Farewell my team: How to leave your team.

Leaving a team is one pivotal moment for both the lives of the people who stay and the person who is going away. As humans, we often look at the aspects of the change that most affect us (as we are risk-averse beings by nature). As leaders, we should look at the many aspects of a team change to help our people navigate it best and ultimately look after the team’s health. Here are some things you might not know are happening and are opportunities for leaders to help the ones around you.

What is left behind

It is essential to make sure the work still goes ahead and typically we ask people who are leaving teams to mark down handover plans and guarantee the work still carries ahead. However, this may be easy to spot, have a deeper look at what you only losing. The work that never got written down, the peace of mind of having someone caring “if something goes wrong”, the role modelling and learnings it shared with the team. When someone is leaving my team, I ask myself a few more questions to better understand what the team is losing.

1. What opportunities are opening? A gap in responsibilities and roles means more opportunities for the rest of the teams. Identifying opportunities is amazing guidance we can give to the folks who are staying in the team and empowering positive change.
2. Who benefits from goodbyes? The team is sometimes more than the person. Bidding farewell to someone is not only an act of respect and kindness for the efforts and time the person dedicated to the team but also a “transition ritual” for the ones staying behind. Showing care for someone we won’t have any more business relations with, will make it even easier to do the same for the relationships we have a direct interest in nurturing. I typically make sure this is a public matter, a transparent act of kindness that makes it a bit easier for others to follow and form what some may call “team culture”.
3. When should I stop caring for the person that is leaving? There is only one possible answer: you just don’t. Time and focus may indeed come in the middle of keeping a growing number of regular connections in the workplace (working hours are not infinite, or so they should!). There is however incredible value in keeping the connection with previous teammates, outside of mere self-interest. Someone leaving is also someone learning new ways of doing the same things, and will be bringing perspectives that can often help the team. As leaders, we can also help the person better settle in a new environment by giving them a safe sounding board that they trusted.
4. What social dynamics will change in the team? People connect to other people. Removing one connection point may have different implications on how other people work with each other. Thinking about the changes in relationships often helps me understand where the team will need more attention and where communication lines will soon need to be rebuilt. This is typically the hardest gap to spot as 1:1 connections and personal bonds are private and impossible to clone with processes.

A team of people, changes with people

This is possibly the biggest blind spot of a leader looking at a teammate leaving, assuming that the team will stay the same (minus the one person). As teams are made by the people who lived them, adding and removing people changes them too. What you look at is what you remember was a team that now is going to be different. The best help we can give ourselves is to realise this change and turn the question around and start learning again what the new team setup will be, what will be different and the positive actions we can take from there.

People over processes

As a people leader, I try to put the people’s changes before the processes. Handover guidebooks will never replace people or reduce the risk of something going wrong. On the other side, understanding how humans in our teams are affected by changes and accompanying them to make something positive out of every change is the real deal-makers when someone leaves our team. Help your team deal with someone who leaves means focusing on people first. Use processes wisely and make sure you are not reducing your focus to simply “writing a handover guidebook”. Talk to the people in your team, about what they see the change bringing. Make inferences on how the team setup will change (because it will) and ultimately think about the best actions you can take to be open to listening and change as well your views on the team.

Simone Campora