When Staff Leave

Our lives and careers are more connected, varied, and challenging than they have ever been, and this is especially true in the technology industry. Those at the start of their career have more societal pressure to get the best experience they can get, no matter where it is. I see engineers bouncing between companies and cities year after year to keep progressing along their desired life and career path. You can’t hold people back.

Likewise, in an economy where house prices are continually rising, having just one person in a relationship working full time is much less likely, especially if both parties are in similarly competitive industries. There exists the two-body problem [Rog12] for academics, which highlights the struggle faced by a couple when each is trying to find tenured academic work where they can still live together as a family. For technology and creative jobs, we’re not limited as much by the lack of opportunities, but couples can face the tension between being able to do the job they really want and the location they want to live in.

Our career drive often throws a grenade under our natural human instinct to settle. As such, as a manager, you need to get comfortable with people leaving to progress their lives and careers.

Good Reasons for Leaving

Those that you are managing are always assessing which other opportunities are out there. When faced with someone telling you that they are going to leave, you can be quick to get angry and think that your employee is giving you another problem to deal with, that they are ungrateful of their position, that they’re just chasing money or prestige, or that they’re taking the easy way out of a hard year at the company. This is rarely the case. People leave for many legitimate reasons that show no malice toward you as their manager. For example:

• New opportunities. Sometimes there’s no room for an employee to be promoted any higher in your department, so instead they’re going to find that role elsewhere, or they wish to join a company where there’s more room for that role to be created, such as an early-stage startup in a phase of fast growth. Additionally, they may have worked at your company for a long time and just fancy a change in surroundings and the type of work that they’re doing. Maybe an opportunity has come up to work with their best friends. That’s totally natural, and it’s not your fault.

• Family._ Their partner may have been offered a job of a lifetime elsewhere and they need to relocate and find a new job nearby. They or their partner may have aging or sick parents and need to leave to offer the right level of care, especially if their family aren’t local. They may want their kids to go to a particular school, perhaps because their child needs a particular education, either through learning or physical disabilities or maybe through academic brilliance. You can’t control these things, so just let them be.

• Compensation. Sometimes your staff are in the right industry at the right time and get offered a life-changing compensation package elsewhere: the sort of package that could mean they could retire ten years earlier or that their partner could quit their job, take a year off, and then start their own business. That’s just the nature of a free-market economy, and as hard as it is for you and the team, just be happy for them. It’s a nice thing.

In these situations, you’ve not done anything wrong. A swirling and complex web of life outside of work pulls and pushes people in a multitude of directions. When somebody hands in their notice to you in order to depart for good reasons, your main aim should be to make their exit as amicable as possible. You can do this by being the facilitator in their departure. You can do the following to ensure that it goes as smoothly as possible:

• Work out an end date that works for both of you. A diligent staff member will want to make sure they exit on good terms, so talk to them about what they’re currently working on, how it affects the team, and when might be the best time for them to go. If they’ve already agreed to a date with their future employer then so be it, but, regardless, jointly put together a plan about what you’d both like done between now and their departure date.

• Ask whether they’d like a reference. They might not need one, but it’s common courtesy to ask, even if it’s just on their LinkedIn profile. It shows the outside world that this indeed was a good leaver and you both cooperated while they were on their way out.

• Focus on what needs handing over. Do a deep dive into everything that they’re working on. What needs handing over to other members of the team, and how? Would it be worthwhile them spending a week thoroughly documenting the work that they’d been doing recently, or is it worth them scheduling a session with the team to run them through it?

• Think of the ideal replacement and get hiring. Now that you’re going to have to replace this staff member, think of the team’s output and think who will best replace them. Then get that job description written and advertised. Refer to Chapter 7, ​Join Us!​ to see how to do this.

• Let them go with your blessing. Most of all, be kind and appreciative of the time that they’ve spent contributing to your team. Tell them that if the new gig doesn’t work out then they’re always welcome to come back into their old role, no questions asked. Give them a much-needed safety net while they embark on a new journey. You’ll be surprised how many do come back if you’re a good manager.

