An easy decision

While I was having dinner at home on Thursday night, my Regional Operations Manager (let us call him ROM) called me on my mobile. After a few pleasantries, he asked me about the performance of one of my team members who had resigned recently (let us call her Resignee).

I was a little bit taken by surprise, the question did not sound logical as Resignee had already resigned, so why did ROM wanted to know about her performance. So before answering him, I asked ROM why did he want to know about Resignee's performance. He said that Resignee wanted to rejoin and had called one of her colleagues. I asked who did she call as I wanted to know whether the colleague was one of my team members. As I have expected, indeed she had called one of her previous colleagues. From here I deduced that she wanted to rejoin my team, as if she were to call some other colleagues from another team, then her intention would somehow meant that she wanted to rejoin but into another team. Another deduction that I could make was, she was not having problem with the team or me before she left.

Let me share more about what had transpired before Resignee left the team. As I had mentioned in my previous posting, since May, I had to let 5 of my team members joined another unit due to operations expansion. 2 of them progressed on promotion. To make matter worse, I had 2 resignations in the team during the same period. Backfilling of the vacancies was challenging as the support from the resourcing department was far from satisfactory, the time ran faster than the replacement coming in. So when Resignee tendered her resignation, her Team Lead and I had plead for her to complete part of her notice period of three months so that we could appoint a replacement and she could then hand over her job properly.

Alas, Resignee was so adamant in resigning and tendered a 4 days notice of resignation and bought out the rest. This showed the utmost selfish attitude that prevailed in her. The least that she could do was to stay a while longer and negotiate with the other company to hold on to the offer. The company would certainly hold on the offer if she was the best candidate, otherwise the company was no better if it was to offer the next best candidate as it had lowered its standard. Afterall Resignee was gainly employed.

Back to ROM. I told ROM that my assessment of her was not that impressive. I had caught her unable to provide assistance to her team during two critical events. Then I also caught her not paying attention during several team meetings, once I even saw her talking while I was giving my speech. I had given her my feedback individually. When she left abruptly, I was not too happy.

Early the next day, I called Resignee's ex-Team Lead to relate to her the previous night's story. Apparently she had been approached by the same Resignee's ex-colleague to relate the appeal to rejoin. Before I told Resignee's ex-Team Lead what had happened, I asked her what was her opinion, she said that she also would not want Resignee to come back.

Then mid morning, my boss came over to me for a discussion. Apparently, Resignee also called another ex-colleague and appealed to rejoin. So this other ex-colleague approached my boss. I gave the same answer, No, and she agreed with me.

To conclude, why did I say this was an easy decision? It was obvious that Resignee's performance was unimpressive when I, the team Manager, personally provided to her my preliminary assessments. To make matter worse, Resignee did not tender her resignation with due consideration to her other colleagues, an obvious lack of team work attitude. This was her lasting impression to me. It would have been different if she could have at least showed that she had changed her attitude by staying back for a while to properly hand over her job. Albeit all these, her ex-colleagues had called everyone else except me knowing quite well I would have opposed the appeal to rejoin. However due to my strong relationship with ROM and my boss, both of them had to consult me and I had the final say.