You’re a successful leader with a great team, one of your team members in particular is fabulous. You harbour a secret worry that one day this person will decide it’s time to move on. You try and push these thoughts from your mind as you carry on. You’re delivering results together and it’s awesome, the person is well compensated. It should be fine, right?

One day the top performer wants to chat with you. They’re looking a little uncomfortable. They know they’re about to drop a bombshell and feel apprehensive about it. As you sit down together you feel a sense of unease wash over you.

“There’s no easy way to say this – I’m leaving”

What Do You Do?

Let’s take a step back to what you could have been doing to prepare for this moment. There are two areas of focus that you should always have on your radar.

Give Enough Reasons to Stay That They Won’t Consider Leaving

If you are proactive in providing an environment in which employees can deliver their best work, you will likely see much less turnover. Some examples of how you can do this are:

Do your best to offer exciting projects and new growth opportunities

Compensate them appropriately in the first place – don’t wait for them to ask

Involve them in strategy discussions and decision making

Dig The Well Before You’re Thirsty

Harvey Mackay’s book ‘Dig Your Well Before You’re Thirsty’ is all about building a very strong network. This is so that if and when you need help from people – in what could be 10+ years from now when something unexpected happens. They are there for you and you’re not contacting people out of the blue awkwardly asking for favours.

Succession planning is the formal business term for how leaders do the same thing. It’s the practice of lining up excellent candidates who might be interested in roles you have to offer in the future. In other words, it’s your plan on what to do if your best team member resigns.

In it’s most thorough sense succession planning is having a written plan for the roles you have on your team. A list of potential candidates who you would approach if the person currently in that role should resign.

It’s a kind of insurance policy to ensure you’re not left high and dry when the current arrangement comes to an end. And it will come to an end!

I plan to write a more in-depth article in the future about succession planning and how to go about it.