Is Your Business a River or a Pond? What the Way People Leave Says About Your Culture

There's a particular kind of discomfort that comes when someone good hands in their notice. Most leaders feel it as a personal blow, almost a betrayal, and the instinct to treat it that way is completely understandable because you've invested in them, you like them, and now they're going. But there's a question worth sitting with before you reach for that feeling, and it's this: is your business a river or a pond?

A pond keeps everything in. The water doesn't move, nothing comes in and nothing goes out, and for a while that can look like stability. But stillness in a pond is exactly what eventually makes the water stagnant. A river works differently, people come in, contribute something real, and move on, and the water stays alive precisely because it isn't standing still. The leaders who handle departures best aren't the ones who manage to keep everyone forever. They're the ones who've made peace with the idea that some of their best people leaving well, with genuine grace and a proper send off, is actually a sign of a healthy culture rather than a failed one.

This isn't just a nice reframe. The data behind it is worth paying attention to. ADP Research published figures in 2025 showing that 35% of all new hires were returning employees, the highest proportion since records began in 2018, and LinkedIn's own data found that boomerang hires have grown 35% since 2022, with 68% of HR leaders saying they are more open to rehiring former employees than they have ever been. The businesses benefiting most from that trend aren't the ones who made leaving feel like a betrayal. They're the ones who closed the door properly in the first place.

Because the people most likely to come back are almost always the ones who left well, and what they bring when they return is something that's almost impossible to develop any other way. They've seen how another business solves the problems you're still wrestling with. They've picked up language, tools and instincts from somewhere else entirely, and they come back able to offer a perspective that lands as genuinely useful rather than disloyal. HBR research reinforces this, finding that a quarter of boomerang employees were top performers before they left, and that they tend to return to more senior roles precisely because what they've gained elsewhere makes them more valuable the second time around. But none of that is possible if the original departure was handled badly. Nobody boomerangs back to a business that made them feel like a traitor on the way out. The door only stays open if it was closed properly, with respect rather than resentment.

And underneath all of this sits something that matters more than any offboarding process or alumni network, which is trust. Not the kind of trust that gets declared in a values document, but the kind that gets built up over a long time in small moments that most leaders don't remember individually. Gallup research found that only 23% of employees strongly agree that they trust the leadership of their organisation, which is a sobering number when you consider that trust is exactly what determines whether someone tells you they're thinking of leaving before they've actually decided, or whether you only find out when the resignation letter lands on your desk.

The reason someone has that honest conversation with you early isn't luck and it isn't coincidence. It's the accumulated result of a culture where leaving has never been treated as betrayal, where people have watched others leave well and sometimes come back well, and where they've learned over time that their honesty won't be punished. Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson, whose research on psychological safety has shaped how we understand trust in teams, describes this as the belief that the workplace is safe for interpersonal risk taking, and it's exactly that belief that makes the early conversation possible rather than the resignation letter inevitable. The leader who gets the early warning gets options. They get time to plan, time to have the proper conversation, sometimes even time to make a case for staying that actually lands. The leader who only finds out via a resignation letter never gets any of that.

So the question worth asking isn't really about retention in the traditional sense, it isn't about perks or salaries or keeping score of who stayed and who went. It's about whether you've built the kind of culture where people feel safe enough to be honest with you, where leaving is handled with enough grace that the door genuinely stays open, and where the measure of success isn't whether people leave but whether they leave wishing they hadn't had to.

Is your business a river or a pond, and which one have you actually been building?

Nicola Gunstone is a NED and award winning executive coach working with CEOs and leadership teams of growing SMEs. If this struck a chord, you can connect with her and follow the conversation on Nicola Gunstone, PCC | LinkedIn.