The day starts like any other. You run back over yesterday’s conversations, check the diary, get ready for the day ahead. There are challenges, but that comes with the job.
Then you open your inbox and there is a message from the most talented person in your team. The one who has made themselves practically indispensable over the past four years.
Subject: New challenge.
You open it confidently. A new challenge, always interesting. What have they spotted this time?
They have found it somewhere else.
The resignation is rarely the surprise
What tends to shake leaders is not the departure itself. People move on, and that is a normal part of working life.
It is the second thought that lands harder: did I really not see any signs?
Usually the signs were there. They were just not the ones being looked for. Delivery was strong. The work was good. Nothing in the visible performance suggested anything was wrong, because nothing in the visible performance was wrong.
What had changed was underneath.
We all look through our own coloured glasses
Every person in a team shapes how that team works together. We each see the world through our own filter, and we rarely notice we are doing it.
Once you realise you are filtering, you can account for it. Particularly when you are drawing conclusions about what is really going on with someone else.
This is what Management Drives makes tangible. It shows that people and organisations are guided by thinking patterns and habits, and that those patterns come from what drives them. Those drives go a long way to predicting how a team functions, how it behaves under pressure, and what each person needs in order to stay engaged.
It is not a personality label. It is a way of seeing what is already there.
What the leader actually influences
You have a very large influence on whether people stay engaged. Not through perks or policy, but through whether anyone has genuinely asked what someone is working towards, and then followed through.
Most one-to-ones cover progress, blockers and priorities. Useful, and entirely about the work. They can run for years without once touching what the person actually wants next.
That is the gap the resignation email exposes.
One thing to try
Take the person on your team you would least like to lose.
Without looking at their objectives, write down your answer to three questions:
- What are they working towards, beyond this role?
- What part of the work genuinely energises them?
- When was the last time I asked, rather than assumed?
If the third answer is “I’m not sure”, that is the conversation to have this month. It does not need a framework. It needs asking, and then listening to the answer rather than reassuring them.
Knowing drives is not a retention tactic
It would be easy to read this as a way of keeping people, and it does help. But treating it as a retention tool misses the more useful part.
When you understand what drives the people around you, you stop being surprised. You can see why two capable people keep grinding against each other, why a change that seemed obvious met quiet resistance, and why the person everyone relies on has gone quiet.
The resignation email is just the moment the gap becomes impossible to ignore.
Drawn together from two earlier articles on LinkedIn. (opens in a new tab)
