41: Leaving Well, Stay Interviews, and Problems with Exit Interviews
In this episode, we are going to dissect the concept of exit interviews and discuss better ways to hold them, including recommended questions for those exit interviews, who they are *really* for, and my top tip for shifting the power of the exit interview. If you’re new here, Leaving Well is the art and practice of leaving a place, role, title, or thing with intention and purpose, and when possible … joy.
Resources and articles mentioned in this episode:
To learn more about Leaving Well, visit https://www.naomihattaway.com/
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This podcast is produced by Sarah Hartley.
Transcript:
This episode is going to be a quick one! There are some actionable items that you can implement with your team and organization today, and I’m excited to share a condensed episode so you can finish the episode and get busy putting it into action!
Let’s start this episode with a quote from Kristie Coulter in her book, Exit Interview where she shares – in great detail – her experience with working at Amazon.
She says, in a chapter aptly named “People Leave”: “People leave, of course. As for me, I keep staying, past the point where I’d owe back my signing bonus, past four bosses and five reorgs, three U.S. presidents. At one point my staying is a week-to-week thing, I keep a go bag under my desk for the few possessions I can’t see leaving behind. But I don’t use the bag. I stay.”
She goes on to say in a chapter later in the book: “There’s so little involved in leaving. All my stuff still fits in one tote bag, and my whole brain is still documented on the wiki from my pre-sabbatical preparations. There’s not a lot of explaining to do to my coworkers either. People leave here every day, after all. I’ll go. Josh will vent about all the ways I wasn’t good enough, and then someone new will fill the gap and it will be as if I never existed.”
A recent survey by management consulting agency McKinsey and Company revealed that more than half of employees don’t think their managers conduct performance reviews properly. Even further, a Gallup study found that only one in five employees felt motivated by their organization’s review processes. So flip that on its head and inject the concept of a stay interview into your next team meeting!
First, here’s what NOT to do:
Don’t assume that connecting with your employees just once per year is going to be adequate. It’s wildly difficult to think back to even just a month or two in the past - when it comes to job performance, development needs, growth opportunities, etc. - let alone an entire year.
Don’t wait until the annual review to deal with performance issues or expectation gaps. It’s incredibly unfair to hold important issues until the time their annual review rolls around.
Speaking of expectation gaps, one conversation per year is hardly enough to maintain current and relevant expectations that you and the organization have of your employees.
You’ve heard the old adage, to move forward, you need to know where you’ve been. Maybe that’s not the actual statement, but you get my drift. My top two recommendations to know where you’ve been are intentional job description reviews and stay interviews.
If you have employees or manage a team with folks reporting to you, consider implementing stay interviews where you spend time supporting your team with updating their resume with the work they’ve accomplished. Offer and implement stay interviews as a complement to standard exit interviews. During this stay interview, also consider reviewing the scope of work or job description for each person who shares projects.
First up is to collect the job descriptions for everyone going through this exercise. This exercise works really well in a group setting, with lots of time for individual reflection:
Read your job description from start to finish, once through.
Note any thoughts that come to mind as you read it, paying no particular attention to the order of your thoughts, or what comes up.
Read it now a second time, with a very intentional effort to note the following:
What in the JD drew you to the job in the first place?
What of the JD was a (be honest here!) bit out of your comfort zone, but you had confidence regardless?
What did you solidly align with on your skills and capabilities in the JD?
What on the JD do you now realize is not practical or possible to accomplish?
What tasks or outcomes are listed in the JD that you are proud to say have been accomplished?
What tasks or outcomes are listed in the JD that you are in the process of completing?
Once everyone has reviewed their JD with those questions in mind, choose one question to dig into at a deeper level. If you are doing this exercise as a group, consider discussing 3d or 3f. The beauty of this group exercise is that there may be elements of someone’s job description that another team member has capacity and interest in supporting. There may be related efforts that other colleagues are working on that could complement the tasks or outcomes of another team member who may be struggling, or they may have ideas on how to restructure or delegate tasks that are feeling challenging.
If you’re listening and you’re a freelancer or consultant and do not have employees, consider ways you can inject the idea of a stay interview into your relationship with clients and customers. Create an outcomes or deliverable document that shares clearly the work you wish to see accomplished during the course of your working relationship. Schedule regular check-ins to review progress made.
On the topic of stay interviews, consider exploring the resumes of your team members and colleagues. You may be thinking the same thing that I often hear from clients when I bring this up: Why on earth would I have my employees update their resumes if they don’t have any plans to leave, or if it would sink the organization if they left?
Hot tip: conducting stay interviews and reviewing your team’s resumes does not encourage folks to leave. On the contrary, it can demonstrate your care for the human side of work. Another added benefit is that you have a front row seat to what is working, what projects are stalling (and why), as well as understanding more about each person to perhaps better align their time with a project or recruit support to finish tasks.
If you’re willing to review resumes as an experiment, consider that we are not very likely going to update our resumes with the current work we are producing. From an employer’s standpoint, reviewing resumes can offer a critical and powerful glimpse into the skill set and past projects that your team has worked on. This is especially powerful if you inherited your team and didn’t have a hand in interviewing and hiring them. Even if you did directly interview and hire, you likely do not remember the nuances of their resume.
As you review the resumes of your team, look for information that is new to you, ask questions about their listed experience, draw correlations to their previous work and the current projects and contributions.
Operating now as if your team members and employees are actively leaving is both reality-based (because most people are actively looking or are unhappy in the workplace), and this intentional way of behaving in your workplace also ranks high on the spectrum of organizational health.
Will you take the challenge to implement either a job description review or stay interviews, or both?
I’d love to hear from you if you do. You can find me on LinkedIn or Instagram with the profile @NaomiHattaway
Thanks for listening, my friend.
