Your Essential Team Member Quits, Now What?

During my corporate career, I often said “Nobody is irreplaceable. It’s just a matter of how inconvenient it is.” I still believe that now, after 19 years working with leaders across many top firms and industries.

Hopefully, the company has a talent management program that helps them align a people strategy with their business strategy. Those that do have identified successors for all key roles and have put development plans in place. When we do this work with leadership teams, we place potential candidates in buckets: ready now; ready in 1 year; ready in 2+ years.

If your company has done this work, you’ll have someone ready to slide into the essential position. If not, think about what are the key skills, competencies and deliverables of this essential role. Then assess all the possibilities in your company against this list.

Where there are gaps, put together a plan to get them addressed as quickly as possible. Do they need a mentor? An MBA? To shadow another leader? Some industry knowledge from association offerings?

If the gap is too large, can the essential position be filled by more than one individual? Job sharing is possible, but it’s normally cleaner to divide up the responsibilities. In my corporate career, there were several occasions where the departure or transfer of someone on my team caused us to re-look at the position and recognize that those duties really belonged better in other areas or departments.

Finally, if there truly is no good internal replacement, move to triage mode. How can you “babysit” this position until you can hire someone? Who can help? What must get done and what can stop until the new hire is onboard.

Once you hire someone, it’s critical to get them up to speed quickly. Hopefully you’ve captured that “tribal knowledge” in written or video form, on a shared drive or through some other mechanism to help them ramp up. It’s also important to offer them executive onboarding coaching to make sure they have the highest likelihood of success. The essential employees are generally very expensive hires. Yet key leaders often don’t last more than 12-18 months in a role. Executive Onboarding coaching and New Leader Assimilation programs help prevent this “organ rejection” by the culture that finds themselves with a new leader.