People leave jobs. If you are a manager, people will leave your team, just as someday you will leave your team.
When this happens it’s an opportunity, a chance to re-evaluate. While you might want to immediately pull out the job description that you used when hiring for the role last time, instead, take some time to think.
A chance to learn
When someone that works for you tells you that they are resigning, it can feel personal: ‘they don’t like working for me.’ It can hurt. You might immediately look for any reason why it isn’t your fault. You may obsess about everything that you could have done differently. It is natural to want to move on as quickly as possible.
Instead, after an employee gives you notice, take a day or two to process and get some distance. Recenter. Come back to them with an open mind. Do not look to assign blame and let them know that you are working to improve the team for the people that are still here. Ask what was not working for them and what they will miss, aiming not to assign any extra meaning to what they say. Take notes. Thank them.
Take some more time to distance, then come back again and think about the leaver’s words. Try to understand from their perspective what they experienced. If they are taking a more senior role elsewhere, was there an opportunity like that in your company that you could have helped them get? If they are joining another company to learn a different technology, was it a technology they could have explored in your organization? Was there another team in your company that they could have joined instead?
Your goal is to understand their unmet needs. Were there signs that you missed? Were there opportunities in your company or in your team that could have addressed their needs?
Once again, the goal is not to assign blame, and the goal is not to get the employee to change their mind either. The goal is to learn from this experience.
So moving forward, how can you approach your role in a better way?
Consider this process to be a personal retrospective, and just like in an Agile team retrospective, you may want to emerge with a list of things to keep doing, a list of things to start doing, and a list of things to stop doing.
A chance to change
As teams evolve they shift and mature. If the leaver has been in the group for a long time, they may have accumulated an unusual set of responsibilities and they may have influenced the technical decisions around their strengths.
While it may seem like the obvious decision is to look for someone with the same skill set, that is just ‘role inertia’ (credit to Omosola Odetunde for introducing that phrase to me). Instead think of this as an opportunity to re-evaluate and make a change without impacting someone.
Consider your technical vision for the team and the skill sets of others in the group. Is there something missing that could help you today or in the future? Is this role still needed? Should you repurpose the position into a different one based on the team’s long-term needs?
It is critical to be thinking about long-term needs and not short-term ones. A mistake tech leads often make is that they hire someone because of near-term demand. They assume that there will be a headcount later to cover the long-term need, but too often that headcount doesn’t appear and now the team is missing a crucial skill set.
Potentially your team is out of balance, where you have too many (or too few) senior folks. This opportunity means you can now rebalance the levels within the group. Maybe this role is no longer necessary and you can give a headcount to another team that needs it more, or is there someone on the team who is looking for a new challenge and can step into the role?
If you are in a position where you manage multiple teams then this might be an opportunity to re-evaluate the team structure, especially if the leaver is a manager. A way to approach this exercise would be to imagine that the person leaving was never on the team. Your manager has given you a brand new headcount and asked you to figure out how you want to use it.
Once you have a plan, you can then write the job description and look to fill the role, as you may decide that you need to replace the person with someone who has a similar skill set. If so, you can move forward confidently knowing that you have thought it through, and if you have also taken the time to learn you will hopefully retain your new hire for a long time.
