How to Convince a Top Performing Employee to Stay After Resigning | Advice for Engineering Managers

One of your top performers just gave their notice,

but don't panic because I'm gonna show you how to convince them to stay without even getting HR involved.

Stay tuned.

Hey everyone, and welcome to my channel. If you're new here, I'm Doug Howard and I help engineering leaders increase your impact at every level of your organization by showing you how to leverage people skills and influence as your biggest asset for advancing your team and your career.

Today I'm gonna tell you how I convinced a top performing engineer to turn down another offer that would've been a $20,000 salary increase for him. And then I'm gonna explain a six step framework that I used so that you know how to convince direct reports to stay after they've given you their two weeks notice too.

Why You Should Give it a Shot

But first I want to explain why it's always worth giving it your best shot to convince a top performing engineer to stay first. All of their expertise and tribal knowledge leaves with them when they quit. You can't put a price on experience in engineering, especially if you work in a niche industry.

Yes, you have processes and systems, and yes, you can go out there and find another engineer, but how long is it gonna take for them to get up to speed and will they actually be able to get up to speed fast enough and ever deliver and match the quality of work that this expert was doing? 

Hiring and onboarding sucks and it's the last thing you want to do. That was my least favorite part of the job was interviewing and working with HR and negotiating salaries and all this stuff. It's a big time suck that prevents you from doing what you do best and it prevents you from helping your team be productive.

Besides if you're an engineering leader, your time is already spread thin, hiring and onboarding and training. This eats up your bandwidth and your teams bandwidth, and you just simply don't have time for that.

Third, when a top senior engineer leaves, it really kills the morale on your team. If this person was popular and highly regarded and well respected, people are gonna be sad that they're leaving and people are gonna start to wonder, why did that person leave all of a sudden? While you're in the interim period of trying to pick up the slack from this person suddenly leaving, it might lead to more fallout and more resignations, because other people are gonna just not want to deal with the stress of losing this top performer.

Top Performer Resigned Out of Nowhere 

I know because I had this happen to me back when I was an engineering manager. It caught me by surprise. This person was a very young engineer, one to two years in the company, but he was a rising star, and I saw all of his potential. Unlike most engineers, he really took a shine and an interest in developing his leadership skills at a very young age.

He was a major contributor within his first two years in the company. I had very high aspirations and plans for him. From the first few months of him starting, I ended up spending a lot of one-on-one time with him because I saw his potential and I wanted to help him reach his full potential.

I saw him as an opportunity to help me grow past my role. I figured if I could groom him to be a leader, then it would help me elevate to the next level in my career. So there's a lot of things at play and when I unexpectedly got his notice, I was just shocked. It caught me off guard cause I had a really good relationship with this guy.

He came to me on a Friday afternoon to give me his two weeks notice, and it was literally outta nowhere. When he came to me, he had an offer that was $20,000 higher than what we were paying him, and I already knew that we couldn't afford to match that.

Couldn't Promote or Increase Salary

Maybe we could give him a small raise, but I knew we couldn't give him a $20,000 raise for the position and title that he was in and his experience. Instead of even going down that path, I showed him genuine enthusiasm towards his offer. I showed him that I was happy for him. I didn't get into how it was impacting me or anything like that.

I didn't show my sadness or anything like that. I just told him, congratulations right away. This is awesome. The other thing I told him was that, I'm happy for him and that it's been a privilege to work with him and watch him grow. I kept it very focused on him right away from the get-go. I didn't dwell or anything. I didn't make it negative. I didn't ask him why or anything like that. I just told him how much that he meant to me and how much I enjoyed working with him. Then I got into, I'll be sad to see you go, but I completely understand. I understand the situation and there's no hard feelings on my part. I'm really happy for you. So I kept it very positive. 

After going into this celebration mode, then I asked him about the new opportunity and what was it. When he told me, I was really surprised. He told me the role was for an estimating role. Now to give you some perspective here, what we did at my company was structural engineering, and he was a structural engineer and he was in the process of pursuing his PE, his license and estimating isn't really in that career track path. Estimating, from my understanding at least, it doesn't advance your structural engineering skills. It's more top level, it's more customer facing. You don't really complete projects. You don't really perfect your skills.

