They Might Not Be Bluffing

When your employees tell you they cannot accept a situation and they are going to leave if something isn’t done, that would be a good time to start listening to them very, very carefully.

We spoke recently with a medical doctor from Malaysia who spent a year working with an international NGO in some very rough places in Africa. He had given up his very successful work at a hospital at home to take some time to go do some charitable work overseas (and before joining the NGO he went out on his own to a Nepalese refuge camp and helped out there for a couple months). His story offers a useful lesson.

While he was on a mission in Africa the HR folks back at the NGO’s headquarters made some changes, specifically putting some people into new positions. The young doctor thought the moves were having a detrimental effect on patient care, and actually endangered some patients. He discussed it with the local leaders, and when that didn’t work, pursued it up to the HR folks at headquarters. He said, very clearly, that he was not comfortable staying what he felt was an unethical situation, and HR’s response was “the decision is made, and that’s it.” The doctor’s reaction? He resigned, and left the mission two months early.

There’s a long discussion we could have about the right reaction everyone could have had, from the local leadership to the headquarters to the doctor, but there’s one lesson in particular that really stands out. That’s a lesson about passion, and the effect it can have on your employees’ decisions to stay or go.

Very often, we think people are bluffing when they tell us they will leave if things don’t change, and very often we’re right. But when people are really passionate about what they do, those threats are rarely idle. When someone cares a lot about what they do, about the quality of their work, they are unlikely to put up with anything that they feel compromises the integrity of what they are doing. If a talented, high-performaing, highly-engaged employee tells you they’re going to walk, you need to listen.

That doesn’t mean you need to change to accommodate them, nor does it mean you should give in to every threat. What it DOES mean is that you need to take such threats seriously and not rely on the hope that it’s a bluff, if in fact this is an employee you want to hold onto. You need to do the cost-benefit analysis, asking yourself how your original decision compares to the loss of this person, and decide if it’s worth it. Maybe it is, but if so, you want the end result to be the outcome of serious deliberation on your part, rather than a miscalculation.

Sure, they might be bluffing…but if they are passionate, and if you want to keep them, don’t bet the house on it.