Team member just quit? Here is your game plan for damage control

When someone leaves our teams, especially when they were really, you know, an A player, a 10X, or when someone quits abruptly, it can really throw us for a loop. And so that’s what I want to talk about today. What do we do? How to really do damage control so that it doesn’t throw off your whole business, doesn’t throw off other people in your team. And so you feel like, okay, I’m going to be okay. I’m going to move forward.

Welcome to the Managing Made Simple Podcast. I’m Leah Garvin, your host and team operations consultant. Through this show and my signature Ops Playbook, I condense a decade of experience driving team operations in some of the most influential companies in tech to save you time, money, and stress. It doesn’t matter if you’re a business owner who realized that running a team isn’t as easy as you thought it would be, or a new manager looking to learn the ropes, or are a seasoned manager ready to up their game, everyone is welcome to hang out with Managing Made Simple.

From conflicts to feedback to delegating and more, we leave no stone unturned when it comes to what makes us love managing, kind of hate it, and everything in between. Let’s go. Welcome back to the show. It’s a new year, new time for new beginnings. And sometimes for our team members, it means they decide to quit abruptly and we’re screwed, okay, as business owners, as team leaders. And this kind of thing, as much as we want to support our team members in finding the situation that’s right for them and flourishing and thriving their careers, when someone leaves our team, especially when they were really, you know, an A player, a 10Xer, when someone quits abruptly, it can really throw us for a loop.

And so that’s what I want to talk about today. What do we do? How to really do damage control so that it doesn’t throw off your whole business, doesn’t throw off other people in your team. And so you feel like, okay, I’m going to be okay. I’m going to move forward. And this is something that I think happens a lot at the beginning of a year, maybe at the end of a year. So if you are seeing a lot of shifts, not to take it too personally, there’s always opportunities to reflect on what we can do differently.

That’s one of the things I’m going to talk about. But to not decide, oh my gosh, everyone hates me. My business is failing. I’m a bad manager. No. Okay. But we do want to do some specific things to really make sure that we can move forward in the situation. And like I said, not really throw off the vibe of our team, because our team is always looking to us about how we’re going to handle the situation, especially a stressful one.

And so I think the first thing when someone quits somewhat abruptly, we want to start by assessing the situation as a whole. Did they give you any notice? Are they leaving without putting all their information where it needs to be? For example, if they had some projects that were active, have they put them on the server? Have they given an update? Now, depending on the answer to that question, you can ask them to put together a handoff plan, like a plan of them winding down, or you might have to figure out alone.

And so let’s say the person does give you a few weeks notice. I’d sit down with them knowing if someone gives you two weeks notice, you’re only going to get one week of productivity out of them, is my guess, right? Like the last week, they’re kind of just waiting for time to pass. If they give you four weeks, maybe you get two weeks. Okay. So I wouldn’t assume you’re going to get the productivity up until the last second.

Sorry to say it. I think if it’s a business where people perform services, maybe you run a spa or a salon or a clinic of some kind, then yeah, I do think you’ll get to the end because you’re billing more on an hourly rate or paying people more hourly. But if you have someone doing more of an office-related job, maybe they’re doing marketing, maybe they’re doing operations, maybe they’re doing design, things like that, maybe you’re in an agency, I would say, hate to tell you, productivity is going to take a nose dive.

And so sort of look at however much notice they give you as you have about half of that to really utilize the time. So what do you want to do? Well, you want to get really clear on if I have one week, if I have two weeks, whatever, what is the most, most important things to get done so that I can hand this off to someone else. And that’s going to look like wrapping up loose ends.

It’s not going to be doing new work, I would say in most cases. Okay. So it’s finding all their documents, where open projects, active status of things, asking them to kind of close the loop with any clients. That’s the kind of thing we want to do. We want to be winding down. Now, on the other hand, if they give you no notice, okay, they tell you on Sunday, I’m no longer working for you and it’s Monday.

I would, you know, the first thing I would do is to kind of sort of take stock of what were they working on? You may not have any idea of where they were storing their documents. You might not know what the status of projects is. It might really throw you. So I would say kind of going back to, okay, where do you have any sense of what they were working on, who their clients were, whatever it looks like, so that you can really figure out, well, okay, how am I going to hand this off?

Now, once we have a sense of what needs to be handed off or taken on or what this work looks like, you know, the second thing to do is to thoughtfully assign the work to the right person and, you know, where you can, where can you hand stuff off? Right. And it doesn’t mean you have to do all of it. Okay. You know, as I think a lot of times the business owners I talk to or managers that I talked to, and this actually happened to me in the past, I’ll share a story in a minute, feel like when someone quits, okay, everyone else is at max capacity.

Everyone else has full plates. So I have to take this on and do this extra job. And then we’re freaking out because we think, well, oh my gosh, like, how am I supposed to do this? And I have to do this new job and I don’t have skills in this area. And we don’t realize that if we look at the full scope of the work and look at, well, who really is the right person to take this on?

