We once hired someone solid. Mid-career, efficient, emotionally grounded—or so it seemed. He’d often talk about how younger folks these days couldn’t take hardship. “Last time we just eat bitterness and move on,” he’d say. Then one afternoon, over two minor feedback items—one of which wasn’t even his fault—he quit.
No escalation. No discussion. Just one email with a resignation letter. For the rest of the team, the move seemed abrupt. But for me, it wasn’t just surprising. It was familiar. Because sudden exits like this aren’t about drama. They’re about something deeper: emotional saturation without a system to release it.
This was a 20-person SME in Singapore. Lean ops, hybrid team, everyone juggling too many roles. You’re never far from customer touchpoints or internal handoffs. That proximity creates tight ownership—but also makes small cracks feel personal. The employee had been there just under a year. Long enough to build rapport. Not long enough to fully embed. That in-between stage is dangerous: it’s when people know how things work, but still haven’t formed full psychological safety.
Earlier that week, two things happened:
- A paperwork mix-up caused by a prior handover.
- A forgotten photo the client ended up supplying themselves.
Neither was serious. Both were resolved with minimal fuss. His manager gave the kind of feedback that starts with “No worries—but just be mindful next time.” And yet, by the end of that day, he was out.
It wasn’t the feedback. Not really. It was the perception of what the feedback meant. In early-stage or flat-structure teams, we often assume psychological safety comes from casualness—no titles, no suits, no formality. But that lack of hierarchy can also mean a lack of interpretive buffer. When someone flags an issue, the signal is amplified.
In larger orgs, there’s more space between the incident and your identity. A misstep disappears into a spreadsheet or a project team. In a startup or SME? Everyone sees it. Everyone feels it. And in cultures like ours—where pride and reputation matter more than we admit—public perception carries invisible weight.
What likely ran through his mind wasn’t “I made a mistake.” It was:
- “I’m now seen as careless.”
- “That’s not who I am. But now I don’t get to control the story.”
- “If this becomes my reputation here, what’s the point of staying?”
This is the psychological loop that makes people resign even when the task-level issue is resolved. It's not about workload. It’s about reputation fragility. And the irony? The person most affected by the loss wasn’t the manager. It was his teammate, who now had to shoulder his workload and train the next hire. As that teammate vented online, you could feel the mix of resentment and resignation: “Now I have to do my work plus his, and still smile.”
That’s the double cost of quiet system failure—emotional and operational.
This employee wasn’t fragile. He was the one who always talked about grit, resilience, being able to 吃苦 (“eat bitterness”). But grit without clarity isn’t resilience. It’s bravado. And bravado breaks the moment something challenges your identity. If you define yourself by your ability to “handle it,” then any slip—even a minor one—feels like shame. And shame corrodes fast in silence.
That’s the startup paradox we rarely talk about: the most “steady” team members are sometimes the ones most likely to fracture when perception turns. Because they’ve tied too much of their value to never being seen as weak.
We love to say our startup cultures are strong. That we “look out for one another” or “talk things out.” But in moments like this, culture isn’t enough. Without structural clarity—what counts as a mistake, how feedback is normalized, what ownership really looks like—everything feels subjective. And subjectivity breeds overreaction.
Especially in hybrid setups where Slack tone can skew meaning, or where face-time is minimal, emotional interpretation becomes the dominant filter.
What that employee needed wasn’t comfort. It was clarity:
- Was his reputation really harmed?
- How did the team see him?
- Was this a career red mark or a teachable moment?
We didn’t have those structures. So he filled in the blanks. Then walked.
If I were advising that founder today, I’d suggest a simple protocol for feedback integrity in small teams:
1. Issue = Action + Assurance
Don’t just flag a mistake. Offer a fix, and explicitly protect the person’s identity in the team.
“Please double-check this next time—and to be clear, we know this isn’t your usual pattern.”
2. Reputation Map Check-Ins
Once a quarter, do informal 1:1s not about performance metrics—but about how people feel seen.
“Do you feel your contribution is clear to others?”
“Anything you’re worried people misinterpret?”
3. Anchor Stories
For every feedback or failure moment, share an older “anchor story” that reinforces the person’s long-term value.
“We had a case like this last year too. What matters is how quickly you recover—and you’ve always been quick to learn.”
These are not HR systems. They’re team survival protocols for trust continuity.
Let’s talk about the person left behind—the colleague now stuck with triple duty. Their online post was partly a vent. But it also revealed something important: in many small teams, the failure of one system becomes the overload of another. The person who leaves disappears. The person who stays absorbs. This is not sustainable.
Founders often try to “be understanding” toward those who resign suddenly. But they fail to equally buffer those who stay. That’s a morale risk. If your loyal performers always get penalized with extra load, your culture becomes performative. Retention doesn’t mean “keep everyone.” It means protecting the conditions that make people want to stay.
If you're leading a team under 30 people, don’t assume someone quitting over “nothing” is irrational. It’s often the cleanest exit from a situation they feel emotionally out of control in. Your job isn’t to prevent all resignations. It’s to reduce surprise ones.
That means:
- Designing rituals that surface perception gaps early
- Making reputation repair as easy as task correction
- Ensuring feedback doesn’t feel like branding
Because in small teams, nobody wants to stay somewhere they feel misunderstood—even if the work is great.
When someone walks after a small incident, it doesn’t mean they can’t take hardship. It usually means they no longer believe the team sees them the way they see themselves—and they don’t want to fight to fix that. So they leave.
The bigger question is: do your systems let people stay and still feel whole? Or do they make reputation feel too fragile to survive a single mistake? If it’s the latter, no amount of grit—or talk about grit—will keep your team together.
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