What to do when employees quit

There are also the cases of pathologically bad employees, or just underperforming.

However, in some cases, it is personal. It's not some growth stage for the employee--they could well be leaving an early employee role because you, the founder(s), have fucked up. You've found yourself with an employee putting out tremendous amounts of work, transferring their knowledge, coordinating their team even as they're leaving, and who generally would be great except for the fact that, for some reason, they're leaving.

Things you should be asking yourself and your employee:

Did you ignore, multiple times, their domain expertise because you {thought you knew better, couldn't afford to follow it, felt like it, didn't like them}?

Did you support them in front of their team? If not, did you support them at all? Did you respect the chain of command, or did you reallocate their resources under them?

Did you lie to them? Was it for a good reason, because of {team morale, need-to-know, legal liability}? Whether or not you ever lied to them, did they feel like they could trust what you said?

Did you give them information when they requested it? Did you give them resources when they requested it? If you didn't give them resources, why not, and was it worth it in the long run?

Did you spend enough time with them, communicating not just about work but bullshitting and building a friendship? If you didn't, was it because you {were busy, had other leads, didn't like them, are an "introvert"}? How did that lack of communication factor into their departure?

Did you display any competence at all by some objective metric in your facility as leader? Whether or not you did, did the employee feel like you were competent?

And yeah, I think you should feel bad. You've wasted their time and the company's resources because of your mismanagement. If you're really luckily, maybe you can learn from it and keep from losing anyone else--because if you don't, you don't deserve to be followed.

And then, instead of recovering in a few minutes, imagine the shock and pain slowly turning into disappointment, anger and dread.

Don’t you realize how important you are to the team?

How could you do this to me?

It was what I felt right then and there. Betrayal. Sadness. Despair about the future.

Umm, companies pull the plug on employees all the time. In most cases with vastly less forethought and regret than employees engage in when leaving their jobs (even jobs they hate).

I guess it can sort of "hurt" on the management side, when employees leave. But given the pain that employees go through (hint: the immediate threat to their own physical safety, as well as that of their families) when they're let go, I'm not sure how one could begin to consider the two situations as remotely comparable. Let alone get so emotional, and feel such a sense of "despair" when an employee (even a particularly valued one) leaves.