The Local Hire Quits: Why Our Best Regional Hire Leaves Sooner Than We Think

We’ve hired a new candidate and they’ve done really, really well. And that’s the bit that kind of hurts, because we needed somebody who knew the local market properly, somebody who’s actually from that market. We found them — a really good, strong candidate. They did an amazing interview and everybody was in agreement: let’s get them on board. And then there was that kind of year that we’d budgeted for — the onboarding, the learning systems, learning who’s who, and learning which meetings matter and which ones we could skip. All of that’s kind of super normal for a new hire. We were really super patient because we knew the return on investment that would come. And then somewhere around months nine or ten or eleven, things changed. They stopped asking us how things worked and they started telling us how things worked. They became that person who would say why a campaign would work in one market, and they could tell us why it wouldn’t work. That person became super important to our team, and they could make the difficult calls between two different offices, and they would come out totally fine. Four months after that, they resigned. The exit interview said that they had a better opportunity. So it goes in the file under, well, it was a money issue — somebody paid them more money, there’s nothing that we could have done. Today I want to suggest it usually isn’t the money, and that the two real reasons why they left have been sitting in front of us for about a year.

Twenty minutes or thereabouts, one real problem, and what we can actually do about it. Today: why our best regional hire leaves just as they’re starting to get good, the two things nobody is aware of that push them out, and four things we can do about it this week. Let’s go.

We’re based out of Barcelona, so we’ve taken some time to enjoy the Spanish culture and to recharge those batteries and come back now for this last half of the year feeling fully refreshed and ready for the challenges that this last part of the year is going to bring. We’ve got a lot of work with new clients — coaching, advisory — and also quite a few workshops lined up now for the rest of this year. So it’s looking like it’s going to be a great end to the year. Anyway, let’s get into this. Once again, great to have you.

So let’s talk about this person, because I think we might all recognise them in our teams — especially if our teams are dispersed, we have regional offices, we have head offices. This is the person we’ve started copying in on things we don’t strictly need to copy them in on. The person we’d ring before a difficult call just to ask how it was likely to go. And when head office wanted to know why the numbers looked a bit odd in the region, they’re the person who could explain it in a way both sides understand. And when someone at head office said something didn’t go down well with the local team — yep, this is the person who quietly sorts it out and makes sure everything runs smoothly. None of this is in their job description, but all of it is real work.

We’ve all got a word for this person: a bridge. The bridge between two different working cultures, between two different offices. So what happens to someone who turns out to be really good at being a bridge? They tend to get more of it. More calls, more meetings, because those go much better when they’re there. And every one of those requests is a compliment, and it’s difficult to spot as work. It doesn’t look like a burden — but it is, because we wrap it up in appreciation. The reward for being a good bridge is only ever more bridging, and nobody counts it as work except the person actually doing it.

So what does it cost us when they leave? Replacing a mid-level hire in an international team is commonly put at several months of their salary once you add up recruitment, onboarding, and the productivity you don’t get while someone else finds their feet. We also lose all of that context — the year of knowing how things actually work, who to ring, what’s been tried before. We lose the local relationships, because those were with them personally, not with us. And we lose the bridge work itself, because now nobody’s doing it, and all those small misunderstandings that used to get sorted quietly start coming to us instead. If it happens twice in the same team, we’ve stopped managing turnover and started living with it.

So why does this person quit? I think there are two reasons. The first is that they’re doing a second job. Researchers call it cultural brokerage — translating between two sides and keeping things running when they don’t naturally understand each other. Sujin Jang studied it in multicultural teams and found what most of us would expect: teams with a good broker tend to perform better. But that work is tiring in a way that doesn’t look tiring. Every time they speak to head office they adjust how direct they are; then they turn to the local team and adjust again in the opposite direction. Andy Molinsky calls this global dexterity — a skill anyone can learn, but never free. Our hire is paying that cost in both directions every day.

And none of it is recognised. Their last review might say they helped a few people, but the actual amount of work is significant — a large chunk that can’t be assessed and can’t be rewarded. And they typically can’t raise it with us, because asking to do less of the bridge work sounds ungrateful, or like they don’t want to work with the other side. So they say nothing and carry on.

The second reason they leave is that the small signals that tell them they belong don’t reach them. This comes from Dan Coyle, who writes about belonging cues — being asked first rather than told afterwards, being copied in as a matter of course, being credited by name when your idea gets used, hearing the informal news at the same time as everyone else. On their own these are tiny, but together they answer the question every new person is quietly asking: am I part of this team, or just attached to it?

And think about how informal news actually travels. If you’re in the same building you pick it up without noticing. If you’re four time zones away, you get the announcement two weeks later. So the bridge person is always finding out late, always finding out formally, always after the decision was mostly made somewhere they weren’t. And credit works the same way — they give us their read of a local market, it gets repeated up the chain, and by the third telling it’s just a team view and nobody remembers where it came from.

Put those two reasons together and you have real damage. The person doing all the bridging is also the person getting the fewest signals that they belong. The better they get, the more bridging they do; the more bridging they do, the more they sit between the two groups instead of inside either. So they end up doing the most work and feeling the least secure — and from where we sit, they look like a star performer having a great year. Then a recruiter calls, and the pitch isn’t more money. It’s: come and do the job you’re already doing, except we’ll give it a proper title, and you’ll be at the centre of things instead of the last to hear. The people most worth keeping are the least likely to tell us any of this.

So what can we do? Four things. Number one: name the bridge work and count it. Right now it’s invisible, and if we don’t write it down we can’t reward it. So we put a line in their objectives that plainly says what it is, and we talk about it in the review as work — not as a personality trait, not as a favour. There’s a big difference between ‘you’re great with the regional team’ and ‘you kept that account together this quarter by managing two sets of expectations, and that’s why the number held.’ The first is a compliment; the second is a real job.

The second thing: share the load. If one person is the only bridge, that’s a problem the moment they take holiday, get ill, or leave. So we spread it deliberately. We rotate who runs the joint calls. We pair people from the two sides on real work. And sometimes we send the person who needs to get better at it, not the one who’s already best, and let our star sit in and support. This needs training and it’ll be a bit slower for a few weeks — but what we get is three or four people who can do this reasonably well instead of one doing it brilliantly and alone.

The third thing: fix the belonging signals on purpose. We can’t wait for these to happen naturally — that’s what got us here. So we ask the person furthest from head office first, not last. We credit people by name in front of the people who matter. And we make sure the informal news reaches them — if something got half-decided in a corridor, we write it down and send it to everyone that afternoon. It’s a small habit that stops us having an inner group who know things and an outer group who get told things.

And the fourth thing: check in early and regularly. The exit interview is the right conversation at completely the wrong time. So we have it much earlier, while it can still change something. How much of your week goes on smoothing things over between head office and the region? Which part of this would you like less of? Where do you want to be in eighteen months? And if the answer is ‘oh, it’s fine, honestly’ — we check in again in a month, because being quiet is not the same as being happy.

So if there’s one thing to take away, it’s this: the two things that made this person valuable — carrying the load and quietly making the team work — are the same two things that made them invisible to us. The better they get, the less of it looks like work. So the person we’d least like to lose is the person we’re least likely to worry about, right up until the morning they tell us they’ve had another opportunity. Keeping them is mostly a matter of noticing the work earlier rather than later.

If this is a live issue for your team right now, that’s exactly the kind of thing I work through one-to-one with leaders — through advisory, through coaching, and through workshops. You can find out more about the work I do by visiting brendanthomasquinn.com, and you can also find me on LinkedIn.