Everything I knew about this guy from working with him was that he wanted to go down a path towards, pursuing his PE, which his professional engineering license in structural engineering, and he eventually wanted to become an SE, which is your structural engineering license. This didn't really make sense to me, but, I didn't wanna point that out to him.

I just kinda listened more about his opportunity. But I did notice that didn't seem to be aligned with his long-term goals. It didn't really align with his interest in leadership and wanting to be a manager in the future either. So from there, after I asked him a little bit about the job and what he'd be doing in his new role, then I talked him through some considerations. I didn't say anything like, you should stay, or, here's why you should stay here, or here's why that other opportunity isn't right. 

Asked Him To Consider What's Most Important

I just asked him. Hey, I'm surprised that you're leaving. I'm just curious, what, what has you most excited about this opportunity? And he told me honestly, it's the money.

He said, quite frankly it's a lot of money. And I couldn't turn that down. And I said, okay. I can't argue with that, but I want to ask you, this. Is money what's most important to you at this point in your career? He was silent for a minute. He stared at me. What do you mean?

And I said, well, flash forward to the future 10 years. You have 10 years of working experience. Maybe you're married and you have kids, money, and security and stability. Those will probably be very important to you then. But at this point in your life, shortly outta college, is money what's most important? He was confused so I guided him a little further and I said as a young engineer, when I was at your point in my career, I thought growth and advancement opportunities, and working for a boss who understood me, those were the things that were most important to me.

Getting opportunities to advance my skills and getting opportunities to have autonomy in my role and grow in my role, and getting opportunities to be supported for getting my PE license and whatnot. Those are what would've been more important to me earlier in my career. But everyone's different and we all have different considerations, so I'm not implying that I know what's best for you or anything like that.

As the conversation continued, I had this casual tone of, have you considered these things? I didn't tell him it in an aggressive way, and I kept it more of a casual tone. I wasn't acting as his boss anymore. I was just having a friendly, candid conversation with him about this new opportunity and asking him if he'd consider these things.

I ended it by saying, I don't know what's best for you, only you do, so I'm not gonna tell you what to do. But I did tell him this. I said, as a friend, I would encourage you to do one thing. Just give some thought to the things I just brought up to you and sleep on it, and when you wake up the next day, if you still feel like this is the right job for you, great, go for it.

I don't want to get in your way and discourage you from a great and exciting opportunity, but if you do still feel like this is a better opportunity for you to work here versus the other job, then tell you what. I won't bring this up to hr, and this can be our secret and we can tear up that letter and nobody has to know about it.

So that's where we left it. We agreed to act like his resignation notice didn't happen, and then he was gonna let me know on Monday how he wanted to proceed. 

How I Convinced Him to Stay!

Here's what happened. First thing Monday morning, like 8:00 AM sharp, he came into my office with the letter and he ripped up the two weeks notice letter and threw it in my trash in my office.

And he shook my hand and he said, I want to be here and I want to work for you. And that's worth more than $20,000 a year to me.

Can you imagine a direct report saying something like that to you?

Now I went through that story pretty quick, so now I want to back down and break it down and unpack what I did. I'm gonna give you a six step framework that I was following in this conversation with him.

Step 1 - Break the Tension

Step one is break the tension by celebrating the offer with them. They're probably gonna be really nervous about this meeting with you when they give you their notice, but you need to calm them down if you want to have any chance at convincing 'em to stay.

For them this offer they have is a positive. In my example, he was getting a $20,000 salary increase, so this is a win for him. This is positive. If you come at it from an angle of being against that, you have no chance at influencing them. So you want to keep this conversation positive. You want to share the enthusiasm in this opportunity for them.

And honestly, if you're a good leader, then you should truly care about everyone on your team, and you won't take this personally. Instead you actually will be happy for them.

Step 2 - Show Your Appreciation

Step two is show that you appreciate what they did while they were working for you.

Give specific things that you noticed and appreciated about this employee's work. Give specific examples of how you've seen them grow or how they were a huge factor in a specific project's success. Be as specific as possible, but explain exactly what you appreciate about this person and why you appreciate it about them.

When you're doing this you are reminding them that you're the type of manager who values this person. Unfortunately in today's world, that's not a given. There's a lot of bad managers out there and like they say, people will stay at a job for a good manager, so you need to make that front of mind right now. When they made this decision to leave and to accept this other offer with another company, they were making that decision based on just logic alone.

