When People Leave

Make Sure People Leave for Positive Change

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Have You Got a Minute?

We’ve all been there.

For the first time in a while, you’re having a pretty good day. You’ve not had many interruptions and you’re making measurable progress on the things you need to be working on. All of a sudden, Alice, who’s one of your stars, walks towards your desk and makes eye contact whilst raising her eyebrows. “Have you got a minute?” she says. “Sure,” you reply, leaving your chair and heading towards the nearest empty meeting room. You notice that something feels a bit odd. You wonder why. You enter the room following Alice and let the door click shut behind you. The air feels heavier than usual.

“What’s up?” “I… just wanted to let you know that I’ve been offered a role elsewhere. It seems like a great opportunity, so I’d like to tell you that I’m handing in my notice and I’ll be leaving.”

Your day isn’t going so well anymore.

How is that project going to get delivered without Alice? She was critical to getting the new infrastructure rolled out! How are Andy and Ben going to react? They get on so well with her. Will they follow her to this new place? How are you ever going to replace her? Why would she ever want to leave?

It Happens

People are always going to leave. It’s normal and it sucks. It especially sucks if you’re a manager. Your output and performance depend heavily on your team: you want to make sure that you’re staffed with great people. You know how hard it is to find talented folk, especially if you’re operating with a limited budget.

These days, we can’t expect people to stay at their jobs indefinitely, especially in the technology industry. Depending on how much you’d like to believe this article, the average tenure at the top ten technology companies is between one and two years (2017 data). My parents would certainly be shocked by that statistic. My father’s last job before he retired had him doing eighteen years of service. In this new world where people are always going to leave, how can we hope to make the best of the situation? How can we adjust our own expectations and feelings about people leaving to make the situation as painless as possible?

First, let’s embrace that previous sentence again. People are always going to leave. It’s normal and it sucks. Just read it a few times and let it sink in. As a manager, you are doomed to failure if you think that you are going to keep everyone in your current team indefinitely. You will only set your expectations so that you feel terrible when someone hands in their notice. Be comfortable with the fact that all of our careers are different and we are all motivated by different things: challenge, location, comfort, working hours, programming languages and frameworks, friends, and new opportunities — to name but a few. All be conflicting forces in life decisions.

The best that you can do as a manager is to make sure that people are leaving for positive change. Focus all of your attention on making sure that people aren’t leaving for bad reasons, and let them depart with amiability and your blessing.

Good Reasons for Leaving

Our lives are more connected, varied, and challenging than they have ever been — this is especially true in the technology industry. There is more societal pressure on those at the start of their career to get the best experience they can get, no matter where it is. I see engineers bouncing between companies and cities at one to two–year intervals. 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 similar industries. Academics face the two-body problem — a struggle couples face when trying to find tenured academic work where they can still live together as a family. People in technology and creative jobs are not limited as much by lack of opportunities, but couples do face tension between their ideal jobs and the ideal location. Our career drive often throws a grenade under our natural human instinct to settle.

People you are managing are always assessing other opportunities. When someone tells you they are leaving, you may be quick to anger, seeing it as yet another problem to deal with. You may assume they are ungrateful for 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. These assumptions are rarely the case. People leave for legitimate reasons with no malice towards you as their manager. For example:

• New opportunities. Sometimes there is no room for an employee to be promoted any higher in your department. So instead, they decide to do that role elsewhere, or they decide to join a company where there is more room for that role to be created — like an early-stage start-up in a phase of fast growth. The person may have worked at your company for a long time and just fancies a change in surroundings and the type of work. Maybe an opportunity has come up to work with their best friends. That’s totally natural, and it’s not your fault.
• Family. Your employee’s partner may have been offered the job of a lifetime elsewhere, so 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 is not local. They may want their kids to go to a particular school, perhaps because their child needs a particular education due to learning or physical disabilities or even academic brilliance. You can’t control these things, so just let them be.
• Compensation. Sometimes people are in the right industry at the right time and get offered a life-changing compensation package elsewhere. Maybe it is the sort of package that will allow them to retire ten years earlier. Perhaps it will allow their partner to 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, just be happy for them. It’s a nice thing.

