Those Who Could Leave, and Why Managers Read Them as Risk

A Thin Book From 1970

In 1970 an economist published a thin book.

Albert O. Hirschman’s Exit, Voice, and Loyalty starts from a simple observation. When people notice that an organization they belong to is getting worse, they have two ways to respond. They can leave, or they can speak up. A customer has these two options, so does a party member, and so does an employee. The sharpest idea in the book, to me, is the third one: loyalty. Loyal people don’t leave right away. They complain first, argue, try to fix things. Loyalty delays exit and activates voice.

Hirschman got there by looking at Nigeria’s state railway. As service got worse, freight customers moved to trucks. You would expect that competition to push the railway to improve. The opposite happened. The most demanding, quality-conscious customers were the first to go, and once they were gone, nobody was left to push management. The organization lost its most valuable feedback before anything else.

The book is more than fifty years old. It still explains a tension I see in a lot of teams better than most management writing does.

Who I Mean

First, a definition. The person I’m writing about is not a freelancer. They hold a regular job at a company. What sets them apart is that they have built their own alternative: skills the market pays for, people who know their work, maybe some savings on the side. If they wanted to, they could work somewhere else tomorrow on similar or better terms. Economists call this opportunity cost, the value of the best option you give up when you make a choice. This person’s staying has an opportunity cost, and they created it through their own work. For the rest of this piece, when I say “employee”, this is who I mean.

Over time I have noticed a pattern. Someone like this is good at their job, causes no trouble, and has no particular need to be in the spotlight. And yet there is a distance between them and their manager that nobody can quite name. No conflict, no open resentment. The big projects just never land on their desk, and the promotion conversation keeps sliding to next quarter. Both sides tend to explain it with character: “difficult person” on one side, “they just don’t like me” on the other. More often, the real source is Hirschman’s first word. This employee’s exit is real. They have options outside, and both of them know it.

A Toolbox Built on Dependence

A good part of the traditional management toolbox assumes the employee depends on the company to some degree. Promotions, raises, the good project, the next role. These work as incentives because the other side needs them. With someone who has real alternatives, the same tools lose weight. If there’s an open door outside, controlling the door inside matters less.

A few mechanisms follow from this. Each one deserves to be read from the manager’s chair too, because someone is sitting in that chair, with a boss, a budget and targets of their own.

• Even a calm “no” can sound like a challenge. Someone with no other option thinks twice before saying no. Someone with options says it more easily. The words may be identical, but what reaches the manager is different: a rational assessment starts to feel like authority being tested in front of the team. From the manager’s side, that concern has a basis. Every objection made in front of others sends a signal, and managing that signal is part of their job.
• Someone who chose to stay today can choose to leave tomorrow. Training, a critical project or a visible role gets postponed for the person who looks likely to leave. For a manager with a limited budget who answers to someone above, that is a real operational risk calculation. Money invested in someone who walks out next month is money missing from someone else’s plan.
• The gatekeeper role shrinks. This employee doesn’t need their manager to reach information, people or opportunities. That quietly reduces the manager’s role as a gateway. Nobody says it out loud, but both sides slowly start acting on it.
• Bargaining power creates fairness pressure. Someone with options knows their market value and will put it on the table if needed. The manager has to keep the whole team fair with the same budget. One exception quickly becomes everyone’s question.

None of these four mechanisms is about personality. They all come from the structure of the relationship. A management style built on dependence will naturally read someone who is not dependent as a risk. A style built on trust and shared meaning sees the same person as one of the most valuable players on the team. Same person, different reading.

The cost of dependence usually shows up in no spreadsheet. That is true of the software we depend on, and it is true between people. It tends to become visible at the moment one side is able to walk away.

Both Sides Misread Each Other

Two misreadings are enough to make this tension permanent, and usually both are present.

Managers mistake the employee’s options for disloyalty. But loyalty and dependence are different things. Dependent people stay because they have nowhere else to go. Loyal people stay because being there means something to them. In Hirschman’s terms, the loyal person is the one who uses voice: they see the problem and say it instead of leaving. A manager who hears that voice as a threat shuts down the most valuable feedback channel they have. After a while the person goes quiet. And silence is very often the last stop before exit.

The employee’s misreading is just as real. Employees often don’t see why they should show commitment at all. I do my job, the results speak for themselves. Results don’t speak about intentions, though. Staying too quiet, never saying out loud what you expect, and that “I could leave anyway” feeling hanging in the air all reach the manager, even if none of it is said. Someone who has to manage uncertainty will fill the gap with the worst case. I recognize this mistake in myself. There were periods when I assumed good work would explain itself, and good work said nothing at all about my intentions.

Making commitment visible has nothing to do with flattering anyone. It means saying once, out loud, why you are here. Sharing what you want to do over the next year or two. Raising the thing that bothers you before you start thinking about leaving, not after. None of this takes anything away from your options. It reduces the uncertainty your manager carries and moves you from the risk column to someone they can plan around. In Hirschman’s words, it is choosing voice while the exit is still open.

Whose Name Goes on the Success

The place where these misreadings show most is the moment credit gets handed out.

In Good to Great, Jim Collins describes what he calls “Level 5” leaders with a simple image: the window and the mirror. When things go well, a good leader looks out the window and credits the team, the circumstances, even luck. When things go badly, they look in the mirror and take responsibility. Weak leadership behaves the other way round, looking in the mirror for success and out the window for failure.

The clearest sign of a leader’s success is that people talk about the names on their team, and less about theirs.

Collecting a team’s success under one name usually comes from an understandable trap more than from a flaw in character. A middle manager is under constant pressure to prove their value upward, and the shortest way to make your own contribution visible is to describe the team’s work in your own words. In the short term it brings visibility. In the long term it pushes the best people away, because people whose work goes unseen choose to be seen somewhere else. The employee with alternatives is exactly the person who can make that choice.

Doing the opposite isn’t hard, it just takes intent. Mention the person who did the work by name in the meeting. Let them present it. Name team members in the report that goes to senior management. None of this makes the manager smaller. It explains why good people stay on that team.

What Good Managers Do Differently

The leaders I’ve seen handle this well have one thing in common. They try to build loyalty on meaning rather than on necessity.

First, they talk about it openly. They aren’t afraid to ask, “I know you have options out there. What do you need to stay here?” The question feels strange the first time, because in most working relationships it’s the one topic nobody raises. Once it’s asked, both sides stop guessing, and the conversation moves from assumptions to expectations.

They give autonomy. People like this do their best work when nobody micromanages how the work gets done. Trying to keep them under tight control is the fastest way to push them toward the door.

And they count the opportunity cost on their own side too. Holding back investment in someone with options looks like the safe choice. What you give up might be that person’s most productive years, or sometimes the person.

That gives a better yardstick. Good leadership isn’t measured by how many people on the team can’t leave. It’s measured by how many of those who could leave choose to stay.

Choosing to Stay

People who stay because they must keep a team running. People who stay by choice move it forward, and the fact that they could leave but are still here is the clearest sign that something is working. The manager’s part is to stop reading that sign as a risk. The employee’s part is to make their options visible as “I choose to be here” instead of “I’ll leave if I have to.” The same fact can be said in two different sentences, and which sentence gets said shapes the rest of the relationship. On your team, are the people who stay choosing to stay, or have they just not chosen to leave yet?