Before the Exit Interview

October 8, 2026

Over the course of nearly 30 years, I’ve watched a lot of really talented people leave organizations. I’ve hired people, managed teams, been part of executive teams, and I’ve also been the person trying to decide whether it was time for me to leave. One thing I’ve learned is that good people rarely wake up one morning and suddenly decide they’re done. Usually, they’ve been telling you for a while.

Sometimes they tell you directly. Other times it shows up in conversations about growth, frustration with a decision, a request for more responsibility, or simply a desire to understand where they fit in the future of the organization. The signals are usually there. The question is whether anyone is actually listening to them.

For high performers, I think one of the biggest signals is growth. Most talented people want to know they are getting better. They want to know what they are working toward. They are goal oriented and want to win. That is what makes them high performers. When they can no longer see that path, they eventually start wondering whether they need to find it somewhere else.

That doesn’t mean everyone needs a promotion every year. In one sense that is growth, but in my mind growth is much deeper. Sure, it could be a bigger role, but more likely it is exposure to something new, better coaching, or simply knowing that someone is invested in helping them become better at what you do. I think good leaders understand that distinction, and it’s also why listening has to mean something more than occasionally asking people if they are happy. Honestly, pretty sure that is the wrong question.

Growth Requires a Conversation

Some of the best relationships I’ve had with people I’ve worked for were ones where I had a pretty good idea where I stood. We talked about what I was doing well, what I needed to get better at, and what might come next. There was a certain amount of safety in that, even when the feedback wasn’t always what I wanted to hear. I knew there was a conversation happening about my growth and that I was part of it.

I’ve tried to create the same thing for people who have worked for me. I haven’t always gotten it right, but I believe people deserve to understand how you see them and where you believe they can grow. That requires more than an annual performance review. It requires actual conversations, coaching, and asking someone what they want before deciding for them what they want. I’ve always believed one of the most important responsibilities of leadership is helping the people under your stewardship grow. Occasionally, that also requires being honest enough to tell a really good employee that the opportunity they are looking for may not exist inside your organization.

That last part is hard because our instinct as leaders is to retain great people. Of course it is. But I don’t think our job is to keep talented people trapped in a role simply because losing them would be inconvenient for us. Our job is to help people grow. Hopefully that growth happens with us, but sometimes it happens somewhere else. That's reality and trust me that mindset will pay dividends long-term.

The mistake is assuming that because someone hasn’t left yet, everything must be fine. I’ve seen people raise an issue, talk about what they want to do next, bring an idea forward, ask for more responsibility, or simply say they don’t feel challenged anymore. When nothing really happens, they may bring it up again. When nothing happens again, eventually they stop bringing it up at all.

That moment should concern a leader much more than the employee who keeps pushing. The person challenging you, asking questions, proposing ideas, and occasionally frustrating you is still engaged enough to believe something might change. The person who has stopped doing those things may have simply concluded that talking isn’t worth the effort anymore.

And silence can look a lot like alignment if you aren’t paying attention.

Someone keeps showing up, doing their job, attending meetings, and hitting their numbers. They may even continue performing at a high level. From the outside, everything looks fine. Meanwhile, they’ve started imagining a future somewhere else. By the time they tell you they are leaving, the decision may have been made months earlier.

That’s part of the cost of not listening.

Listening Doesn’t Mean Agreeing

I think there’s an important distinction here because listening doesn’t mean employees always get what they want. I’ve had people ask for promotions I didn’t think they were ready for. I’ve heard ideas I didn’t think were good ideas. I’ve had people disagree with decisions I ultimately still had to make. Leadership would be pretty easy if listening simply meant saying yes.

Real listening means someone understands that you heard them, considered what they said, and were willing to engage with it honestly. Sometimes the answer is no, but there is a huge difference between hearing “no, and here’s why” and feeling like nobody heard you at all.

That difference is trust. When you have enough trust with someone, you can have remarkably difficult conversations without destroying the relationship. You can tell someone they aren’t ready. You can challenge their assumptions, give hard feedback, disagree, or ask them to be patient. But patience is a lot easier when someone understands what they are waiting for and believes you are invested in helping them get there.

One of the dangers of leadership is that the higher you move in an organization, the easier it becomes to believe you know what is happening inside it. You see dashboards, sit in leadership meetings, review engagement surveys, hear reports from managers, and maybe conduct town halls or employee surveys. All of those things can be useful, but none of them replace relationships.

Some of the most valuable information I’ve received as a leader has come from conversations that weren’t particularly formal. Someone telling me what was frustrating their team. A salesperson explaining why something that looked great on a slide wasn’t working with customers. An employee admitting they weren’t sure what their future looked like. Sometimes it was something I didn’t particularly want to hear, but those conversations were gifts.

The problem is that leaders can unintentionally train people to stop giving them that feedback. Dismiss enough ideas and eventually people stop offering them. Defend every decision and eventually people stop challenging you. Ask for feedback and then spend the conversation explaining why the feedback is wrong, and eventually people figure out what kind of feedback you actually want.

Then one day you look around and wonder why nobody tells you anything anymore. You may have created exactly what you rewarded.

People Need to See a Future

I keep coming back to growth because I think it sits underneath so much of this. High performers tend to be curious. They want to learn, solve bigger problems, and know there is another mountain somewhere in front of them. A leader doesn’t have to have a perfectly mapped career path for every person on the team, and in most organizations that would probably be impossible. But I do think we owe people an ongoing conversation about what the future could look like.

That means understanding what they are trying to learn, what kind of work gives them energy, where they want more responsibility, and what they believe they are ready for. It also means sharing what you see that they might not see yet. Sometimes that is an opportunity. Sometimes it is a blind spot. Sometimes it is a skill they need to develop before they can take the next step.

Those conversations don’t cost very much. Not having them can cost a fortune. Replacing a great employee is expensive. Losing institutional knowledge is expensive. Rebuilding trust on a team is expensive. Watching a talented person take their ideas, relationships, experience, and energy somewhere else is expensive, particularly when you realize afterward that some of it might have been preventable.

I don’t believe leadership success is measured by whether everyone you hire stays forever. That isn’t realistic, and I’m not sure it would even be healthy. People change, companies change, and opportunities change. Sometimes leaving really is the right next step. I’ve been fortunate to work with some incredibly talented people over the years who have gone on to do extraordinary things somewhere else, and some of them have become lifelong friends.

But I do think leaders should ask themselves a harder set of questions when good people leave. Did we know what they wanted? Did we understand what was frustrating them? Did we know how they wanted to grow? Did we give them honest feedback about what was possible? Did we create enough trust for them to tell us when something wasn’t working?

Or did we find all of that out during the exit interview?

By then, you may finally be listening. It’s just a very expensive time to start.