Christmas tree – a game of recursive dismissal

You have stars, leaders, key employees. Very useful and necessary people; if not everything, then a lot rests on them. And you also have a staff shortage. And the sword of Damocles – those same stars can quit at any moment.

You know very well: if a star leaves the company, followers and dependents may follow him. Or where the star is, or where the eyes are looking, because “my world has collapsed,” “I only worked here because of him,” “then there will be nothing but a swamp,” etc.

I don’t know how it is in other industries, but here in IT, this is a real problem, because… programmers are not very attached to a specific company – there are too many options where to go with approximately the same conditions (or even better).

And often people’s attachment to each other is stronger than to the company. It’s as if a good group of people accidentally got together on vacation or on a train – they met, got to know each other, hung out – without being tied to the train or hotel where they ended up. They know for sure that they are here temporarily.

Companies, of course, must bind people to themselves, creating competitive conditions, be it salary, interesting tasks, schedule, technology and everything that is interesting to programmers. And most companies do (as if they have a choice given the current state of the job market, ha). But it is not possible and will not be possible to overcome the attachment of people to each other, as well as to lead it and manage it on an industrial scale. We have to live with this somehow.

So, the problem of the possible dismissal of stars and potentially leaving with them must be solved. To begin with, understand the scale of this problem. Who will follow the star?

Usually they look at the first circle – those who work, communicate, and admire the star directly. They are included in the list of “risky” and they try to do something preventively – divide and conquer, “place” them on other teams in order to increase the number of contacts of a person and, accordingly, the connections that hold him.

But when there are a lot of people, everything is more difficult. One star shines brightly, one leader, but there are several less bright ones, to which someone is also attached. And it turns out like this: the star leaves, followed by adherents of the first circle, incl. one of the dim leaders, behind him are several more, among whom is his friend, also a dim star, behind him… Well, you understand. Recursion.

I somehow became interested in at least roughly assessing how this recursion would go. I didn’t dare to quit for the sake of this; I only had the courage to do modeling. I came up with a game – Christmas tree to understand the scale of the problem.

You can play in person, in a messenger group or on a board with stickers (if you want to preserve the mystery of connections as much as possible). I'll write a version with stickers.

So, for example, I start. I tell everyone the rules. I put a sticker with my name on the board. Whoever quits if I leave writes his name on a sticky note and also puts it on the board. The rest look at the names and at some point write themselves down too. For some, seeing one favorite is enough to make a decision. Some people need critical mass – a few people. At some point, new names will stop appearing and the results can be removed.

Of course, you need to explain to everyone that this is just a game. Its goal is not to understand who is attached to whom, but to realize that everything is bad and something needs to be done about it. At the department or company level. The manager at this moment should feel a little scared: it turns out that the employees here do not work because of the company with its standards, salaries, projects and cookies – they just like to work with each other.

Although, I don’t rule out that someone will only have one sticker left on the board. Maybe, however, we started from the wrong place.

PS I got some interesting results. I'm not a star, but I started with myself. Conducted the game on the entire department of 30 people.

Previous studies, incl. mine showed that only the first circle, 3-4 people, would quit after me, the rest were not very attached to me.

And there were 29 people on the Christmas tree.