One of my staff members announced that she has accepted a position with another company and would be leaving my team. I have a lot of feelings about it. Some are bound up in my team’s needs and how I’ll be able to fill in the leadership and talent gap that she’ll create. Some are opinions on whether that was the best career option open to her. I’ll readily admit to some disappointment that I did’t have the time to fulfill the promise that I had made to promote her along the career path she was pursuing while on my team. However, I hope that this individual only saw and experienced one thing from me: constant support and enthusiasm.

You can’t make their mind up

Lopp writes in Shields Down about how people come to quit and how he takes it personal. I’m assuming that it’s a somewhat dialectical piece that’s a basis for conversation. I say that, because it the piece feels like ever resignation is a personal failure. I don’t feel that. I can’t feel that. That doesn’t make sense for me.

First, I’m not a “company man” and, even if I owned the company, I’m not sure I could be one. The expressed growth plans of any given business are not guaranteed to meet the career goals of any individual at any given point in their career trajectory. At best, we can hope to align goals and career for years, maybe even a decade, at a time. There are instances where individuals stay with a company for multiple decades, but I’m not sure the days exist where that makes sense anymore. There was a time when someone would be rewarded for their loyalty to a company, but those days don’t exist anymore.

More to the point, I sincerely hope that anyone that works with me finds that their professional growth will slingshot them well past the company’s current ambitions. If I can’t bring someone up to par with our professional expectations, then I’m failing as a manager. If I can bring someone up to current expectations but can’t grow them beyond that, then they need to go elsewhere to continue growing. If I can grow them beyond the company ambitions, then we have a window of opportunity to grow the company and the employee. It’s on the company to grow rapidly enough to provide continued growth to my team. If it can’t, then I should fully expect to watch my team take those considerable talents to other places where they can apply their knowledge and grow, either themselves or their own teams.

And so, to a very real extent, I expect (and hope) that my team will surpass me. I’m growing a business on their talents. When those talents exceed the business, I have to face reality. There are a lot of limiting factors to my business growth that don’t include the raw talent of my team. I can’t expect them to wait on the world to right itself so that they can express themselves. I can’t magically make the business grow to meet their salary worth or their creative ambitions. But I can acknowledge when they are ready to move on and be ready to grow their replacements. More on that in a bit.

But first, I really want it to be a difficult decision for people to leave my team. I want them to want to stay. I want them to already know what their career path is. I want them to know the growth, both professionally and artistically, that they’ll be giving up. They deserve to know what that looks like and the consequences of leaving my team. Not in any kind of deprivation sense. But more in that I’ve already had the real talk with them about ambitions, growth, and timelines.

I don’t want anyone on my team to leave with a “bird in the hand” mindset. Everyone should know exactly where they are on their career paths and trajectories. The opportunity that comes should be difficult. They should have a hard choice. I don’t want to lose any staff members to petty stuff. I want to lose them to crucial moments. I want them to make a hard and meaningful career decision. They can only do that if (a) they feel like they’re growing on my team, (b) they know what they are growing towards, and (c) it’s meaningful to them.

If I did my job right as a manager, my staff is wrought with uncertainty on whether they are making the right choice because they are already deeply invested into the career path that they will be giving up.

Your job is to support them

In the same vein, if I am doing my job right as a manager, then my job is to absolutely support my staff member as they transition into another roll. Even if he or she is having second thoughts about turning in a resignation, my job is to support them and encourage them that they have made the right decision. This is paramount.

There is no “diving save” here. There is no cancelling the resignation. I can’t unring that bell. And I don’t want to. That’s a fool’s errand and only fools will do it.

When someone on my team decides to leave, it’s not a decision that happened when they told me. It’s a decision that happened long ago. I don’t care how good the offer was, my staff member made a decision to sit at the table and hear it. There’s something there that indicates a growth away from my team.

But growing apart doesn’t mean that there’s a negative critical response. I’m fully on board with someone growing their career in a way that I can’t provide. That’s healthy and responsible. My job as a manager is to understand, mediate, mentor, and guide them along that path. It’s literally my job to grow their careers, even if it’s not with me. I should not and cannot stand in the way of that.

Adopting this mindset comes with a few benefits. First, I’ve found that supporting the individual makes the entire process of separation much, much better. The individual has a sense of trust throughout the process and is willing to provide so much more effort in the final two weeks. I’ve seen individuals that take the resignation period as a prolonged in-office vacation, but I’ve found that most people really want to support their peers. They care for their teams. Give them that space and they’ll fill the last two weeks with as much work as they can cram in.

