You know what you want from the people who work with you. You know who should take on more work, who should become more independent, and whom you can count on when things get difficult. But do you know what they want from the years they spend alongside you?
That question is easily left out of conversations about the company's future. We talk about growth, new business, greater capacity, and better organisation. We assign people places in those plans, assess their abilities, and imagine everything they could do. We rarely ask whether they see themselves in the future we have planned for them.
Perhaps the colleague we intend to give more administrative work wants to learn a role involving clients. Perhaps our best specialist does not want to lead a team, even though we have already imagined promotion as a reward. Perhaps someone wants more responsibility, but for years we have given them the same tasks because they complete them without mistakes and that is easiest for us.
A person can become so useful in one position that this very usefulness closes off the way forward.
We say they matter to us, yet meet every attempt at change by asking who will do their job. We praise their potential as long as they do not ask for an opportunity to develop it somewhere that suits us less at the moment. Their future waits for us to sort out the schedule.
Sometimes that wait lasts for years.
Leading people means taking their ambitions seriously even when they do not align perfectly with our current needs. It does not mean promising everyone the position they want, training the company cannot afford, or advancement they are not yet ready for. It means listening, assessing the possibilities, and giving an honest answer. If a path exists, show what it takes to begin. If it does not, do not keep someone in place with a vague promise that “something will come up.”
That conversation requires more care than the annual question about where someone sees themselves in five years. We need to notice what interests them, where they are growing more confident, and which tasks leave them wanting to learn more. We also need to ask what they no longer want to keep doing in the same way.
Support becomes real through what we are willing to change. A colleague who wants to learn new work needs time to learn, not another task on top of the existing ones. A person taking on a new role must be able to hand their previous one over to someone else. If development always comes after everything that has to be finished, there will rarely be room for it in an already full working day.
There is a harder moment, too. A person we helped develop gets an opportunity we cannot offer them. Another department, another company, a different direction. Our first reaction may be entirely human: we are sorry to see them go, worry about who will replace them, and wonder whether we could have done something differently.
But if we then start listing everything we have done for that person, we turn our support into a debt they are expected to repay by staying.
“After everything we have done for you” is not a conversation about the future. It is an attempt to turn the past into an obligation to stay.
The company has a right to expect fair treatment, respect for agreements, and a responsible handover. It also has the right to offer a reason to stay. But investing in someone's development does not give us the right to approve their progress only while it remains useful to us.
That does not diminish the importance of business results. The company has to operate, people have to finish their work, and decisions have to be sustainable. Precisely for that reason, it is worth looking for room where an employee's progress and the company's needs can meet. We will often fail to find it if every conversation ends with what we are missing.
The next time we make plans for the people on our team, it is worth leaving room for their answers, too. We may have to change something. We may discover a possibility we would not have seen ourselves.
Or we may learn for the first time that a person we have spent years planning for one job actually wants something entirely different.
It is better to hear that in a conversation about their development than to read it in the reasons they give for resigning.
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