People Will Leave Your Life
Lately I’ve been wondering what’s going on with a young friend of mine. We were talking almost daily through instant messaging for awhile there, and it was fun. Then one day I didn’t hear from her, and when I finally did it was about two weeks later through email. She said she was sick, but hopefully would be back soon. That was almost 5 months ago.
The problem is that I met this friend through one of those social networking sites. I have a phone number and email, but I’ve never met her in person, and she lives out of the country, so going to try to visit, especially without an address, is out of the question. And, just recently, the answering machine stopped having her message; someone else is on the machine now, so I think the number has been switched.
It reminded me of a time many years ago when I was first getting into the internet, though I’d been playing with computers for a much longer period of time. There was this guy I’d met at work who was really into it, a much older guy than I was at the time, and he knew so much about the internet and all its wonders that we developed a pretty close relationship. He would send me all sorts of things through email, then we’d talk about them at work. Then, one day, he was gone; he’d had a heart attack that Friday night, and I’d been wondering why I hadn’t heard from him all weekend until I got back to work on Monday. It was heartbreaking.
Being a military kid, one of those things you learn when you move around a lot is that people will fall out of your life, and sometimes no matter how hard you try, you just can’t hold onto those people because life gets in the way. I remember moving at a 10 year old halfway across the country and writing letters back and forth to my best friend at the time, a guy named Carl. We made it four months before the letters stopped. About six years later I had a different friend named Carl when I moved once again, and we made it less than two months. From high school, I now keep in touch with only 3 or 4 people; from college, maybe another 7 or 8. Not that I didn’t try, but there’s only so much one person can do when other people can’t keep up.
The same principles apply to working with people in business. People leave for a variety of reasons, and, luckily, most of the time it’s their choice, because most managers really do hate firing people. I’ve known some managers who have screamed at an employee for giving them a resignation letter; I’ve known many others who have told an employee to make that day their last. Sometimes it’s warranted; most of the time it’s not, though. People sometimes have problems keeping their emotions in check at tense times, and most of the time I figure that these managers have been caught off guard and don’t know another way to react.
Here’s the thing, though. The reasons why people leave should give you, as a manager, a chance to learn something about yourself and the company you work for. If people leave because of you, then you know you need to change something about yourself. If people leave because they have a problem with the company in some fashion (low pay, lousy benefits, etc), then you know there’s nothing you can do about it, but maybe you can talk to upper management about your issues in hopes that some things can change. If people leave for better opportunities, you should take pride in yourself for training someone so well that they’ve been able to score what amounts to an advancement. And if people leave for reasons that have nothing whatsoever to do with you or the company, such as a spouse is moving or they have to go take care of a sick relative, wish them well and allow both sides to leave on good terms.
Of course, both sides should always leave on good terms anyway; after all, you never know when the two of you might meet again. But people will leave your life; we all just have to learn how to deal with it.
