Ep 573 | What to Do When Half Your Team Walks Out

Thank you for joining me today. It's Brian Gubernick, and welcome to the No Days Off podcast, where we believe that every single day brings a new opportunity to get better. Let's say you go away, maybe you go on vacation, you finally get a chance to breathe. It's a much-deserved break. You're super excited and you go on this trip and you have an amazing time. You finally get some rest. And then you come home, you get back to the office, and you learn that a portion of your team, your people, are leaving you. Let's just say for sake of conversation, well, 3 of your best people just quit. Now what do you do? How do you react? What should be your steps? Well, today's episode is gonna be about those moments. When leadership stops being this concept that we read about or we talk about here at No Days Off, and it starts being a crisis, leadership's in crisis. When the job isn't to necessarily feel good, the job instead is to survive and then rebuild and then lead anyway. Well, this particular situation actually happened to this guy that, that I work with, that I coach, just recently. And he called me and said, "What do I do?" And my reaction was, "Give me a minute to think through this," because this would be a new scenario. Yes, I've absolutely had people leave my world, but not multiple people at the same time, especially after I've just been out of the office for a little bit. So called him back the next day, and here was my response. I'm not saying it's the right response, but after thinking about it some, and frankly channeling some of the individuals I admire that, that I think have done a great job, uh, in leading through hard times, channeling some of their thoughts, here's what I came up with. Okay, I think you've got to set the tone. Set the tone in your mind more than anywhere else first. This is the job. Right, like you got to get your mind right, right? This is the job. This is what you as the entrepreneur, as the business leader, signed up for. See, leading a team isn't always about keeping people happy. It's about building something that's so good that some will stay and some won't, but the mission has got to continue either way. If you just got gut punched by your team walking out, Sure, you can feel bad for a moment, but don't beat yourself up. Don't collapse either. I would take it personally and then get up, dust yourself off, and take it professionally. In other words, it's okay to be bothered. It's okay to be upset. Just let that last for only a short period of time. Because again, this is the job. So let's set the tone by getting our mind right. And then I think we could start to deploy some tactical steps, tactical steps to rebuild and really regain control. So after you kind of get through that initial challenge and then get your mind right, here's what I do starting the next day, and I do it step by step. Number 1, I think you've got to own the room. What do I mean? I think you hold some sort of team meeting. Even if it's just you and, you know, the 6 people remaining or the 4 people remaining or the 10 people, whatever it may be, hold a meeting and address the elephant in the room. Address it with honesty and, and do so with, with, with zero spin. What I would say, and what I was advising this guy to say, is some key people just left. I didn't expect that. I'm not happy about it. I'm not thrilled about it. But I'm also not shaken by it either because I believe in what we're doing here. I believe in what we're building. Now, that, that would be the script. To break script now, I would say that transparency, in my opinion, is going to beat the spin every single time. It's going to beat the PR every single time. So I would own the reality and not sugarcoat it. Everybody sees what's going on, so let's go at it. Let's go right at it, acknowledge that some people left, you didn't see it coming. I'm not pumped about it, I'm not thrilled, but I'm also not shaken. This is just, this is what business building sometimes looks like, and I really believe in what we're constructing. So number 1, own the room. Step 2, I immediately move into re-recruiting the core. I would want to privately meet with every remaining team member. One-on-one, not, you know, I have that group meeting, but then I'm going to go one-on-one and I'm going to ask every one of them the following questions. First, why are you here? Why are you here? What are you trying to achieve? What's your mission? What's your goal? Let's, let's make sure we're on the exact same page. Odds are they've shared some goals with you, you know, in the past months or year or whatever it may be. Let's go through that one more time. Why are you here? Next question I'd ask is, what's working for you? What's going really well in your world? What makes you excited? And then lastly, what's not working for you? And I might be just sitting there taking notes and understanding. After I have the conversation around why are you here and what's working for you and what's not working for you, I'm probably then going to take a moment to reaffirm the vision. Not the vision I may have had a year ago or even 6 months ago, but the one that I am now going to build, right? And it might be a variance from what I had previously planned given the shakeup. I'm not just trying to retain these people, I'm actually trying to re-recruit them. I'm gonna, I am gonna be somewhat pessimistic in thinking, man, if 3 people left, more, more to come. So, I immediately am gonna