By Timothy Askew; reprinted from Inc. with the kind permission of Timothy Askew.
One of the things I am most proud of as the 20 year owner of my executive sales firm Corporate Rain International is how many employees and associates have left me to take a leadership role at other companies or to start their own ventures. While I see a multitude of articles written about holding on to great employees, I never see an article about celebrating an employee assuming greater leadership and greater personal growth by leaving.
There should be more discussion of this, particularly in the small business universe. I believe in supporting employee growth and fulfillment even to the point of their leaving your company. I see this as a fundamental step in creating good through-branded culture.
In hiring people I try to make clear it is to our company’s advantage for employees to be constantly growing in competency, leadership, fulfillment, and mindfulness, as well as making a living through our company. My interviews of potential associates always begin with determining if they will be happy and fulfilled in Corporate Rain”s community. What do they want out of life—personally as well as professionally? How would being with Corporate Rain help them gain their goals? Only then do I consider if Corporate Rain will be happy with them. (Probably so if they truly understand and like us.)
I want my company’s ambience to be one of generosity to and generosity from my employees. I see this generosity directed first toward one another, second toward our clients, third toward the success of our client’s clients and fourth toward the broader world in general. I want associates who want to live in and promulgate such an atmosphere, such a salubrious corporate trope. And that starts with me.
My firm is a sales outsourcing company. It is an extreme service community. Service that goes beyond contract is attitudinal. When a trope of giving is endemic in a company’s DNA, clients feel it. Therefore, they trust and let themselves become good enterprise colleagues from the get go. They trust you. As they should. It is comfortably efficient.
The same applies to employees. You save so much time when values are generally shared on an assumed basis by all members of a corporate community. If there is a comity of belief and principal, all the penultimate details are just executional work. That is good corporate culture.
And that is why efficacious bosses should celebrate when a valued and beloved executive leaves. It is a tribute to your own leadership as an owner. It is a plaudit to the petri dish that has generated such an employee—your company, your corporate community, your culture, you. It is just as much a communal triumph as landing a million dollar contract.
There are also good selfish reasons to celebrate employees who move on and up. They become ambassadors for your brand. They hopefully personify the culture of your company even as they assume leadership roles elsewhere. They become a peer network. In the long-term their good will results in referrals of the best sort.
So when one of my associates begins to grow beyond opportunities and salary levels in my company, I try to help them segue to the next life step through references and my own contacts. Someone will show up to replace them. But even if a replacement associate is not as good, trying to control and hold in stasis the happy status quo will only result in tension and frustration for all.
Sometimes I think a healthy company life is like a healthy personal life— a constant process of letting go, of simplification, of acceptance of loss. Our ultimate loss in life is life itself and we are all headed there. Likewise, a good corporate culture healthily accepts loss and changes as appropriate and natural, like a snake molting its old skin to make way for a brilliant new one.
Lao Tsu says, “Life is a series of mutual and spontaneous changes. Don’t resist them; that only creates sorrow. Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like.” Thank you, Lao Tsu.
Image: Pexels.
Tim Askew is the owner of sales firm Corporate Rain International and a member of the Inc. Business Owners Council. He has several advanced degrees, and has been a tennis pro, actor, opera singer, Broadway producer, dishwasher, bartender, minister, and college assistant dean. Askew is the author of the book The Poetry of Small Business (available on Amazon). @TimothyAskew
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