It Feels Like It's Spinning Out Of Control

Things feel like they're spinning out of control at work. No, it's not related to my personal desire to quit though it's possibly for similar reasons. There have been a rash of departures recently— so many that I'm concerned we're losing the ability to get things done.

• The recent spate of departures began a few weeks ago. Two members of a team adjacent to my function announced their departures. While they're just 2 from among a team of 15 worldwide they were working with a significant number of my customers. At least two of these customers are asking us "WTF?" right now as the team struggles to fill the gaps.


• The reason it's a struggle to fill those gaps is that the team was already cut down to being a skeleton crew. There's no spare bandwidth for other team members to jump in and help. And, in fact, the two employees' reasons for leaving were directly related to the overaggressive cuts a few months ago. They lost trust in management and moved on to jobs at new companies that seemed more stable and offered them career growth.


• The next departure that affected my work came right before Thanksgiving. "West", a technical field leader, announced he was leaving. Because West has an executive title I wondered how much of his departure was due to the C-suite and board making cuts, versus West leaving for his own reasons. Some scuttlebutt I've picked up argues West left for his own reasons— though among those were hum not being offered career growth by the C-suite. Either way, his departure is a huge loss to us in technical sales.

Now, these departures were already enough of a struggle to handle, particularly in the customer-facing work I do. But then yesterday a small avalanche of high-level departures hit:

• Our Chief Revenue Officer (CRO), the head of sales, is leaving. Unusually, he's leaving before the fiscal year is over. Typically when an account manager or sales leader leaves they finish out a quarter or the fiscal year. That really makes me wonder how much of this decision was his vs. the CEO's and board's. My best hypothesis given underlying sales data is that he was told he'll be dismissed after the FY is over, and he chose instead to leave on his own schedule.


• Also, the head of HR is leaving. I'm not sure anybody cares about that, other than her underling who's getting promoted. 🤣 But it's always concerning when members of the C-suite and the next level down start leaving at the same time. What do they see that the rest of us don't?


• Minutes after the message announcing the CRO's departure arrived, the CRO sent a message announcing the departure of several people underneath him. We're losing a technical VP— my grandboss— and two Senior Directors. Again, when multiple leaders are leaving at the same time, the rest of us are left to wonder: What risk do they see that we don't? What do they lack confidence in that they've asked us to believe?

So, with all these departures there are problems on two levels. First, execution. With so many people leaving a levels from individual contributors to senior leaders it will be harder to get critical things done for the next several months until new people can be brought onboard and gotten up to speed. Second, strategy. What do all these leadership departure portend? How many were driven by the board of directors— and are their cuts going from overly aggressive to just plain nuts? How many departures are because leaders don't believe the future they've asked the rest of us to buy into?