Archive for January, 2014


Your core employee decides to leave, what’s next?

In a start-up (I guess calling it a small organisation makes more sense) pretty much every single employee will have a role to play, and it’s nearly impossible to have a backup plan for everyone. In this scenario  anyone putting that resignation letter is going to hurt and will have impact in the company.

All the investments you have made with that person is going to drain. As a founder your natural reaction will be more emotional, angry, confused, lot of “why this ..that” type of questions will go in your mind! Most of the time your first reaction will be how to change that employee mind set and ask him to stay.

If you take a step back and think, the employee wouldn’t have made that decision lightly, he would have gone through all the implications and decided something else is better for him/her. On the other side, will you have the same confidence/trust sharing anything with that person who decided to leave. Either way, it’s a better decision to let that employee go, the more you prolong it’s going to cause more problems.

As a founder you need to understand, as a human being everyone’s expectations and priorities are different. This is one of the best quote on this subject

Waiting too long before acting is equally unfair to the people who need to get off the bus. For every minute you allow a person to continue holding a seat when you know that person will not make it in the end, you’re stealing a portion of his life, time that he could spend finding a better place where he could flourish. – Jim Collins

Even companies like Buffer who are known for their transparency and openness had to let people go time to time. By looking at their growth, culture and openness everyone might think, once you are there it’s a great place to be. But the reality is  different, here is the quote from Buffer CEO

No matter how awesome our hiring process is, it’s inevitable that sometimes the person is not a great fit. Now that we have grown to 13 people and had to make tough team changes along the way, we’ve started to see a ratio emerge. We now know not to be surprised if about 1 in 4 people we hire doesn’t work out. – Joel Gascoigne 

Analyse the situation and avoid it happening in the future

The best thing you can do is listen to what the employee had to say as part of exit interview carefully. See what went wrong, some of the common things to check and verify

This process will give you opportunity to learn what went wrong and possibility to correct it.