Two Resignations. One Chair. Zero Questions. Why Your Best People Keep Leaving and Nobody's Asking Why.

Meet Debra. She was one of the best they had.

Deputy head. Fifteen years in education. The person everyone leaned on when things got hard. She ran the timetable, mentored the NQTs, covered for absent colleagues without being asked, and somehow still managed to teach a full load.

Everyone thought she was amazing.

She was the first person in the building every morning and the last to leave most nights. Not because anyone told her to. Because the system had quietly made it impossible to do the job in the hours she was actually paid for.

Nobody worried about her. Why would they? She was delivering. She was reliable. She clearly loved her job and was dedicated. Everyone could see that from all the hours she put in.

If you asked how she was, she was "fine."

Until she wasn't.

Her resignation letter said "personal reasons." The head teacher was stunned. She hadn't seen it coming at all. In fact, it's fair to say the shock bordered on frustration and disappointment.

The head thought Debra cared about the school. It was clear Debra wasn't as loyal as she had thought. There'd been no complaint, no grievance, no red flags. Just a letter on the desk on a Tuesday morning and a woman who looked ten years older than she had three years ago.

The head conducted the exit interview. Standard. Ticked the boxes. Filed it. Moved on.

They recruited Debra's replacement within six weeks. The new deputy lasted just eight months.

Same role. Same resignation. Same "personal reasons." Same shocked leadership team.

And still nobody connected the dots. It was flagged as a recruitment issue. They'd simply hired the wrong person to replace Debra. It was a people problem.

But here's the thing. Both of those women were good at their jobs. Both were committed. Both cared deeply about the school and the kids in it.

Neither of them was the problem. It was not a people problem.

The role was the problem. It had been structurally overloaded for years. Too much responsibility. Not enough authority. No boundaries. No capacity review. Just an unspoken expectation that whoever sat in that chair would absorb whatever the system threw at them and get on with it.

And both of them did. Until they couldn't.

The school lost the amazing Debra, the replacement with great potential, and a whole load of money to boot.

And here's the bit that really gets me. Nobody sat down after the second resignation and said "hang on, what if it's not them? What if it's us?" Nobody looked at the role itself. Nobody mapped what that chair was actually asking of a human being on any given Tuesday and compared it with what a human being can realistically hold. Because if they had, they'd have seen it. The overload wasn't hidden. It was just unread.

This is what I mean when I talk about pressure being systemic. It doesn't live in the person. It lives in the structure. In the role design. In the workload allocation. In the expectations that nobody ever wrote down but everyone understood.

You can offer that deputy all the wellbeing support you want. You can give her a mindfulness app, a counselling helpline, and a fruit basket on Wellbeing Wednesday. None of it will change the fact that the role she's sitting in is built for one and a half people and she's doing it alone.

There were signs. Clear signs that all was not well with Debra, but no one could read them and so they remained ignored until the damage was done.

That people problem was a structural pressure problem. And until someone takes the time to learn how to read it, every person you put in that chair will eventually break the same way.

I've lost count of how many organisations and people I've spoken to where the same role has churned through multiple people and nobody has stopped to ask: "What is this role asking of people that it shouldn't be?"

They just keep recruiting. Keep onboarding. Keep losing. And keep being shocked every single time.

I just don't get it. Or maybe I do. Leaders are not trained to read pressure and they are often also firefighting their own absorbed pressure. It's a compounding effect.

And it's not just education. I hear the same story in the NHS, in councils, in SMEs. Different sector, different job title, same pattern. A good person walks into a structurally broken role, absorbs everything the system throws at them, eventually breaks, and the organisation calls it a retention problem. It's not a retention problem. It's a pressure problem that nobody's reading.

That is why Pressure Literacy is so important to me. It reads the why, and the where, and it teaches you the early warning signs before it becomes expensive.

It reads where load is concentrating. It reads which roles are structurally set up to fail. It reads the gap between what's on the job description and what's actually landing on someone's desk every day.

Leaders need to spot the Debras. They need to make damn sure they hold onto those amazing people, support them, not break them and lose them.

So here's my challenge to you. Think about the last person who left your organisation unexpectedly. The one who "seemed fine." The one whose exit interview said something vague and polite.

Now ask yourself these questions:

Who replaced them? Are they struggling too? What was that role actually asking of a human being? Was it realistic?

And if you put someone else in that exact same chair tomorrow, with the exact same workload, the exact same expectations, and the exact same lack of structural support, how long before they hand in their letter too?

If you don't like the answer, that's pressure you haven't read yet.

And that's exactly what I'm here for.

Nikki