how it might be done better.