He did his job perfectly. Yet he left.

What to learn from an employee who does everything right, and then resigns?

Sound familiar? Just back from holiday, and then that resignation you didn't see coming. It happens again every year, somewhere towards the end of August or the start of September. An employee returns from holiday and lets you know they've found another job. For the employee themselves, it's rarely a surprise. That doubt had been there for a long time. There simply hadn't been any room to talk about it.

A while ago, a friend told me about someone he knew. An IT professional, driven and genuinely good at his job. He came back from his summer holiday with a clear message: he was leaving. No conflict, no incident, no burnout. Just the calm, fact-based conclusion that he'd been doing the same work for far too long, and that there had never been a moment to talk about anything other than the projects he did.

Recognition

This story isn't unique. I hear it more and more, particularly in roles where people are strong performers and, for that very reason, keep getting assigned to what they already do well. The work gets done, the results are good, so why would you change anything? It's a question almost nobody asks out loud. Until someone, on holiday, decides to answer it for themselves.

Stalled

What happened to this IT professional wasn't neglect in the classic sense. Nobody treated him badly. He did his job well, received good appraisals and the occasional pay rise. Predictable, manageable, low-risk. For the organisation, that was efficient. For him, it slowly became an invisible kind of stagnation — the sort you only notice once you've properly stepped away.

Comfortable

After a resignation like this, I hear the same explanations time and again. The job market is tight. Headhunters are working overtime, and good IT people get poached wherever they go. It was only a matter of time. All true, perhaps. But also all explanations that conveniently steer attention away from a more uncomfortable question: when did anyone last talk to him about what he still wanted to learn, rather than about the quality of his work?

Attention

Development and coaching are still too often seen as something for when things aren't going well, or as a reward for those performing above their level. Yet it's precisely that kind of attention — genuine interest in where someone wants to go, not just in what they deliver — that makes it possible to raise "the same work again" before someone reaches a decision about it alone, on holiday.

Mirror

The question on the table is usually: how do I prevent people leaving after the summer. That question comes too late, once the resignation is already on the table. So ask yourself instead: when did you last have a genuine conversation with someone on your team about where they want to be in five years, and what support they'd need to get there — inside or outside their current role? Not the annual review, focused on how satisfied you are or where there's room for improvement. A conversation without an agenda. Purely out of curiosity.

If you can't answer that straight away, you probably already know enough.