There might be a few things for us and there might be a few things for other team members, especially if something’s in someone’s wheelhouse. So let’s say someone has a related role or they’ve been wanting to build a skill in the area that the person was working on that quit. Well, that’s a fantastic opportunity to delegate that to them. Not just to go, hey, I don’t want to burden you. So I’m going to take this on.

A lot of times when someone quits a team or leaves, it’s a really good opportunity for another team member that’s there. And they’re actually wanting to take more on. They’re excited about that. So again, we don’t want to assume, but what I mean by thoughtfully assigning it is we want to sit down with them and look at their workload and load balance and say, hey, what’s realistic? Because we also don’t want to assign someone two jobs.

I can’t even tell you how many times I’ve been talking with a business owner or manager, and they’ve said, I want to be a better manager. I just don’t know the steps. Tell me what to do and I’ll do it. And frankly, I’ve felt that way too. Even when I had been managing people for a while, because this stuff is hard and it changes all the time. So the last time someone asked me for the steps, I made a cheat sheet.

Head to LeahGarvin.com slash scorecard for 20 things you can do this month to be a better manager. This is literally your tell me what to do and I’ll do it steps to motivate your team and get better results. There’s no time like the present. Grab the scorecard or write freaking out. LeahGarvin.com slash scorecard. Now, the story I wanted to share was years ago, I was working at Google and I was managing a few program managers and an engineer.

And the engineer left or he gave two weeks notice. And immediately my stomach dropped to the floor. And I thought to myself, oh my God, I have to learn how to do code and I have to go back to school. And I was like, why? I went spiraling in this thing of, I will have to take this on because I don’t have another team member to do it. So it must be me having to do it.

And we weren’t able to get it back, Phil. We weren’t able to hire someone else. And so immediately I thought to myself, oh gosh, I’m going to have to spend, you know, day and night figuring out this stuff that I have no idea how to do. And I went to my own manager and I said, I don’t know what to do. This guy left. I mean, I don’t have the skills. It’s like, I’m freaking out. And she said, why in the world would you think that would be the answer?

It’s not even good. Like, it’s not even helpful. Even if, you know, like you wanted to do it, you’re not the right person. You don’t have that skill set. And it was a wake up call for me of like, why the hell would we assume we’re like the right person to do a job that we have no experience in? And so there may be pieces of something we have to take on, but we also, it is important to find the right person to do that thing.

And if it’s really not in your wheelhouse, stopping and saying, okay, I need to find like an emergency consultant or an emergency temp person or contractor or something to do this. But it doesn’t mean like we should do that job because no one at Google, an engineering company, wanted me to like take up engineering, moonlighting, like that wasn’t going to help anybody. That was my own anxieties. And so if you’re, you know, as a business owner, you may not have that, you know, voice of reason.

I think it’s really important to say, hey, you know, I’m not the right person for this. I got to, I’m the right person to scope out the work potentially and figure out what we need. But, you know, I’m not the person to really take this on. Now, if there is some work that you do take on, maybe it is stuff that you can cover and it’s something that you’ve done before or whatever, you want to have a plan for handing it back off.

Okay. A lot of business owners I talked to have accumulated a piles and piles of tasks and responsibilities based on having gaps in staffing, which really takes them away from focusing on the strategy of the business, on growing the business. And this is one of those things that when we dive into this work through the Ops Playbook and we take a really comprehensive look at how their time’s being spent, we can identify thousands of dollars of time that could be put onto something else if that person had the bandwidth to do that.

And so we want to make sure when someone leaves, we are figuring out, well, okay, what is the plan to hand that back off? How long is it going to be? How long am I going to be doing something for and not just kind of keeping it forever? Because again, I think we can forget that, you know, every minute we’re doing something, it’s a minute that we’re not doing something else, right? And when we’re doing really tactical work, stuff that’s really could easily be handed off to somebody else or potentially to a virtual assistant or something that’s, that really, you know, you could find someone at a really affordable rate to tackle that.

Well, our kind of earning potential is now at that like base level where we really want to be keeping it as, you know, as max value as we can. And so I think sometimes we think we’re saving money by not hiring someone when actually that means we’re not able to be actually claiming that hourly rate we could be bringing in at whatever, you know, whatever that looks like. So just a reminder that not hiring someone and doing it yourself is rarely the cheaper option, to be honest.

And so we do want to have a plan for, for handing that work back off. Okay. Last thing I kind of said, I was going to talk about this. We do want to use an opportunity where someone quits, whether it’s abruptly or not to reflect on, well, what could we have done differently? You know, were there signs, were there, was there feedback that they gave me that I didn’t action? Was it just like not the greatest fit for them and really take stock in that?

