When a key person leaves, hold a meeting so staff can process the departure, reassign their work immediately, show appreciation to keep others engaged, and communicate openly about what's next. These steps prevent the resignation from triggering more departures.
How do you handle it when a key team member resigns? It will impact your company culture. So here are 4 ideas on how you can protect that culture. I'm going to cover topics such as the emotional impact, the operational impact, retaining team members, and keeping morale high. So if we start with the emotional impact, you have to understand that resignations can be emotional for everyone. So hold a meeting that allows people to kind of talk about their feelings about the resignation, talk about how they think about what's happening. The second thing you want to start doing is managing the operational impact. So what does it mean when somebody is leaving? That means there are tasks and responsibilities of the departing member that need to be reassigned. You should delegate these tasks, of course, to other team members or hire replacement quickly. So Being very upfront and saying, hey, I need you to carry this additional load, but it's only going to be a short period of time. And here's the plan for hiring somebody to replace the departing member is a place to start. What do you do about retaining the existing team members? Well, first of all, show appreciation for your current team. If you're not doing it already, and I'm sure you are, then do it even more during this time of change. And second, offer incentives and opportunities for them to grow, to keep them engaged, and to avoid more people leaving. So really understanding why, how is this impacting, what are you thinking about in terms of what we're doing? And then see if you can do things for them that will encourage them to stay. And then the last thing is keeping morale high, which you do by communicating openly and honestly about what's happening and how people are feeling about the change. And then maybe organizing an extra team-building activity in addition to the ones that you normally would do. So those are 4 steps. Think about the emotional impact, the operational impact, retaining team members, and keeping morale high. And you will be doing just fine if a key team member resigns.
