Why your best employee is about to leave. And what you will find out too late.

It almost never happens suddenly.

The person who resigns has usually been thinking about it for months. There was a moment, or a series of moments, where something shifted. A decision they disagreed with but did not feel safe to say. A conversation they needed that never happened. A sense that the distance between who they are and what the job requires had grown past the point of return.

By the time they hand in their notice, the decision is already made. The conversation you have then is not a negotiation. It is a formality.

What founders consistently tell me, after someone they valued has left, is some version of the same thing: I could have seen it coming. I noticed the signs. I told myself it was something else.

What the signs actually look like

The signals of someone disengaging are almost never dramatic. They look like ordinary behaviour that has shifted slightly.

Someone who used to send ideas stops sending them. Not because they ran out of ideas. Because they stopped believing the ideas would land anywhere useful.

Someone who used to push back in meetings goes quiet. They still attend, they still contribute at a surface level, but the challenge has gone out of them. They have learned, through accumulated experience, that pushing back costs more than it gives.

Someone who used to ask questions about the direction of the company stops asking. They have either found their own answer or stopped caring about the question.

Someone starts being very precise about their hours. They arrive at nine and leave at six. This is not laziness. It is self-protection. They are drawing a boundary around the part of themselves they are no longer willing to give.

None of these things look like a resignation. They look like a slightly quieter version of the same person. In a fast-moving team, they are easy to explain away.

Why founders miss it

The founder is busy. When you are managing a growing company, a team member who is not causing problems is not a priority. The person who is quietly disengaging does not squeak.

The founder interprets the signs charitably. Someone going quieter is having a hard week. Someone who seems distant is dealing with something personal. These interpretations are often correct. The problem is that they are applied consistently, every time, until there is no more time to apply them.

The founder conflates performance with engagement. Someone can be performing well and be deeply unhappy. The people most at risk of leaving are often the best performers, because they are the ones with the most options. They are also the ones most likely to stay quiet about their dissatisfaction, because they are professional enough not to make it someone else's problem.

By the time performance drops, the person has usually already decided.

What is actually underneath

When I work with leadership teams and someone has recently left or is clearly on their way out, the conversation underneath is almost always the same.

Something was not being said.

A role had grown in a direction the person had not signed up for and had not felt able to name. A relationship in the team was costing them energy every day and there was no structure for that to be addressed. A decision had been made in a way that left them feeling excluded from something that mattered to them.

These things almost always go unnamed, because the culture of the team has not created a reliable space for that kind of conversation.

The conversation that prevents it

There is no system that guarantees you will never lose someone you wanted to keep. But the most preventable departures share a common feature: there was something that could have been said, and it was not.

The question worth asking is not "how do I retain my best people." It is "have I built a team where the things that matter can be said before they become reasons to leave."

That is a harder question. It requires looking honestly at the conversations that are not happening in your team, not just the ones that are.

Mees Loman is the founder of Loman Leadership, a leadership coaching practice for founders and leadership teams of fast-growing companies in Amsterdam and beyond. lomanleadership.com