In these situations, you have not done anything wrong. There is a swirling and complex web of life outside of work that pulls and pushes people in a multitude of directions. Become the facilitator here. Focus on negotiating a date for them to leave, what sort of work and knowledge they need to hand over and to whom, and on beginning recruitment for their replacement. Always offer a reference if needed, either formally or through a network like LinkedIn. Keep it amicable, because the industry is closely connected and you may just end up working with this person again in the future. Leave the door open and the mat out.

Bad Reasons for Leaving

Sometimes, people leave for bad reasons. Let’s exclude people being let go due to bad performance because as a manager, that is a process that you have initiated and are driving through. The bad situations I refer to are the ones Andy Grove called “zingers.” What he was describing was the situation 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. 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 issues include:

• Compensation. Your direct report was unhappy with their end-of-year pay increase, yet they felt that they were unable to talk about it openly. They got continually more annoyed to the point that they answered that email from a headhunter and went for an interview elsewhere. You found out only after they accepted the other job offer, giving you no opportunity to try and rectify this pay issue over time.
• Issues with coworkers. Your direct report simply cannot stand one of the people on their team, and each day over the last six months has been immensely frustrating. They don’t have any issues with their coworker’s work; in fact, it’s very good. However, their personalities clash badly. They didn’t want to bring the issue to you as they felt it was a personal issue rather than a professional one.
• Career progression. The person hands in their notice because they have been offered a team lead role at another company. 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 starting and they would have been a good fit. You didn’t even know they were interested in being a team lead!
• Lack of challenge or new work. The person is bored with writing code for the API and would love to increase their skill on high-throughput data ingest. They didn’t think they could ask to move teams, as they felt that they were employed only for their current role. You, however, know that they could have just asked to move teams. Why didn’t they say anything? Why are you now holding their notice?

The root cause is the same: a lack of open and honest communication. Once somebody has accepted a job offer elsewhere, it becomes much harder for them to back out: it’s a tricky and embarrassing situation. Many of my other articles beat the same drum: keep close, open, and honest relationships. 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.

Negotiation?

If someone has surprised you with their notice, one tactic is to negotiate changes to their role that might keep them at the company. Negotiating points might be a change of team, an increase in pay, more flexible working hours, extra time to do personal projects, and so on. For good leavers, negotiate all you’d like. However, if you have a good relationship with your direct report then you probably should have seen their notice coming. You knew about their life situation changing. Your negotiation should come from a position of trying to help them so that they are more likely to stay with you.

For bad leavers, try to gauge how far gone they already are. My own advice here would be to exercise caution. It’s likely they sat on their issue in silence a long time, and whether you like it or not, their trust in you and the company has eroded significantly. For the effort you expend negotiating, you may end up in the same situation in the future. Should you go to the effort of removing an open headcount to create the budget to make a counter-offer, switching people around on teams at short notice to allow a team move to happen? Mentally they may have already changed jobs, and reengaging a disgruntled employee can be very difficult. It’s your call, but be careful. They are not quite the same person that you hired.

And You’re Still There After All

Whether your direct report is leaving for good or bad reasons, you’re still there. The loss can feel upsetting in the same way that it does when you lose a friend. It can be easy to feel isolated or betrayed, or that you’ve let someone down to the point that they have departed.

Remember that if they leave for good reasons, it’s not your fault. If it’s for bad reasons, then you’ve learned a lesson and you’ll do better in future with everyone else on your team. And if you’re still feeling low, confide in other managers in your organization. They’ll have been there before.

You have a duty to facilitate others towards their career happiness, even if that happiness is found elsewhere and without you. It’s hard, but you’ll be remembered as a good boss.

If you enjoyed this article, be sure to pick up James Stanier’s books from The Pragmatic Bookshelf:

Further Reading

Also by James Stanier:

Become An Effective Software Engineering Manager on Medium: