Show Notes
How to handle employee resignation is the part of managing nobody trains you for. Somebody gives notice on Monday. By Tuesday the announcement is out, their meetings are canceled, and you have a job posting half written in another tab.
You think your team is processing the loss of a coworker. They are not. They are watching you, all week — what you say about the person who left, what you do about the hole they left, and how fast you act like it never happened.
The week after somebody quits is the most honest week your team will ever spend evaluating you, and most managers sleepwalk through it. They do two things in the first forty eight hours. They go quiet, and then they move fast. Both feel like leadership. Neither one is. And the second resignation, the one that lands about ninety days later, is almost always the one the manager caused in that week.
In this episode I walk through The Week After, three moves for the five days that actually decide whether anybody else starts looking:
ONE. SAY IT FIRST. Within twenty four hours, you tell the team yourself, plainly, and you say one true good thing about the person who left. Your silence is not privacy, it is a vacuum, and your team already knew before you did. Two warnings included, because the way most managers talk about a departing employee teaches everyone still in the room exactly what will be said about them.
TWO. ASK THE STAYERS, NOT THE LEAVER. An exit interview is an autopsy. Instead, inside five days, sit down individually with the two or three people whose leaving would hurt most and ask one hypothetical question that costs them nothing to answer. Then do not defend it and do not promise to fix it, because an unkept promise in that week costs more than the silence did.
THREE. DO NOT BACKFILL THE FEELING. Moving fast is usually about the manager's discomfort, not the team's need. Name what is actually dropping, put an end date on every piece of extra work you hand out, and go back to the person carrying the most and say what it is costing them. Work flows to whoever complains least, and that person is your next resignation.
Plus how it maps to the LEAD Framework: Listen, Envision, Align, Drive. And why losing a good person is not the test — the five days after are. ----------------------------------- Get my coaching frameworks behind the scenes. One idea and one small shift to your inbox every week. Start here: https://www.thejohnespinosa.com/start-here
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