Second, the feedback gets a lot better. If someone feels an iniminical relationship with the company, then the exit interviews are pretty well useless. They have their feelings, but they are so detached that it doesn’t have to match what’s really going on. If someone still feels a connection to their team and to their manager, then they make a concerted effort to provide meaningful feedback that’s intended for growth. People who feel supported as they are on their way out have an inclination to support the people that they left. It’s also an opportunity for some of the most honest feedback that you can get. Do not let that pass!

Third, your support will be noticed by the team. It doesn’t really matter how, but it does. It may be that the individual mentions the support to others. It could be that others notice your language and behavior. It could be that this is just a part of your natural behavior that’s exhibiting itself in this moment. In any case, how you support someone leaving your team will be recognized by people on your team. If you are cutting and rude to someone on the way out, then your team recognizes that your support is conditional. Those conditions will be the rules by which your staff relates to you. If you show enthusiasm and graciousness to people choosing new opportunities, your staff will be willing to challenge you and themselves. If you want a growth mindset in your team, you absolutely must celebrate every growth opportunity, not just the ones that benefit you.

You have a new opportunity

In my experience, the primary response to someone leaving the team is one of immediate personal reflection. There’s a whole sense of how this will change goals and timelines, of the additional headaches and work that it introduces, of how it will create additional load on you, the manager.

These are, to the extent that they are practical responses to the immediate task in front of you, fair. But they are the least interesting questions possible.

If someone is leaving your team, you should be trying to reframe it as a gift. You have an unexpected opportunity. This isn’t some “change your perspective” bullshit; this is about as real as it gets. You have a legitimate opportunity to make a pivot in a positive direction if you act deliberately and appropriately. Don’t screw it up.

Let’s say that you’re like me and losing someone in a leadership position. That means that there is a gap available for other people to grow into. There’s a need for leadership. I have options! I have some people on my team who are looking to be challenged. I have an opportunity to assess whether this is the challenge that they are looking for. I can provide career and professional growth by identifying them.

Alternatively, this may be a direction opportunity. We’ve had success with the leadership that we’ve put into place. Now that it’s disrupted, I can choose to either fill it in, leave it vacant, or find someone with new talents. My mind is racing with opportunities. I can bring in some more senior leadership that would allow me to escape some of the day-to-day decisions and focus on long term vision setting. Or I can bring in someone relatively green and grow someone that may fill in neatly. I might find someone with their own goals and I get to struggle with the growing pains of making that work while also learning from that individual.

I will greatly miss the team member that I’ve come to appreciate and trust, but I’ve also put my mind into how we can grow in her absence.

Don’t ignore opportunity

People can leave your team for all manner of reasons. Some may be personal and you can’t do anything about. Some may be opportunistic and you just can’t fight fate. Your goal should be that you’re growing your staffing beyond what you can provide more than they need to find something else because they’ve stopped growing. That requires some real humility as well as mentorship from you.

You can readily acknowledge that resignations can create risk for your projects and stress on your teams. Hopefully, you’ve invested a lot into their growth and trust in their talents. It’s natural to feel some deprivation when they announce that they will leave.

You should have also invested in bonds of trust and growth. Yes, gaps in talent can create risk. But gaps in talent provide opportunities for growth. It provides opportunities for creative fulfillment. If you are supporting your team appropriately, others should be able and willing to fill in gaps. They’ll already be on the path of growth into positions of leadership and filled with expectations of support from you.

I can speak to one situation when another person in leadership left my team. I spent the weekend thinking through what we’d have to do when the person actually left. To my extreme satisfaction, the rest of the team organically repositioned themselves. I had a few extra 1 on 1 meetings that week as individuals volunteered to fill in gaps and ask where they could help.

One of the incredible things about being supportive of your team is how readily they support you when you need it. That’s a lesson that never gets old for me. I fully expect that the support that I entrust into people leaving my team will be returned as my existing team repositions. They know that I have their backs because I demonstrate it consistently throughout our entire process.

That gives me enough overhead to realize that I don’t need to “fill in gaps” when someone leaves my team. I get to think creatively about what opportunities that provides. This is only possible because “saying ‘goodbye’ well” to someone exiting is a continuation of how I manage my team.

If you aren’t growing your team in such a way as to be able to wish them well when they grow beyond you, can you honestly say that you’re growing your team? Does your growth have limits? Are those limits practical, professional, or petty? Can you, as a manager, overcome those limits?