CANADA: Preeti Malik was walking into a performance review. She walked out having saved one of her best employees. The co-founder of Digital Creativs did not deploy a pay rise or a new job title. She asked a single question.
The employee, dependable, technically sharp and a strong cultural fit, had beaten her to the punch. “I won’t be able to continue,” he said, before she could raise a single concern. Malik shelved her agenda and pivoted. “If you could design your ideal role, what would that look like?” she asked.
What followed dismantled every assumption about why good people quit. “He wasn’t leaving for more money,” Malik wrote on LinkedIn. “He was leaving because there was a role misalignment.” The employee had been hired specifically for automation work, tasks he excelled at and genuinely enjoyed. Gradually, layers of repetitive, administrative work had been piled on top. The constant context-switching had hollowed out his engagement. “The automation work, which is what he came in for, the stuff I never had a single problem with, he loved,” Malik wrote. “The tedious work we’d layered on top? He hated it.”
The following day, Malik returned with a restructured role built around his strengths. He accepted.
The post struck a nerve online. Several readers noted that underperformance is frequently misread as a capability problem when the root cause is misalignment. “One of our employees was showing less attention to detail because expectations around her role weren’t clear enough,” wrote one commenter. “After realigning, she’s now one of our star players.”
Malik drew her own conclusion plainly. “Retaining your team isn’t about perks or pay bumps. It’s about whether your team feels like they do work that matters and helps them grow.”
The real risk, she argued, was not just losing a skilled hire but surrendering institutional knowledge that cannot be rehired. She almost did. One question was all that stood between retention and resignation. Most managers never think to ask it.
