Imaginary Movie: Anatomy of a resignation
Opening Scene: Our protagonist Neon, a talented JS/frontend developer at a premier tech company, has resigned and manager Smithy is caught completely off-guard (obviously zoom in on Smithy’s face as you cut to the next scene)
Scene 2: 4 months ago — Neon’s sitting in a team meeting where Smithy is talking about how they’re going to ship project X, a high-profile full-stack feature over the next 6 months
Scene 3: later that night, Neon is hanging out with his college buddies and learns T’s company allows her to opt permanent remote work, M took up a new job that let him buy a new car and O is now a full-stack developer. Zoom in on Neon’s face as he’s clearly confused and is now evaluating his own role subconsciously
Scene 4: Next morning, Smithy has a 1:1 with Neon and tells him the 8 things he needs to do for project X to succeed and reminds him of how he missed that one thing in Project W earlier, especially under aggressive deadlines. The 1:1 was a wonderful one-way conversation, one for the ages — imagine Smithy wearing AirPods-Max throughout the 1:1, with noise-cancellation on, for dramatic effect
Scene 5: With Eye of the Tiger playing over a montage scene, Neon types up a resume, applies to a bunch of companies, takes coding exercises, some distasteful questions, Zoom interviews, signs PDF documents; Neon takes his BluePill offer as a full-stack developer
Scene 6: Cut to present — Smithy’s manager is disappointed in him for putting project X at risk and so, Smithy makes a counteroffer matching BluePill and gets rejected, with Neon saying “too little, too late” and walk away with swag and a semi-evil smile of accomplishment. Roll credits.
What does the manager in the audience take away from the movie?
- A lot of managers in tech discover an employee’s misalignment only when they resign, but turns out the resignation is the end outcome of a journey, not the beginning where it is completely manageable/avoidable
- The only way out for managers is to genuinely care about an employee’s interests and concerns — proactively — and 1:1s need to be empathetic 2-way conversations.
- Lastly, this is pure business, not a nice-to-have — employee resignations cost disproportionate money for a growing company — to “listen” is a core part of the Manager’s job description. More so, in the new normal, with the Great Resignation going on in full swing already and all pre-pandemic ways of employee engagement and goal setting no longer delivering: in other words
if you don’t change the inputs, the output won’t change!
Post-credits scene: I ask you to check our startup YugaHQ.com out, where we get you to learn and enable employee aspirations using an Employee (B2C) Career Planner.
#futureofwork #greatresignation #employeeengagement #thegreatresignation #careers #greatreshuffle #management
