Few months ago, I made one of the hardest decisions of my career. I decided to move on from my previous workplace.
Not because I hated the job; I loved it, actually.
Not because I lacked opportunities.
And certainly not because I wasn’t committed.
I left because deep down, I knew I needed to challenge myself beyond the walls I had become comfortable in. I wanted to explore my full potential, stretch my creativity, test my leadership capacity, and discover the version of myself that only growth can reveal.
But if I am being honest, there was another reason too.
I was tired.
Not the kind of tired sleep fixes.
The kind of tired that builds quietly behind constant performance. The kind where you keep showing up, delivering results, meeting deadlines, fixing problems, carrying responsibilities, and smiling through pressure until people assume you are “fine” simply because you are functioning.
Throughout my stay, I do not think many people noticed how stressed and frustrated I truly was. Maybe my greatest strength became my greatest disguise. Because I was hardworking, reliable, and always delivered on time, often to perfection, my struggles became invisible.
I complained. I raised concerns. I spoke about the workload not being sustainable for one person. But sometimes when people are exceptional at surviving pressure, organizations mistake survival for capacity.
The dangerous thing about high performers is this: they rarely break loudly. They break silently while still producing results. And because they continue delivering, nobody realizes the cost attached to that consistency.
Many organizations only begin asking questions when the resignation letter arrives.
And this…..this is where the story gets interesting.
Because the moment that email lands in an inbox, something shifts. Suddenly, there is urgency. Suddenly, there is availability. Suddenly, people have time.
I have heard this story from so many people, told in so many different ways, yet always ending in the same quiet disbelief.
A colleague of mine, a talented content strategist who had spent nearly five years building systems her organization still relies on today, handed in her notice on a Tuesday morning. By Tuesday afternoon, her line manager had called twice. By Wednesday, the HR manager had scheduled a “meeting.” By Thursday, she was sitting across from the same director who had ignored her last three requests for a conversation about her workload and career direction.
“They wanted to know everything,” she told me. “What was wrong. Whether the salary was the issue. Whether a promotion would change my mind. Whether I had accepted another offer yet. They suddenly had all the time in the world. But that same manager, I had tried to book a one-on-one with him for two months. Two months. He was always in meetings. Always travelling. Always unavailable. The moment I resigned, he had three Hours to sit with me over coffee.”
She paused and looked at me with something between amusement and sadness.
“Where was that coffee when I needed to be heard?” she said.
That question has stayed with me.
Because it captures something that too many high performers experience but rarely say out loud. It is not the lack of resources that breaks people. It is not always the salary. It is the feeling of being invisible until the moment you make yourself impossible to ignore.
Another friend, a senior finance professional, described a similar experience with chilling precision. He had spent three years raising flags about unsustainable expectations placed on his team. He documented everything. He requested formal reviews. He sent emails. He followed up on the emails. He was professional, composed, and thorough in every single attempt to draw attention to what was clearly becoming a crisis beneath the surface.
“Nobody came,” He said. “Not HR. Not management. Nobody. I was doing too good a job of keeping things afloat for anyone to realize the ship was sinking.”
When He finally resigned, the HR department reached out within hours. There were phone calls. There were meetings. There was a counter-offer. There was a suddenly available budget for the additional headcount she had been requesting for two years.
“It was insulting,” she said quietly. “Not because they tried to keep me. But because the solution had always been available. They just didn’t think I was serious until I proved it.”‘
And there it is.
The fundamental breakdown that happens in organizations that wait for the resignation to ask the questions they should have been asking all along.
There is a moment in every high performer’s journey, a quiet, private moment when they make the emotional decision to leave long before they write the letter. The resignation email is just the formality. The real goodbye happened months earlier, in a meeting where their idea was dismissed without discussion, or in a corridor where they smiled through exhaustion and no one stopped to ask if they were okay, or in a performance review where their extraordinary output was acknowledged with a standard rating and a rehearsed sentence about “continued growth opportunities.”
Maya Angelou once wrote something that has guided how I think about people and their needs:
“People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
Organizations often forget this entirely.
They build systems for performance. They build systems for compliance. They build systems for talent acquisition. But they rarely build consistent, intentional systems for making people feel genuinely valued while they are still present, still productive, still pouring themselves into the work.
