How to quit… or be quit on
I’ve resigned from 8 jobs since graduating from college, and I’ve been fired from two.
I’ve occasionally found quitting to be a joyful, celebratory experience. (One wonderful boss actually hugged me when I told him I planned to leave.) I’ve also found it to be downright scary, preceded by lengthy periods of rehearsing and ruminating and not sleeping. (The actual conversations tended to be a lot lower-drama than I was anticipating, of course.)
The difference is the leader on the other side of the table. If you’re working for someone who cares about you as a person, someone who understands the difference between the organization’s interests and your own, the conversation isn’t one to dread. If one or both of you have doubts about the relationship, that’s a different story.
I learned this lesson the hard way.
Ages ago, I had a member of my team who was running into some organizational interference once we promoted her into a new role. Ella (not her real name) was bright, ambitious and personable, and she had my support. So I suspected this was a temporary set of obstacles.
I returned to my office one Thursday after several hours of meetings elsewhere in the building. Imagine my surprise to find Ella’s ID badge and BlackBerry sitting on the corner of my desk! A few hours earlier, we’d said good morning as usual. And now she was… just… gone.
After a deep breath and a quick check to make sure there wasn’t a hidden camera somewhere, I asked a colleague of Ella’s to pop in for a minute. I knew they were close and often talked after hours. While I was curious about what happened, this wasn’t my immediate concern. I had an offer to extend.
“I’d like you to call Ella up and give her a choice,” I said. “Tell her I said she should take the weekend and think this over. If she wants to come in on Monday, we can talk it through and then pretend this never happened.”
As it turns out, I never heard from Ella again. But I resolved from that moment to be the easiest boss to quit on. For the remainder of my career in leadership, I put conscious effort into making the actual conversation as comfortable as possible, and also trying to gather any feedback on what would have kept the person around. When I managed managers (who sometimes managed other managers themselves), I had an informal rule that anyone leaving my org had to stop by for a chat with me on the way out. I learned a lot from these meetings.
When your folks are about to move on, try to give them the following:
Your full attention during the conversation itself
Your congratulations on any successes to date
Your blessing for whatever the next chapter holds for this person
Your commitment to making the transition process as smooth as possible
Your support for the future of their career, whether it’s in your orbit or not
Your curiosity about what went well, and what could have gone differently
Image: MarkBuckawicki, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
