A co-founder has recounted how a single, well-timed question helped her hold on to a valuable employee who had suddenly decided to resign. Writing on LinkedIn, Preeti Malik, co-founder of Digital Creativs, said she was caught off guard when she received the resignation. “He was a good employee. Reliable, sharp, great culture fit,” Malik noted, explaining that the employee had entered a scheduled one-on-one meeting intending to quit, while she had planned to discuss concerns about his performance.
Before she could raise those issues, however, the employee asked to speak first. “I won’t be able to continue,” he said. Malik then chose to set aside her agenda and approach the situation differently.
'He wasn’t leaving for more money' Instead of focusing on performance, she posed a question that altered the course of the conversation. “If you could design your ideal role, what would that look like?” she asked. The answer, she said, made the underlying issue clear. “He wasn’t leaving for more money. He was leaving because there was a role misalignment.”
Malik explained that the employee had initially enjoyed the automation-focused responsibilities he was hired for. Over time, however, repetitive tasks had been added, requiring constant context-switching and diminishing his engagement.
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“Turned out the automation work, which is what he came in for, the stuff I never had a single problem with… he loved. The tedious work we'd layered on top? He hated it. Because it made him context-switch every two seconds and took focus away from the work he enjoyed,” she wrote.
Taking this into consideration, Malik said she returned the following day with a revised role that better aligned with the employee’s strengths and interests. After taking some time to think it over, he accepted the offer. “I’ll take you up on it,” he messaged her the next morning.
Reflecting on the episode, Malik said the company might have lost a key team member had she treated the resignation solely as a performance concern. She highlighted what was at risk, including “a culture fit that’s genuinely hard to replace, months of business context sitting in his head and someone who’s actually good at an important role”.
The experience reshaped her perspective on retention. “Retaining your team isn’t about perks or pay bumps,” she wrote. “It’s about whether your team feels like they do work that matters and helps them grow.”