go into re-recruiting mode. Specifically with those that matter most. So step 1 was own the room. Step 2, re-recruit the core. Now my third step is to try to analyze the shakeup or the exodus without the emotion. I don't think it's worth time blaming. I don't think it's worth time pointing fingers. Instead, I'd be asking myself, did they leave for a better opportunity? Or maybe did they leave to escape a broken culture or broken model? I'd also ask, were there warning signs that maybe, maybe I missed? What didn't I see? And then lastly, what were they saying, or maybe not saying, that I need to hear now? See, I would take— I know it's going to be hard, right, because it's emotional, but we're going to do our best to operate without emotion. We're going to take the reasons, or the supposed reasons, for the exits, and I'm going to turn them into insight. Because through that insight, I could then take action. I could figure out, okay, if this is why I think they left, or if this is what was going on here, how can I curb that? How can I fix that immediately? The warning signs that I may have missed Those are red flags still today. I've got to fix those so I could turn these exits into insight, and then I could start to take action. Step 4, now I'm going to start to fill the gaps, not the ghosts. And there's— that's an important phrase. I'm going to explain. I don't think you need another, uh, John 2.0 or Amy 2.0, you know, making believe that those were the names of the people left that, that were leaving. I said to the guy I was coaching, I said, you don't need to go find those exact people again. You need roles filled with the right people for this new version of your team, for this new version, this new vision that you have that we just talked about. Maybe you're redesigning some responsibilities, maybe you're rewriting job posts, maybe it's an opportunity for you to set some new standards. In other words, don't rebuild what broke. Let's build what's next for us. So fill the gaps, but don't do it with the ghosts of that, of those that were once here. And then step 5, I think you've got to set some sort of short-term, call it rally goal, energizing goal, some sort of short-term win. Create a short-term win, something that's maybe achievable in the next 30 days or maybe 60 at most. And make it public and make it team-wide and figure out ways for your people to feel progress rather quickly. Because one theme here at No Days Off, I talk about it quite a bit, sometimes the medicine for a scenario is just to create momentum. How do you create momentum? Start by having— creating some small wins, even if you have to manufacture those small wins, and let those small wins compound and they start to turn into bigger wins. So I think you, again, once you establish step 1, 2, 3, and 4, step 5 is to set that short-term rally goal and really get those there excited about something. Mind you, you're still trying to hire, and now you're recruiting to this, this, this high-energy environment that's focused on these short-term goals. I think you've got to kind of reframe leadership here. If they left you when you weren't in the room, you got to ask yourself, what kind of leader am I when I'm in the room, right? Remember, in this particular scenario with this guy, they left when he was on vacation, or they started to leave when they— he was on vacation. So you kind of got to ask yourself, what kind of leader am I when I'm in the room? See, the, the best leaders, they don't just recover from, from the failures or from the hits. They actually turn them into fuel. You don't build greatness through all of these perfect days and perfect weeks and perfect months. You build it when in scenarios like this, when the team suddenly shrinks and, and the pressure suddenly rises. You've got to lead anyway. Again, I know it's tough for this guy to see, and, and I could see his mindset shifting as we were discussing. It's tough to see the opportunity here But anytime something like this happens, it does present a new opportunity to figure out a different path. So one more time, those steps: own the room, re-recruit the core, analyze the reason for the losses, the exodus, fill the gaps, and lastly, set a short-term rally goal. This is a hard thing to do. And this is the hard thing about hard things. When it's all on you, it's all on you. I mean, you're the one as the leader that goes to bed at night thinking about that, that's it, that business. You're the one that wakes up in the morning thinking about that business. And when times are good and everyone's excited and we're having progress, it's a hell of a lot easier to lead. But when times aren't good, when there's chaos, when there's Exodus like this, It's hard. It's hard, but this is what you signed up for, and it's all on you. But there's, there's upside. When you rebuild from this, odds are your culture will be tighter. Odds are your team, your people will be more, more committed. And the truth of the matter is you'll be more battle-tested than you've ever been. So you've got to get back up. You've got to re-recruit, you've got to rebuild, and then you just got to lead like hell. You got to go crazy, and you're going to have to roll the sleeves up and go harder than you've gone in a while. But so be it, that's just part of the game. That's all I have for you today in the No Days Off podcast. Thank you so much for listening, and remember, every single day brings a new opportunity to get better. So let's get after it. [MUSIC] [MUSIC]