April 25, 2026

Read Time - 4 minutes

“Train people well enough so they can leave, treat them well enough so they don't.” ~ Richard Branson

She gave two weeks' notice on a Tuesday.

Our chair spent those two weeks lamenting — about how much she'd be missed and wondering who could possibly fill her shoes. What he didn't do was sit down with her and figure out how she actually did her job. A week after she walked out the door, we quickly understood that was a mistake.

She had been with us three years. She came in quietly, learned fast, and somewhere along the way became the person everyone ran to when something needed to actually get done. She was a natural problem-solver who absorbed our systems (and their workarounds) almost intuitively — she knew which faculty needed a phone call and which ones needed a paper trail, which issues to escalate and which ones to quietly fix before anyone noticed. She never had a title that reflected any of that. Or compensation…or authority. Just a lot of responsibility.

And that, in the end, is exactly why she left. Her new role offered better pay and more autonomy — but what she told me later was simpler than that. She was tired. The workload had quietly expanded to fill every available hour, and she'd found something that actually fit her life. She could pick her kids up at 4pm. She wasn't responding to emails in the evening. She had found work that didn’t consume everything outside of it. And I’m embarrassed to say none of us had even noticed the weight she was carrying.

We should have. In retrospect, the signs were there. But when someone performs at that level, there's a seductive logic to just letting them keep performing. You don’t check in because nothing seems broken. You don’t ask what they need because they never complain. The smooth operation can feel like proof everything is fine.

But it wasn't fine. She had been quietly charting her next move for months.

What followed her departure was instructive. We scrambled to document processes that existed only in her head. We parceled out her responsibilities to people who were already stretched. Morale dipped — because she had set a standard, and it was obvious to us all that we weren’t meeting it.

I filed that experience away. And when I eventually became chair, it shaped how I led from day one. I didn't just need to know where my people were headed — I needed to make sure I was asking the ones I wasn't worried about. That started with one question: What do you want to do, and how can I help you get there?

Leadership Takeaway

In my experience, leaders don't lose their best people overnight. They lose them through a hundred small moments — no one asking what they needed, whether the work still felt worth it, or whether they were carrying more than their share without anyone noticing. That's what makes it so hard to see coming. High performers don't announce their disengagement. They usually keep delivering. They handle everything without complaint, right up until the day they don't. By the time the resignation letter arrives, they've usually been mentally halfway out the door for months. And most of the time, it's not the workload itself — it's what the workload means — whether anyone is investing in where they're headed, and whether the culture around them holds everyone to the same standard. When neither of those things is true, A-players rarely explode. They just start quietly looking.

Gallup's 2025 State of the Global Workplace makes the leadership case plainly: managers account for 70% of the variance in team engagement. Not compensation. Not perks. Not the annual recognition dinner. The conditions leadership creates. And when Gallup looked at what actually predicts whether employees stay, pay falls away as the primary driver. The stronger predictors are opportunities to learn and grow, feeling valued, and believing the work matters. So when A-players stay, it's rarely because the money got better. It's because two things are true — they feel like they're growing, and they're surrounded by people who hold the same standard they do.

Those two things are within your control as a leader, even when the budget isn't.

We can't usually outbid the next opportunity. So the question is whether the people on your team feel like they're becoming something here — and whether the culture around them makes that possible or quietly works against it.

Practical Guidance

Know where your people are trying to go.

Most leaders have performance conversations. Far fewer have growth conversations. There's a difference. A performance conversation is about what someone is doing. A growth conversation is about where they're headed — and whether you have any role in helping them get there. When I started asking that question, I learned things about my team I never would have found out otherwise. This isn’t information people typically volunteer. They aren't hiding it — they just haven't been asked. You can't retain people toward a destination you don't know about. So start by knowing.

Appreciation and investment are not the same thing.

Year-end thank-you notes, staff appreciation week, a kind word in a meeting — these matter and they should happen. But they're not development. They tell someone they're valued today. They don't tell someone they have a future here. Your best people need more than recognition — they need to feel like they're becoming better at something because of their time here.

Watch who's carrying whom.

A-players don't just want to grow. They want to work alongside people who are held to the same standard they are. Nothing drains a high performer faster than a culture where effort isn't expected of everyone — where they're quietly picking up slack that nobody's addressing. This is the conversation most leaders avoid, because it requires having harder conversations about accountability and expectations. But if your best people feel like they're carrying dead weight while leadership looks the other way, they will eventually stop carrying it — by leaving.

The growth conversation and the accountability conversation are two sides of the same coin. One invests in your A-players. The other makes sure the environment around them is worth staying in.

What this actually looks like in practice.

It doesn't require a new program or a budget line. It requires two habits: First, a conversation — at least once a semester — with each direct report that is explicitly about their growth, not their projects. Second, a willingness to address the performance gaps you've been tolerating, because those gaps are costing you more than you think — not just in productivity, but in the quiet resentment of the people doing the most.

The Bottom Line

A-players rarely leave because of the salary. They leave because of conditions that leadership creates, tolerates, or ignores — and that's good news, because those things are within your control.

What I find remarkable is how normal it is to leave high performers alone. Part of it is that few of us in higher ed ever saw this kind of investment modeled — many of us had bosses who managed tasks, not people. Part of it is that we confuse being available with actually developing someone. "I'm here if you need me" is not a growth strategy. And part of it is simpler than that: their competence signals to us that they're fine. No news is good news. We learned that lesson from the wrong people.

Here's what gets lost in that assumption. We invest readily in equipment, technology, and strategy — and those things matter. But those are features. The fundamentals are the skills, perspectives, and collective capacity of your people — and how that work actually gets done together. That's what determines whether this is a place worth staying.

Your best people are asking a quiet question every day: Is there a future for me here? The ones who answer it themselves — without ever asking you — are the ones you're about to lose.

Try This Before Friday

Think about your two or three best performers. Not your most senior — the ones that would make your week radically different if they weren't there.

When did you last sit down with them — not for a project update, not a performance check — but to ask where they're trying to go? If you can't remember, that's your answer.

Block thirty minutes this week. Have that conversation. You don't need an agenda. You need one question: What do you want to do, and how can I help you get there?

Thanks for reading.

See you next Saturday!

The Playbook gets you thinking. Here's what gets you moving:​

💡 Coaching Built for Campus Leadership

Campus leadership is specific, messy, and rarely what anyone prepared you for. Most people figure it out alone, in real time, while everything else keeps moving. My coaching is built around walking alongside you through that — with someone who has held these roles and knows what it actually takes. A few spots open each quarter. Learn more.

🏛️ Leadership Development for Your Team

The best workshops don't just inform — they change how people work. I bring interactive sessions — on campus or virtual — focused on the skills academic teams need most: faster decisions, productive conflict, and systems that create time instead of consuming it. Learn more.