In our engineering consultancy, the whole last year was all about taking big losses in people:

1. CTO left the company, after marriage, and decided to run his own smaller scale consultancy/prototyping company. For him, it was certainly impossible to combine being a chief engineer, and being a first time father with a newborn at the same time. Even a promise of doubling his pay, over his already high compensation, was not enough to keep him.

He was the man who worked with the founder of the company for a really long time, beginning his career as a poor pipsqueak on an assembly line. He was an exemplary engineer and a team lead, despite him only having 2 years of engineering college.

A thing to learn from that is that you have to reduce intensity of work with seniority, not increase it. Family has no price tag. Trying to keep a successful 30 something Chinese guy in the company is a giant challenge, and the more money you throw at the guy, the more likely he will leave!

Even a promise of maximum 6 month of paid paternal leave, and reduced schedule after was not holding water as it was clear to everybody that the company can't function in its present form without everything spinning around C-levels.

What would've been the best option here is if we can genuinely guarantee a humane job schedule for somebody like him, and be able to back that with concrete actions. Our soon coming attempt at this is to give senior, lead, and C-level positions to people in late twenties, expect to rotate them frequently, and be ready that they may ask for a voluntary demotion when the time comes for them to get busy with family matters. We also plan to double down on our effort to move more decision making, and PM work to junior employers to offload senior engineers and C-levels.

2. Our best PM, and best engineer departed the company (was fired) for screwing up a project that had 8 digit revenue potential, and screwing it in the most unprofessional way possible. We could've tolerated failure if the screw-up he did was genuinely involuntary, but not when he kept the issue secret from the rest of the company for 3 months.

This however ended very, very well for him in the end. One gigantic multinational hired him just 2 weeks after we fired him, and he is super happy now...

Out of that, we learned that it is important to keep "high stakes game" away from individual employees. The guy was simply too afraid to reveal the issue to the rest of the company, because his bonus and his future career with us depended on that.

A big thing resulting from that is that we have "a talk" with every senior PM about handling such situation; C-levels now personally inspect high stakes projects to see that PMs do not hide "big issues," and not trying to quietly solve them by themselves. Lastly, we agreed to no longer give any bonuses to senior project staff, and instead gave them high flat rate salary. That is a complete anathema in China, and we had a very, very long talk in the company. I'm glad we went through with it. I can't be more happy with the change.

All measures above resulted in that our PMs no longer get too cocky and cavalier with each project, and no longer try to take as much projects upon themselves as they can physically. Projects now go much, much smoother, with each PM handling no more 2 or 3 projects at the time, and paying more attention to competing them "smoothly" over just completing them quickly.

3 Our COO, an another person who was with the founder for a really long time took her maternal leave. She is an expert in all thing about running logistics in manufacturing, an extremely valuable part of the company, one of our primary assets. Now, being taught by us losing our CTO, we manged her maternal leave much smoother. On the paper, she is given 1 year fully paid leave, and we took an obligation to keep her employed, even if it is the end of the world, after that.

Even prior to that, the company had a talk with her about how much workload is ok for her, if she wants to remain a COO, and what we can do to keep her workloads on humane level. She was very happy to be given a substantial amount of time to train juniors in her team to take upon more work. With that done, our manufacturing logistics now runs like a clockwork, and she was back to work 6 months after, taking a just a little bit lighter work schedule. Because she is now sure that nothing critical depends on her personally, she is more confident that having to run back home when something happens with baby will not impact her work as a COO.