One resignation may be an event. Repeated resignations under the same conditions may be a pattern.
I saw a line recently that made me laugh because there was an uncomfortable management truth buried inside it: an organization loses several high performers rather than addressing the leader they are all leaving.
The meme makes the conclusion easy. Real leadership cannot.
One strong employee leaving can mean almost anything: compensation, career progression, geography, family circumstances, a better opportunity, or simply the desire for change.
But when several strong employees leave the same team, under the same leader, within a relatively short period, something changes.
It still does not prove the manager is the cause. It does mean the organization has a pattern worth investigating.
Good organizations do not automatically blame the manager. They also do not automatically explain away the pattern.
This is where organizational processes can work against organizational learning.
HR may conduct three separate exit interviews. Each resignation becomes its own case. Each employee provides a slightly different explanation. Each departure is processed, the position is opened, and eventually someone new is hired.
Three incidents. Three closures. But who owns the problem?
In IT operations, if three critical incidents occur and share common infrastructure, timing or failure characteristics, we do not congratulate ourselves because the service desk successfully closed three tickets. Problem Management asks a different question: what do these incidents have in common?
Leadership should apply the same discipline to people.
Imagine a Service Desk that loses three experienced analysts over eight months. Individually, the departures appear explainable. One accepted more money. Another wanted advancement. The third said the environment was no longer a fit.
The organization replaces them and keeps moving.
But beneath the turnover, experienced analysts had been absorbing escalations, coaching new hires, carrying customer knowledge and recognizing recurring issues before they became major incidents. As they leave, first-contact resolution weakens. Escalations increase. New analysts depend more heavily on Level 2 teams. Remaining senior people inherit more work. Knowledge that never made it into the repository walks out the door.
The organization has restored headcount. It has not necessarily restored capability.
And if the common condition behind the departures remains, the replacement employees enter the same system.
Replacement is restoration. It is not root-cause resolution.
A proper review would look across the departures rather than treating each one independently. What manager did they share? What happened to engagement? Were there repeated internal-transfer requests? What did performance history show? Were people raising similar concerns in one-to-ones, skip-level discussions or exit interviews? Did workload, promotion decisions or leadership behaviour change before the departures?
The purpose is not to build a case against a manager. The purpose is to test competing explanations against evidence.
Maybe compensation really is the issue. Maybe the team has become a recruiting ground because its people are unusually strong. Maybe a reorganization removed career paths. Or maybe leadership behaviour is driving people away.
All are hypotheses until the evidence supports one.
Key takeaways:
- One resignation is an event; repeated resignations with common attributes are a management signal.
- Exit processes should aggregate patterns, not merely close individual cases.
- Replacing people restores capacity; it does not resolve the condition that caused capability to leave.
When three servers fail from the same underlying defect, we do not buy three new servers and call the problem solved.
Our people deserve at least the same management rigor.
If you are building stronger leadership systems around employee experience, operational performance and management accountability, reach out. I’m always happy to compare notes.