Okay. $20,000 increase, I'd be an idiot to turn down that money. But now you're bringing an emotional element into the situation by showing that there are other considerations, liking the person you work for and having your work being valued and appreciated. Other things you can do to tap into this emotion is explaining how hard it'll be to replace them, and how much you'll miss them, and that you'd hate to see them go.

If all this is true that I just said, share the future vision you have for them. You could say something like, oh man, this is too bad, cuz I was really hoping to get you in this type of role over the next year. To be clear, I'm not proposing that you lie, manipulate, or play games.

If you really had high aspirations for this person, tell them about it. Now would be a great time to tell 'em about it.

Step 3 - Ask About Their Opportunity

Step three is ask them questions about the opportunity they have. Take off your manager hat for a minute and put on your mentor hat. Stop thinking about what's best for the company and consider what's best for that person. Don't look at 'em like an employee. Look at 'em as a colleague, as a mentee, someone that you care about and you care about what's best for them.

When you put that hat on, probe them to learn about the opportunity. As you're probing them, see if there's an opening to discuss the new opportunity. 

Good questions that you can ask are, where, what, how, and why. Where will you be working? What will you be doing there? What are you most excited about? How did you make this decision? How does this opportunity line up with your career goals in the long term and medium term?

When you ask these questions, listen very closely to their answers, because you're gonna use the answers in the next step. But before I get to that, as a mentor, you're probing to make sure that they feel like this is the best decision for them.

You're gathering information for this next step, but when you're listening, you want to hear do they actually feel like this is the right opportunity for them?

You'll hear it in their voice.

Step 4 - Give Them Something to Reconsider

Step four is give them something to reconsider on their own. When you're listening to the answers they gave as you were probing in the previous step, does anything they say sound contradicting to what you know about them? For example, is their goal to grow into a manager role, but this new opportunity puts their career on a different path that isn't aligned with that.

Are you able to point out some blind spots that they might not be able to be aware of? Position this as an innocent question. You could say something like this, Hey, I'm really happy for you. This sounds like a great opportunity, but I'm a little confused. I really didn't realize that you were interested in X, Y, Z, or I thought you wanted more X, Y, Z instead. You have the opportunity to do those things at your new company?

Give them some perspective to reconsider, open them to the idea that this might not be the best decision for them. But again, I can't stress this enough. Be genuine. Don't manipulate. If you honestly feel like this new opportunity is a good opportunity for them. Don't ruin that. Don't play games. But if you do feel like staying with at your company is the best opportunity for them, or if you feel like they haven't considered things that they should, then go down this path.

Step 5 - Ask Them to Sleep on It

Step five is ask them to sleep on it. Don't pressure them to give you an answer on the spot. As an engineer, they're gonna need a little time to process and reflect on the new perspective you've given them. 

Give them the space, then sit back and wait. Ask them to sleep on it as a favor to you. Here's what I'd recommend saying, Hey, I know you've given me your notice, but let's keep this between us for 24 hours. As a friend, I want to give you the chance to think about this decision so that we can discuss it first thing in the morning before we get HR involved. Does that sound good?

Step 6 - Accept Their Decision

Step six is accept whatever decision they make. Obviously, we're hoping that they make the decision to stay, but if they decide to take the other opportunity, you need to be okay with that. You should have peace in mind in knowing that you gave it your best shot to make it work. Remind yourself that their decision is not personal and that for them, this is an exciting new career opportunity.

Make sure you still show that same level of enthusiasm in congratulating 'em when they make this decision. Let them know that there's no hard feelings about this decision, too. You still want to end on good terms with this employee because who knows, they might be calling you back within the next few months.

Maybe they'll realize that the new job isn't everything they thought it would be. This is a great framework to follow whenever a top performing engineer resigns, but if you wanna give yourself the best chance at convincing them to stay, check out my episode called How to Influence Anybody to Do Anything in Five Steps.

check out my FREE mini masterclass - “increase your impact as an engineering leader”

Learn How to Influence People to Create Efficiencies and Save Time

Stop following, waiting, and letting other people dictate your time.
Start leading, inspiring, and creating impact for your team and organization 

Join me for this FREE 60 on demand minute MINI MASTERCLASS to learn how you can INFLUENCE decisions, INSPIRE change, and MOTIVATE behavior at every level of the organization.