Have you ever found the perfect new team member? A person who fits exactly what your organization needs? Hopefully you have had this experience at least once in your leadership career. It is rewarding for everyone when you bring in the right person at the right time. However, there are cases when you find out this person actually is not the perfect fit. Worse, maybe they were perfect, but after a while decided it was time to move on to another opportunity. Either way, there are some important lessons to learn and use in order to move forward when this happens.
What did you learn from the experience? Here are a few questions to ask yourself (be sure to include what did you do well and what would you do differently):
Lesson Two: Solicit Feedback
What feedback can you get from the person leaving and/or lessons they learned? Here are a few questions to ask the person leaving:
Lesson Three: Create A Plan To Move Forward
It is important to make sure the message of this person’s departure is communicated properly and you capture the opportunity for feedback moving forward. Here’s how to navigate this process:
The answers to the questions in these three lessons will help you personally reflect, learn, grow and make better hiring and retaining decisions. As your organization grows and changes, it is inevitable that some of the “perfect” hires may not be the best fit. It is also important to realize there are times when a person needs to move on, even when everything has been done correctly.
Moving on is often like a graduation; it is simply time to move on. I use to be a school teacher and I think the best metaphor here is recognizing that we may love a student and be very proud of them. However, we would never keep them from progressing to greater things just because we like what they do for us. One of my favorite sayings is “Your ceiling should be their floor.” Learn what you can and then, let people “graduate” when they need to. Stay in contact with them and be proud that you were a part of their leadership journey and career development.
This article originally appeared on Forbes.
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