“Not every end is the goal. The end of a melody is not its goal; but nonetheless, if the melody had not reached its end it would not have reached its goal either.”

- Friedrich Nietzsche, The Wanderer and His Shadow

When Charlotte, our COO and my partner for five years, told me she was stepping back from Groops, my first feeling was gratitude for everything we had built. My second feeling was, “Oh shit, I better get on this.”

I had a fire underneath me. Within a day, I was splitting her role into functional parts, posting the job, reaching out to advisors, and meeting candidates, all while she was still here. It felt weird and sterile, and a little like I was cheating on her, but I did it anyway because I had to. That is my job as CEO.

Somewhere in the middle of all of that, it hit me. I teach termination every single semester in my classes, and here I was speeding right past it, driving to solve the problem. If you’re scaling a company, you know that moment. Someone important leaves. You feel it, you fear it, and the pressure to fill the gap drives everything. This is when leaders wake up at 3 a.m. and think, how is this going to affect the company? Who’s going to cover the work? Will this shake the confidence of the rest of the team, or will it be welcome? I don’t know.

Everyone’s watching. My colleague Craig Forman, an organizational psychologist and former lead people scientist at Culture Amp, always says that everyone is watching how you bury your dead. The person leaving is only one audience. The people staying are the bigger one, and they are quietly asking themselves a few different questions. How will this affect the company? How will it affect me? And what does this tell me about how I’ll be treated when it’s my turn to leave? We see ourselves in each other, so every exit becomes a preview of our own.

The research backs him up. Joel Brockner and his colleagues found that employees who survive a layoff pull back their commitment when they identify with the people who left and believe those people were treated unfairly. The team isn’t reacting to its own outcome. It’s reacting to what the exit says about the place it still works. And most companies miss this. In Gallup’s 2024 study of people who left their jobs voluntarily, fewer than half were satisfied with how the exit was handled, and nearly a quarter described their manager’s response as rude, hostile, or negative.

In psychology, we call the work of ending well termination. Irvin Yalom described it as an integral part of the process itself, not just the moment it stops. Skip it, and the unfinished business follows your team into the next quarter.

What to Do The Next Time Someone Leaves

1. Notice your own urge to rush. If you feel the pull to wrap it up fast, pause and ask what that speed is protecting you from.

2. Name the ending with your team before you name the coverage plan. You might say, “Before we figure out who’s covering what, I want to take a few minutes to talk about what Sam has meant to this team.”

3. Ask two questions out loud. What has this person added to how we work, and what do we want to carry forward?

4. Share the transition plan directly, so people don’t fill the silence with their own story.

None of this takes long. It might take fifteen minutes, and it tells everyone in the room that people here matter all the way through.

At Groops, every engagement has a designed ending, because we’ve seen that the ending is where the learning sticks. When someone leaves us, we talk about the patch they added to the Groops quilt. Charlotte was never just one square. She was the backing.

Thanks for reading, and keep on connecting,

Bobbi

P.S. If you’re leading a growing team through a big transition, whether that’s a key departure, a reorg, or rapid hiring, this is exactly what we’re working on with our founding design partners.

We’re bringing on a small group of companies with 50 to 800 people, and each cohort gets better pricing than the next. Reply to this email and I’ll send you a demo video to watch on your own time, or book a time to meet with us below to talk about becoming a design partner.