She was the best teacher in my building, and I found out she was leaving by reading a resignation letter on a Thursday afternoon in May. Eleven years in the classroom. Students sent her cards a decade after graduating. And I had walked past her door nearly every day that year, asking how things were going, and receiving the answer I had trained everyone to give me: "Fine."
I called her in. I asked what had happened. She was kind about it, which made it worse. "Dave," she said, "nobody asked me anything that would have mattered." Then she told me what I could have heard in October.
We Interview on the Way Out
Most organizations are great at exit interviews. We sit across from someone whose mind is made up and ask what went wrong. It is a bit like a doctor asking questions at the funeral. The information is accurate and entirely too late.
The better practice is called a stay interview, and it is almost insultingly simple. You sit down with a person who is still with you and ask a handful of honest questions about why they stay, what would make them leave, and what they need that they are not getting. You do it before there is any crisis.
"Plans fail for lack of counsel, but with many advisers they succeed." Proverbs 15:22 assumes a leader who goes looking for the counsel, rather than waiting for it to arrive.
Why "How Are Things?" Doesn't Work
Research on psychological safety, most famously Amy Edmondson's work at Harvard, shows that people do not speak up about problems unless they believe the risk is worth taking. A casual question from the person who controls their evaluation, schedule, and future is not a safe question. It is a test, and most people have learned to pass it by saying nothing.
Self-determination theory points to the same thing from another angle. Edward Deci and Richard Ryan's decades of research suggest people stay and thrive when three needs are met: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. A good stay interview is really a way of checking all three. Do you feel trusted with your work? Are you growing? Do you belong here? You will not learn those things by walking the hallway.
The Desert Fathers had their own version. A younger monk would go to an elder and ask, "Abba, give me a word." The elder spoke, yes, but the real work was the younger man's willingness to be asked and to answer honestly. The relationship carried the truth. A title never did.
The Five Questions I Use
I describe this fully on the Tools page as The Stay Interview, but here is the heart of it. Set aside thirty minutes, away from your desk if you can. Tell the person up front this is not a performance review and nothing they say will be held against them. Then ask:
What do you look forward to when you come to work? What would you miss if you left? What is one thing that, if it changed, would make you more likely to stay? What do you need from me that you are not getting? Where do you want to be in two years, and is there a path to it here?
Then do the hard part, which is to stop talking. Take notes. Do not defend, explain, or fix in the room. Say thank you, and mean it. Within two weeks, do one visible thing about what you heard, even if it is small. If you do nothing, you have taught that person never to answer honestly again.
A word on timing. I used to think these conversations belonged only to the people I was worried about. That is backwards. The person who is quietly carrying the most is usually the one who never gives you a reason to worry. They are reliable, so we leave them alone, and being left alone for years is exactly what wears a reliable person out. Gallup has reported for years that how people feel about their immediate manager is among the strongest predictors of whether they stay. The relationship is the retention strategy. Everything else is decoration.
I now put two or three stay interviews on my calendar every month, ordered by how long it has been since I truly listened, not by how much trouble anyone is causing. It is a small rhythm. It has also turned out to be one of the most pastoral things I do as a leader, because it treats the person in front of me as someone with a story rather than a position to fill.
What It Costs You
It costs ego. Some of what I have heard in these conversations was about me. Once a long-serving staff member told me I changed the schedule so often it felt like I did not respect their time. I wanted to explain. I wrote it down instead, and the next semester we locked the calendar in August. It was a small fix and the best thing I did that year.
I wish I had asked my best teacher in October. She might have left anyway. But I would have known what she was carrying, and she would have known someone cared enough to ask the second question.
Who on your team or in your family do you currently assume is fine, simply because they have never told you otherwise? This week, put thirty minutes on the calendar and ask.