And I don’t mean beat yourself up about it, or I don’t mean saying like, I’m the worst manager, like no one likes me. No, but saying, Hey, you know, I want to always be improving myself as a leader, as a manager, as a supporter of my team. And so I can’t, I want to know now sometimes people do exit interviews. I would say I got mixed feelings on those. I don’t think people give the most honest feedback always.

Sometimes people leave because they’re mad about something. Sometimes people leave because they didn’t like something, but they don’t want to tell you about it. So I think you can get mixed in information from having an exit interview, asking someone why they left. I think what could be a really helpful thing is to kind of look across the trajectory or the kind of time you were with that employee and think about really, were there things they shared?

What was kind of their, was there enthusiasm on the projects? Did they come to me a few times and say like, well, I’m not sure about this. Like just so that you can be more attuned to the feedback that your team members are giving you for the future. I think also telling your team members that are still there saying, Hey, I’ve been really reflecting on, you know, why, you know, Sam or Joe or Steve or whoever left.

And here’s some of the things I want to do differently as a manager. And that’s going to create even more, I think, loyalty of your employees that are on the team that, Hey, you are always looking at how you can grow. One of those things, I think, reflecting on what you could do differently. If the first one were like, you have no idea of the status of their work. So like, that’s the first tip I said of like kind of assessing the situation.

If someone left and you had, you’re like blindsided and you have no idea where things are at. I want to say a huge learning, right? And something we can proactively do today with all of our team members is to always assume in the back of your mind, this could be your most loyalty members last day. We have no idea what’s going on with people. We never know. And we always have to be covered in case someone doesn’t come back for whatever reason.

Hopefully it’s a positive reason, right? But like we never, never know. And so you want to do a few things. You want to make sure that if you have a company or business or a team where there’s kind of documentation being worked at, designs, files, projects, things like that, that all of that information is saved on a server that you are in control of or on a cloud drive or something that you have access to, right?

So that if they left and their computer was shut off or whatever, or they use their own computer and you don’t have access to that, that you have all of that IP, basically that is yours because it’s being worked on your company. So that’s the first one. You always want to have whatever that project files are, everything. Every day that stuff should be saved really onto that drive that really is in your control. A second one is having a clear task list or a work tracking system, right?

That reflects accurate statuses that shows what each person is working on, that has the updates, that has where things are at. And this is why this is such a fundamental piece of the Ops Playbook program. It’s talking about what is that work tracking system? What is the level of detail? What information do we have in here? Really getting people on board and accountable to filling that out at the frequency that you’re asking for, ideally daily, so that we have this.

And a team that has a system for tracking their work never gets in the situation where you have a team member leave and you had no idea what they’re working on. But unfortunately, a lot of times we get in that situation because we’re using multiple tracking systems. We’re not asking for a level of detail that’s actually that helpful. Maybe people aren’t updating it regularly, whatever it is. So that’s why in the Ops Playbook, we spell out, well, what are those norms and expectations?

So that everybody can get on the same page. And then everyone understands that it’s in everyone’s best interest. Okay. So this is what we do. Someone quits abruptly. I know it is terrible. It feels like, well, the rug just got pulled out of her because it did, right? It creates more work. I want to acknowledge it is a really, really hard situation. But when we do these three things, we first assess the situation, right? Do the damage control.

If they’ve given notice, can you have a plan for hitting things off? If they haven’t, where can you find out what they were working on so that you can figure out how to do number two, which is to thoughtfully assign the work to the right person. Some of that might be you. Some of that might be another team member. You want to have a plan for how to hand it back to a new hire or how to ramp that down because we don’t want anybody to have now two jobs to do for the price of one, whether it’s you or your team member.

And then the third is reflecting on what you could do differently so that you’re always working to be better as a manager, to be really tuned into, hey, am I reading? Am I listening? Am I hearing the feedback? Am I being responsive? Am I always growing as a manager? And then bonus again, always, always, always be making sure that you have an awareness of where work’s at. And it doesn’t mean you have to always know it in your mind, but you know that it’s into a system so that you can find that when the moment is that you need it.

Okay. So if you need support with any of this stuff, work tracking, this is a big piece, stops playbook. So that’s something we would dive into there. And if someone quit today or abruptly wherever, whatever day it is, and you’re like, oh my gosh, I need someone to just crank out this plan with me. That is the perfect, perfect situation to do an SOS call. Because in this hour, we will talk about, okay, where is everything at?

What is our game plan for handing off work, for figuring out what’s left to open, for figuring out what are those top priorities that you really need to get done? So if you want to schedule that call, head to LeahGarvin.com slash SOS, and we can make sure that this crisis is taken care of right away. All right. See you next time. That’s all I have for today. Thank you so much for tuning in to the Managing Made Simple podcast, where my goal is to demystify the job of people management so that together we can make the workplace somewhere everyone can thrive.

With that said, let’s spread the word. If you love this episode, please pass it along with someone who might benefit from it. See you next time.