Bad Reasons for Leaving

Sometimes, people leave for bad reasons. But what do we mean by bad reasons? I’m not talking about a situation where they’ve stolen the office toaster or put a dead fish in the air conditioning. Typically these are the departures where you, as their manager, are totally surprised that they are going—where you are caught completely off-guard by someone handing in their notice, insofar that you know in retrospect you could have prevented it from happening. I’ve heard these situations called “zingers.” Often they have a similar root cause: a lack of open and honest communication from both parties, which results in simmering issues not being caught early.

Some examples of these zingers are below.

• Compensation. Your direct report was unhappy with their end of year pay raise, yet they felt that they were unable to talk about it openly with you. They got continually more annoyed about it to the point that they answered that email from a headhunter and went for an interview elsewhere. You found out about this for the first time when they had accepted the other job offer, giving you no opportunity to try and rectify this pay issue yourself.

• Issues with coworkers. Your direct report simply couldn’t stand one of the people on their team, and every day over the last six months has been immensely frustrating for them. They don’t have any issues with their coworker’s work; in fact, it’s very good. However, their personalities clash badly and they didn’t want to raise it to you as they felt it was a personal issue that would reflect badly on them rather than a professional one that could be resolved. It got so bad they applied elsewhere.

• Career progression. Your direct report handed in their notice because they’ve been offered a role at another company that’s a significant level up on the career ladder. They cite that there were no opportunities for promotion in the department. However, you know that in a few months a new team will be created and they would have been a perfect fit. But you didn’t even know they were interested in being a team lead! Argh!

• Lack of challenge or new experiences. Your direct report has become exceptionally bored of writing code for the API and would love to increase their skill on your data ingest architecture instead. They didn’t feel like they could ask to change teams, as they felt that they were employed for the role that they are currently doing. You never suggested anything else because they seemed to be so diligent at what they were working on! You, however, know that they could have just asked to change teams. Why didn’t they say anything?

So, what can you do to prevent this? Hopefully you’ll see a common theme at play here: a lack of an open, transparent, and candid relationship between yourself and your staff member. Fortunately, by reading this book up until this point, you’ll have already learned much more than many other managers about having strong relationships with your staff. This makes it much less likely to happen to you; however, it still can happen.

What you need to ensure is that you’re building conversations into your one-to-ones regularly about:

• Career progression. How often are you talking to your staff about their careers? Where do they want to go in the next six months, two years, and beyond? You’ve already learned how to give performance reviews that allow for introspection and goal setting in Chapter 6, ​The Most Wonderful Time of the Year​. However, later in Chapter 18, ​The Crystal Ball​ you will learn how to do a two-part career-planning exercise that will allow you to dig deep into the desires of your staff. You can refer back to this exercise continually over the years.

• Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Have you talked about the model that you learned in Chapter 5, ​The Right Job for the Person​ with your staff yet? You should. You should also revisit it occasionally to see whether your staff are working toward self-actualization or whether there are issues further down the pyramid that are nagging at them. If so, what can you do? Can you fix them?

• Pet peeves. Sometimes the tiniest annoyances can happen over and over again until they make you explode with rage. Is there anything that repeatedly bugs your staff? Do they have frequently frustrating interactions with anyone on their team? Are they secretly fuming at the state of technical debt in the codebase? Are they tearing their hair out over your ancient build system? It’s your job as a manager to uncover these frustrations and turn them into opportunities for your staff to make them better. Facilitate that difficult conversation with their colleague. Let them fix that nagging technical debt. Let them propose a better build system to replace your current one and find them the time to do it. There’s nothing more satisfying than scratching that itch that you previously couldn’t reach.

Most of all, if you truly care—which I’m sure that you do—your staff are more likely to be open with you. Be interested in your team’s life outside work, in their emotions and their hopes, both for their life and their career. Many clues will surface that you can use to keep your staff happy. You might just prevent people from leaving.