8 Exit Interview Mistakes
Why conducting a poor exit interview can carry huge costs
Exit interviews provide companies with one of the most powerful conversations they will ever experience. This assumes your company does them right. This also assumes that both leadership and talent management align with the same vision for exit interviews. If you don’t have alignment as to the importance of exit interviews, then they will provide your company with little value.
Exit Interview Overview and Context
Leadership and talent management should recognize the difference between an exit interview for a termination and a volunteered exit. While I would apply some of the points in this post to both, I write this post for volunteered exits. To help with the understanding of some terms in this post, I have included a brief definition of terms below this.
Terms:
Termination: when a company terminates (fires/dismisses an employee).
Volunteered exit: when an employee chooses to leave on their own.
Hyper-legal: a process by which an organization spends more of its time and resources on protecting against lawsuits than growing through feedback.
Preview
I also preview my AI summary to standard readers. In paid posts, I highlight how AI is providing people with poor quality (or completely incorrect information). I've cautioned readers on the dangers with AI - people will end up finding information they want to know rather than what is true. Exit interviews provides an example of this danger. The information multiple AIs have compiled is not only wrong, it's unlikely to serve you. Read the opening paragraph in my post again: exit interviews - if done right - will be one of the most powerful discussions that your company ever has.
How Most People Are Misled By Artificial Intelligence
Start AI Summary.
AI communicates that the biggest mistakes in exit interviews are:
Not creating an environment of trust and openness. The irony about this advice from AI is that an exit interview is already too late if you have this problem. For instance, if someone is leaving due to a lack of trust, you certainly aren't going to have it in an exit interview.
Inappropriate exit interview questions or discussions. This is a problem that can be avoided if you understand why you're giving an exit interview. This shows lower-level thinking.
Not leveraging feedback. While obvious, this is actually good advice. You shouldn't have an exit interview if you aren't going to take any feedback.
Timing the interview during a high emotional time when people feel intensely about the situation. This is a terrible answer. I'm grateful that my competition is taking this advice.
Not informing people about how the exit interview will be conducted with clear instructions to enhance feedback. Like the fourth one, this is a terrible answer.
Not having a structure for exit interviews, which makes it difficult to leverage feedback. This advice is both true and false. I cover some of why in this post.
End AI Summary.
As you see, AI will mislead more companies than it will help in the long run. Paid subscribers regularly see these AI summaries in the related posts, as the internet is full of more misinformation than good information.
If you haven’t already, I suggest that you sometimes re-read my predictions related to the future of AI. Like this summary, you will start to notice these patterns.
Creating the Best Exit Interview
The world is full of sham, flattery and deception. ~ John D. Rockefeller
Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning. ~ Bill Gates
Before we look at creating the best exit interview, let’s remember a key customer: talent. In both talent management and leadership, one of our customers is our talent. Leadership must balance serving customers and employees. Unlike popular internet advice which tells you what you want to hear, the actual truth of leadership is that it involves much more responsibility. You are balancing many people’s needs. If you dislike this, then you should avoid leadership entirely.
With this in mind, exit interviews should help us improve as leaders and organizations. If we do them right, they will pay us huge dividends.
Mistake 1: not having an exit interview in the first place. You learn more from negative feedback than positive feedback. Exceptional organizations and people love negative feedback. Why?
Positive feedback is often deceptive.
Negative feedback communicates exactly how an organization (or person) is being perceived by another (or others).
Negative feedback is the fastest route to the why.
While we should consider a different exit interview for terminations versus volunteered exits, any exit is an opportunity to get direct feedback. Sometimes you hear improvements you can make.
Without feedback, you cannot improve. History is full of entire empires that fell because their system inherently prevented feedback (ie: the Soviet Union). If you want to avoid the same fate, you need a system which provides you with honest feedback as an initial step.
Mistake 2: getting hyper-legal in an exit interview. While a termination and volunteered exit differ, the more the latter becomes a legal situation, the less you’ll get feedback. We had a speaker at the leadership lunch I host recently tell us a story that highlighted this exact point:
(Paraphrased Quote) Early in my consulting career I left a hyper-legal company. You could tell they only had exit interviews for legal reasons. Even though they begged me to stay, their entire company existed to protect themselves from lawsuits. They never took feedback. I had no interest in sharing with them why I left. I knew they wouldn't listen and couldn't listen. The actual reason they held exit interviews? Liability prevention. By having exit interviews, they insured against lawsuits.
As he predicted when he left, the company would struggle. In the past few years, they’ve stumbled as a company and are in crisis mode. Their entire feedback structure never involved improvement; it was liability protection.
An exit interview should be personal, not hyper-legal. When asking questions, confirm comfort with the person expressing. "If you're comfortable sharing, why... (your question). You don't have to answer if you're not comfortable."
Related to this point for those of you who see my presentation on exit interviews, apply the three points I suggest here. This is the step where you apply these.
Mistake 3: a formal environment for the exit interview. Personal offices and closed rooms often exist to create a formal environment. Yet, the more you make the exit interview feel formal, the less feedback you’ll receive.
This would seem like an easy step, yet it’s frequently missed. Exit interviews make great casual occasions. Yet in lawyer life, they are constructed as formal environments to prevent even the slightest liability. While there’s a difference between a volunteered exit and a termination, recognize the importance of a casual environment for the right audience.