Instead, the urgent conversation happens after the resignation. The sudden investment of time and energy happens after the letter. The thoughtful questions about well-being and ambition and satisfaction arrive too late across a table where the other person has already made up their mind.
I spoke once with an HR director who admitted something to me in a moment of unusual honesty. She said, “We are very good at exit interviews. We have a whole process. Structured questions. Anonymous surveys. Compiled reports. We present the findings to leadership every quarter.” She paused. “But I sometimes wonder if we have perfected the art of understanding why people left instead of perfecting the art of making them want to stay.”‘
That stayed with me for a long time.
Because what she described is not unique to her organization. It is the dominant culture in workplaces across industries and borders. We have become historians of turnover. We document what went wrong with extraordinary precision after the fact and take very little of it into real-time practice.
The stay interview changes this.
Not as a tick-box exercise. Not as a scheduled quarterly obligation that feels more like a performance than a conversation. But as a genuine, recurring, human practice of asking the people who are still with you what it would take for them to stay and then actually listening.
The questions are simple but the courage to ask them sincerely is rarer than most leaders would like to admit.
What makes you feel valued here?
What is draining you right now?
What excites you most about your role?
What has been frustrating you that you haven’t said out loud yet?
What would make you feel more supported?
Where do you want to be in two years and how can we help you get there?
These are not complicated questions. They are not expensive to ask.
They require nothing but time, presence, and the willingness to hear answers that might be uncomfortable.
And yet, in most organizations, they are only asked when it is already too late.
I think about the people I know who left jobs they genuinely loved because no one thought to ask them what they needed before they started looking elsewhere. I think about the talent quietly walking out of organizations that could have kept them with a conversation, a role adjustment, a moment of acknowledgment, a sign that their contribution was seen as more than a deliverable on a project tracker.
I also want to say this clearly, because I think it gets lost in the conversation about retention: the goal of a stay interview is not to manufacture loyalty through tactics. It is not to keep people at any cost. Some people will leave regardless. Growth sometimes requires movement. And that is not a failure.
The goal is to create the kind of culture where, if someone chooses to stay, they are staying because they are genuinely fulfilled not because they are too exhausted to leave, too loyal to ask for more, or too invisible to believe anywhere else would see them differently.
Because there is a version of retention that is just captivity with better catering.
And the most talented people eventually see through it.
The organizations that will define the next era of work are the ones that understand the difference between people who stay because they are afraid to leave and people who stay because they cannot imagine wanting to be anywhere else. One produces compliance. The other produces excellence, innovation, and the kind of institutional loyalty that no competitor’s salary package can easily disrupt.
Building that kind of culture requires leaders who are willing to be uncomfortable in the right moments, not in the aftermath of a resignation, but in the quieter, less urgent moments when nothing appears to be on fire. It requires managers who are genuinely curious about the human beings on their teams, not just their productivity metrics. It requires HR professionals who advocate for people as loudly as they manage processes.
It requires the discipline to ask, consistently and sincerely: what would make you stay?
Not after the goodbye email.
Before the thought of leaving even fully forms.
Because by the time the resignation letter arrives, formatted professionally, copied to HR, cc’d to the relevant manager with the standard two weeks’ notice — the real conversation has already passed. What remains is just paperwork.
The person you needed to keep made their emotional exit long before they made the official one.
Start the conversation earlier. Stay in the room with your people. Ask the questions that matter before the answers no longer can.
Stop asking why they left. Start asking why they stay.
By: Edith Edem Agbeli
Channel Manager – Joy Prime (Multimedia Group)
Risk assessment and cost reduction strategist, finance specialist, writer and author – Beyond perfection
Email: mzjudyed@gmail.com
www.everything-me.com
DISCLAIMER: The Views, Comments, Opinions, Contributions and Statements made by Readers and Contributors on this platform do not necessarily represent the views or policy of Multimedia Group Limited.
DISCLAIMER: The Views, Comments, Opinions, Contributions and Statements made by Readers and Contributors on this platform do not necessarily represent the views or policy of Multimedia Group Limited.
Source: www.myjoyonline.com