New as an HR Manager: Star employee just resigned
I need feedback on this situation. I’m new in a job as an HR Manager.
In our company (300 people) each departement has a manager and 1 or 2 supervisors and then advisors. In a departement, let’s call it departement Sales, many talented employees have left recently which left us flabbergasted.
One example is Jack, he is 31, has been with us for 5 years. Ambitious, very good worker, seen by both his supervisor and manager as a talented employee who is ready to move up the ladder in one year. He has been in his current function in our company for almost 2 years.
Jack has been one of the only people in this company who hasnt been mentioned negative to HR. The dude is well-liked.
4 months ago he came to me and he told me that he was ambitious to grow into a certain function. He asked his supervisor for a development plan to which the supervisor replied: ‘You don’t need oké for sales you just need to learn it’, so he came to me, he told me what he wanted to do, scheduled trainings for himself and asked my opinion.
I was enthousiast, i also sent him to an assessment, to get a look at his abilities 2 months ago. We received the results 2 weeks ago, honestly, it was more than good for a person in his role.
He is in a role where there are a lot of incoming calls, side-note, he has done lots of side projects, after hours or on the weekends he was still working.
We talked about his development 2 weeks ago.
Last friday he resigned. This came as a huge shock. He gave a few reasons:
- Development, he felt like everything needed to come from him. He didn’t receive any positive feedback about things he did, he got more and more demotivated from his job.
2.Workload, he was having the most difficult tasks and had the most difficult customers, often representing millions of euro’s. He said that he told his supervisors, who were kind, but nothing changed.
- He announced that he had received an offer from the competition to the manager (not supervisor) m, stating he did not care about money but wanted to know what his development could be, according to him, the manager said that people his age are too impatient although Jack stated that he wants to evolve the following years not weeks or months. The supervisor said there were 5-6 people with potential in the team, that they would miss him for his personality etc, that they were really satisfied with him
He signed for a job as a Sales Manager at the competition, in his exit interview he stated that he would have stayed had he received a thank you or a you are doing great or something. Other managers are constantly showing the great results of their employees, a new employee heard ‘you are too good to be in this position’…him and his team didn’t. He actually cried cause he loved the company.
How can I prevent this in the futur, as said, I am new in an HR Manager job, what can I do to prevent this sort of things ?
I’d like you guys to give your feedback
EDIT: I read some replies, and I 100% understand however after we reviewed his assesment we clearly said that we could do things: trainings, let him do projects etc