The Art of Leaving

“How do you know when it’s time to leave a job?” isn’t the most frequent question I’ve been asked over the years, but it does show up frequently. Sometimes the person asking is trying to figure out what to do next in their career. Sometimes, their employment situation has changed and they are wondering whether it makes sense to leave or to stay. It is always a challenging question because the range of issues and reasons to leave and the impediments to leave are so idiosyncratic. The best I can do, as in many career questions, is to share my experience and hope there’s a nugget that can help them.

(Yes, this idea for the newsletter was inspired by the events of the past few days, but I’m not writing about any specific person’s decision!)

I think most of us, over the course of our careers, find ourselves wondering whether to stay in a current situation or to seek out a change. As we know, some people stay with one organization for an entire career. Others, like me, move several times. Neither is right or wrong. Both versions can create fulfilling careers that allow individuals to find the best combination of circumstances for each individual.

One of the first questions is to ask what does leaving mean and why are you considering it? For some leaving means they simply want a different job. For others, it can mean they want to leave their specific organization. It can mean feeling like it’s time to take on more responsibility and/or reach for a promotion. The cause can be a change of leadership, a change in the conditions of your work environment, or in your interests. Sometimes, an interesting opportunity knocks on your door. Changes in your personal life, a family member’s health or your own health can create the conditions that make it time to consider a change of some sort.

I’ve most often moved because I reached a point where I felt I had learned what there was for me to learn and I needed new challenges. I didn’t expect to stay in the Dean of Students Office at UT Austin for eleven years, but the Dean of Students kept finding new things for me to do. As I’ve said jokingly, but it’s also partially true, eventually I wanted more responsibility and the Dean wasn’t going to retire to meet my schedule and that meant it was time to look elsewhere.

That’s when I went to SMU as Dean of Students. Interestingly, that position was the exception in my experience. I wasn’t “done” with my work at SMU when a search firm called to talk about a position at Trinity University. The first thing I said to him was that I wasn’t ready to move, after all I’d only been at SMU about two and a half years at that point. But then he said, “The new president is building his team. He thinks the academics are in pretty good shape but he would like to improve the student life experience and he’s willing to put resources into those improvements.” Well, of course my ears perked up. We don’t hear that often. I decided to look into it and that’s why I was only at SMU for three years. Vice presidencies at good universities are rare, so I made the move.

Each move I made was for a different set of reasons in a different set of circumstances. I encourage people who are considering leaving a job to be clear about their reasons and what they hope will be different in the new position.

The one time I do discourage people in making moves is when they come to me and tell me that some authority figure told them they should only be in a position for a set number of years The other version of that prescriptive advice is that you should be achieving a set level of position by a certain age or a certain time in your career. There is no one way to create a career path and one person’s timeline is very unlikely to fit with another’s set of life and professional circumstances.

There’s one other version of the art of leaving and I’ve never gotten this question, but I think people in leadership positions should be asking it of themselves. The question is some version of “Am I bringing the necessary level of energy, enthusiasm, and leadership to make a positive difference in the organization?” When we can’t answer with a wholehearted yes, it seems to me it’s time to think about leaving.

I’ve known senior leaders who stayed too long in their position, who let things get a little stale, who lost the energy that had characterized the early years of time in that position. In those situations, instead of leaving when they had made great strides, when people were sad to see them go, people were a bit relieved to see them go. The window to make such a decision is sometimes very narrow which is why knowing when and how to leave is very much an art not a science.

It’s important for each of us to pay attention to the question of staying and leaving because staying too long isn’t healthy for anyone. Moving too quickly and too often is equally a problem. The hard part is knowing what is the right thing for oneself and for the organization. Many people will have questions about the choices their colleagues make, but it is up to each one of us to make our own decisions about timing, about when and how to leave, about whether to leave or to stay. The decision to leave, or to stay, takes time for reflection, self-knowledge, the ability to consider hard questions and to have honest talks with family and friends.

What questions and considerations have been central to your decisions to stay or to leave? Are they different than mine? I’d love to hear them and your thoughts on this challenging art.

Take care,

Gage

PS. There’s one more piece to this equation, I try to encourage people to decide what is next before they make a move. It’s healthier to move toward rather than away from something. The one exception is if the environment they are in is truly toxic, harmful in anyway. Then the question is what do you need to do to take care of yourself and move toward that.