You're judged by the people who leave you

Ask a commercial director how their year went and somewhere in the first few minutes you will hear a retention figure. Nobody left. Or two left, and one of them was a mistake anyway. It is said with some pride, and I understand why. Losing people is expensive, and it feels like a verdict.

But I spend a lot of my week talking to the people who left. And what the search side teaches you, over and over, is that the leaver, not the keeper, is where a director's reputation actually gets set.

Who a leaver talks to

The firm they join. The three or four peers they ring before they accept. The panel that interviews them in five years and asks why they moved. Your current team talks about you inside the building. Your leavers talk about you across the industry, for years, and they are believed, because they have nothing left to gain.

UK construction is a small place. Every director I know has bid against, sat across a final account from, or been interviewed by someone who used to report to them.

Three good years, two bad weeks

The pattern I see most often is directors who are good for three years and poor for a fortnight. The resignation lands and something switches. The leaver is cut out of meetings. Handover becomes a grudging formality. The reference becomes "we only confirm dates". Some go further: the dragged-out notice, the bonus that suddenly has conditions. I hear about all of it, usually within the month.

Those directors are converting three years of goodwill into a story about the last two weeks. Because that is what people retell. Nobody repeats the fair appraisal from year two. Everyone repeats how they were treated when they handed in their notice.

The directors with the best reputations, the ones candidates ask to work for by name, do the opposite. They treat the resignation as information rather than betrayal. They ask what the person is going to, and mean it. They write the reference the person earned. They make the handover a proper piece of work, because a bad handover punishes the team that stays, not the one who goes. And they keep in touch, which costs nothing.

The return is not sentimental. Those leavers become the client who hands you a tender, or the candidate who comes back three years later with the experience you could not give them. More senior people rejoin a former employer than most directors would guess, and nearly every time the door was left open by how they were treated on the way out.

The uncomfortable bit

A team nobody ever leaves is not necessarily a well-led one. Sometimes it is a team with no ambition in it, or one where leaving has been made too frightening to attempt. A director who loses good people occasionally, to bigger roles, and stays on good terms with every one of them, is running something healthier than the director who has clung on to everybody.

So the test I would set yourself is not your retention rate. It is this: if someone rang the last three people who left your team and asked about you, what would they say? Not whether they were sorry to go. Whether they would work for you again, and whether they would tell someone else to.

If you are not sure, the next resignation is your chance to find out. Handle the fortnight as if the whole industry is watching. It is.