The Exit Interview Nobody Did

A strong employee, four years in, put in her notice. The owner asked me to sit in on the exit conversation, because he genuinely wanted to understand what had happened.

It turned out she’d tried to raise a concern twice before, months apart, informally, in passing. Nobody had followed up either time — not out of malice, just because things got busy and it fell through the cracks. So she stopped bringing it up and quietly started looking instead. By the time the “exit interview” happened, it wasn’t really feedback anymore. It was just an explanation for something that had already been decided.

That’s true of a lot of what we’ve covered across these posts — the CRM nobody trusts, the process that only lives in one person’s head, the pricing that depends on who you happen to talk to, the standard nobody enforces. None of it announces itself. It just quietly costs you, a little at a time, until someone finally asks the right question — usually later than it should have been asked.

If your strongest person quit tomorrow, would today’s version of you actually learn something new in that exit interview — or just confirm what should have come up months ago?