Routines get upended and the whole affair can be very inconvenient affair for a firm that finds itself having to look either internally or to outside sources for a replacement, while existing team members are forced to pick up the slack.
These episodes tend to bring out the worst in people, as a chum of mine found recently.
My pal, itching to get out of banking, resigned after a good decade with his firm. Having told his boss and the team in person, he then emailed an official HR-mandated resignation letter to his boss, expecting at least a courteous good luck message in return. But what came instead was a rude shock.
His boss’s response was a cutting reply saying it was probably for the best that the chap was leaving. And his boss didn’t stop there.
He went on to make several accusations, including telling the guy that he appeared to have done very little work in the past few weeks, was frequently missing from his desk, and was often spotted “loitering” around in IFC’s mall and its coffee shops.
The letter ended with the banker’s equivalent of “good riddance to bad rubbish”, only with a few more expletives thrown in.
Now, my friend was understandably incensed but he took the high road by refusing to respond, and happily started his gardening leave. In a few weeks he was vindicated, hearing on the grapevine that his former boss was among a bunch of people getting the boot at his old shop.
What goes around certainly comes around.