For instance, an important question to ask: how do you ensure your employee is comfortable sharing feedback? You answer affects how you conduct exit interviews overall and for each employee.
Mistake 4: having an ego in the exit interview. For the sake of this point, I’m assuming that you are doing the exit interview. If not, then apply this point to who is.
First, recognize that this employee voluntarily is leaving. For this point, we’re excluding terminations. This means that your company failed with this employee in the context of keeping the employee.
Second, any defense of your company won’t help you because logic seldom changes a person’s mind. Instead I suggest that you change your mind if you feel defensive because your employee is taking action by leaving. If you feel or act defensively, you’re less likely to receive feedback as your mind is in defense mode.
Mentally enter listen mode with your employee and note the feedback. As an observation, when a person argues even one point, they mentally begin to start the opposite mental state of listening. Avoid arguing even one point, even if the employee criticizes you.
Related mistake to 4: having the wrong person give the exit interview. I find it humorous that human resources tends to give exit interviews. Human resources have the strongest reputation for being dislikeable. There’s numerous whys to people disliking human resources that I won’t address here. Avoiding using human resources for exit interviews.
Research: when I A-B tested feedback to HR versus a comfortable 3rd party, I found that 1 out of 3 employees intentionally gave dishonest feedback to human resources during exit interviews. While there’s a lot of detail as to why, one reason is that very few employees have a positive view of human resources.
Mistake 5: showing a lack of emotion. If you take AI’s advice or legal advice, you will miss this. Both want to protect you from liability. The more robotic you sound, the more likely your bases are covered. Even if you assume that this belief is correct, you guarantee the exit interview results in nothing.
When an employee leaves, the company experiences a metaphoric death. You will no longer see that person’s smile at the office. You will no longer hear that person’s perspectives in your discussions. You will no longer feel that person’s enthusiasm to the solutions you create. As you walk around your office, the walls and rooms will speak of an emptiness without that employee.
This is part of why companies lose top performers. They forget the humanity of their employees.
If you feel saddened by the loss of an employee, then you should show this. Exit interviews aren’t some massive chess move on a board where you look strategic. Rather, exit interviews involve a human interaction where the chapter of that employee ends. As every good storyteller or story writer knows, you don’t end a good story with a brilliant chess move. You end a story with a human touch.
Reflect over the memories of your employee and give them something that reflects this. For instance, one extremely detailed employee I worked with I purchased a Swiss watch before he left. Here’s what I told him:
You are the most detailed person I’ve ever worked with. I just love how you enjoyed sharing knowledge with everyone. You loved to deep dive! When I saw this watch and the intricate details of gears, you popped into my mind. I wanted you to have something that you could look at and remember the why of you getting it. Swiss watches are known for their detail. Like them, I know you will be like this throughout your career and people will love it.
That gift was only appropriate to him. Likewise, what gift would you get for the person leaving?
Never forget: everyone wants to have good memories. Yet most of these same people don’t want to enhance their current experiences to create good memories. Part of having good memories is being a good memory to other people. Because I know this point feels easy to skip, let me repeat it: part of having good memories is being a good memory to other people.
Related to mistake 5: only putting in effort for top performing employees. Like top performing employees know, you don’t enable good behavior when you want. All behavior is practice. All exit interviews are practice. With the exception of terminations - as these have a different context - treat all exit interviews with importance.
Mistake 6: not reflecting over your feedback from an exit interview. The precursor here is that you’ve taken detailed notes throughout your exit interview. You’ve also done every step I’ve listed above this.
Look through your notes and spend time thinking about the picture. This employee meant a lot to you and your company. You have notes on why they left. What can you change.
When we feel a negative emotion, like sadness, we often want to distract ourselves away from this. When we distract ourselves, we avoid reflection. Reflection involves experiencing the negative emotion and staying with it while we consider what led us to that moment. Distraction kills honest reflection.
As you note what you can change, also note where you may have blind spots. These blind spots make great conversations at leadership events because other leaders relate to these. We won’t always have the answers after an exit interview - there are lessons we may learn after a decade or more in business.
We can finally get that answer when we take two actions. First, we actually reflect over the problem. And second, we ask for help from people who’ve been there.
Mistake 7: not painting the right picture with exit interviews. As a final point, exit interviews fundamentally communicate the beliefs your company has about itself and its employees. Look at what I advise in this post:
Have exit interviews when employees voluntarily leave
Avoid being overly legal in exit interviews
Hold the exit interview in a comfortable environment
Keep you and your company’s ego out of an exit interview
Find the right person or people to give exit interviews
Show emotion in an exit interview
Seeing all exit interviews as practice to improve future exit interviews
Reflect over the feedback in exit interviews
You can see the picture this paints. Fundamentally, each of these suggestions reflect the beliefs of an exceptional organization. When I speak to talent management and leadership on company identity, we look at the company’s beliefs. What are your company’s beliefs about exit interviews? What picture do these paint?
All images are either sourced from Pixabay or generated. All written content is copyright, all rights reserved. The AI content to compare with human creativity is summarized with the author's own wording to show how AI misses the mark. None of the content may be shared with any artificial intelligence.