01: Origin Story of Leaving Well, Naomi Hattaway
Naomi is passionate about community building, equity, and accessibility, and consults on inclusive program design, leadership effectiveness, and communications. Naomi also owns 8th & Home, a network matching folks on the move with Realtors who chase communities not commissions.
After living across the US, her family moved overseas to India where she learned to thrive in the midst of chaos. Following one year in Singapore, they moved back to the US and have traipsed their way through Florida, Virginia, Ohio, and Nebraska, and now back in Florida.
Love language: accountability, tattoos & really good playlists.
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In this episode, I share about the origin of the Leaving Well framework, and how our family has implemented the concept as we’ve traipsed all over the world, and back to the United States. I also discuss how it’s served my real estate clients well as they move from home to home. The crux of the episode finds me telling the story of how the leaving well concept integrated into my workplace and organizational health structure during my tenure in executive leadership at an affordable housing nonprofit.
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Resources and articles mentioned in this episode:
To learn more about Leaving Well, click here.
My Bookshop.org Leaving Well library has many resources to support your workplace transition journey!
To support and contribute to the production costs of this podcast:
This podcast is produced by Sarah Hartley.
TRANSCRIPT:
In the end, I think what I would say about my own experience with Leaving Well from that organization was that I wanted to leave well, and I wanted to leave out loud.
This is Leaving Well, where we unearth and explore the realities of leaving a job, role, project, or title with intention and purpose, and when possible, joy. I'm Naomi Hattaway your host. I will bring you experiences and lessons learned about necessary endings in the workplace with nuanced takes from guests on topics such as grief, confidence, leadership, and career development.
Braided throughout will be solo episodes sharing my best practices and leaving well framework. Expect to be inspired, challenged, and reminded that you too can embed and embody the art and practice of leaving well as you seek to leave your imprint in this world.
When I think about the origin story of leaving well, I may talk about it now, present day as it relates to transitions in the workplace, but the origin story actually truly goes way back.
It goes way back to the time when our family left the United States and lived abroad. We had been living in Georgia when my husband and I got married. We soon moved up to Ohio, and from that place in Ohio, we made the decision to relocate our family to India. My husband had gotten a job, and he left a few months before the family followed, um, as is typical.
That's very typical that someone goes on ahead, and then someone's left And in the timeframe of doing that closing up shop, I did so much work to prepare our little family for what was about to come with our journey to India. I got library books, stacks and stacks and stacks of library books to help our children understand what it might look like, what it might feel like, what it might taste like.
We tested out all sorts of Indian recipes to see if we could all identify with a favorite before we even got there so that we would feel some sense of connectedness when we landed. We enjoyed thoroughly our three years in India. But I will say, if I'm being honest, that it both tested and treated me well every single day.
After three years in India, we moved to Singapore for one year. And the reason for that was primarily because I contracted chikungunya, which for me turned into a chronic illness. And at doctor's recommendation, I moved to Singapore and brought the kids with me in an effort to rest and heal and get a little bit better.
A year later, uh, due to realizing that our family did not work very well in different countries and realizing that we needed to be perhaps back in the United States all in one place, we repatriated. Something that people do not talk about as frequently as they should is the extrication from a thing, the leaving from a thing.
When we landed back in the United States, I wrote a blog post sharing my struggles. At the time, I didn't know how many readers I had, but I don't know, maybe a handful. And that blog post ended up resonating with thousands and thousands of people. That blog post ended up being the linchpin to an online community that grew to be 17, 000 people called I Am A Triangle.
And during the fostering and stewarding of that community, I met Jerry Jones. who has written a piece called Leaving Well. And it is all about the practices and the habits and the things that you should do when you leave an expat posting. This also applies for military, missionary, anything where you are in service of something and finding yourself away from home or away from your passport country.
So I began implementing the ideas from Leaving Well as we integrated back into the United States. And we've moved a lot since then inside the United States, and every time we do, we have a series of things that we practice as a family. We intentionally say goodbye to the places that matter to us most.
We go back to our favorite restaurants to say goodbye and have one last meal with our favorite servers. We visit the library again. We take photos of the things that we hold close. I also have my real estate license, and one thing I have always told clients is take advantage of the time when you are leaving to say goodbye so that you can land in your new place in the best shape possible.
Some of my clients have even wrote little notes on the inside of closet doors, having their kids say goodbye to the home where they've been raised. So fast forward a little bit, and I had landed myself in the nonprofit space. I was the Nebraska chapter lead for Moms Demand Action, and I loved being able to give back and do some volunteer work in that arena.
But I also wanted to get back into the workplace. It had been some years since I had worked when we were overseas, and I found myself working for a national affordable housing nonprofit, working at Local Affiliate. And I poured myself in. I had a team of about 10 folks. We were very, very on the front lines with the community that the nonprofit was meant to serve.
And I loved every minute of it. One of the first things I did when I started was to create a journey map. I realized that so much disconnection was happening inside of the nonprofit because departments were not talking to each other. Not only that, but departments were not innately connected on a regular basis to the mission.
To the consumer, to the client that was meant to be served. So, this journey map ended up on a large whiteboard in my office. And I literally drew the beginning. Where does the person first interact with this non profit and with our staff? And then we drew points all along the way to completion. What does the end of that journey look like for this non profit client?
Then what we did was we, as a group, as our team, we started putting different pinpoints throughout the journey that we had laid out. Where were there gaps? Where had we really found innovative ways to serve the customer, the client? Where were there gaps that were still huge, huge chasms? Where could we be better?
The next thing we did was invited other departments to come in and add their two cents. What was their responsibility as a department? Where did they need to have more collaboration? More charisma, more connection. Through the time that I served at that non profit, I grew incredibly aware of succession planning and how I now believe that it is a thing of yesterday.
Traditional succession planning doesn't often work and it's often just a checkbox that we find ourselves completing to appease our board of directors or to say that we've done the thing when it comes time to file annual reports. I was named as the successor to the executive director at this nonprofit, and I tell you that it really made me proud.
I was, I was so happy, I was so pleased, and it really showed me that I, I did have value. I brought worth to the organization. That is, until I realized that it was mostly in name only. The nonprofit leadership team did not do any of the steps that it would take to actually have that. be true in fruition if something had happened with the executive director or if the executive director at the time no longer held that position.
There was no plans put in place so that I would be ready to take over as a successor to the ED. There's a whole host of other things that happened and a whole host of other things I could talk about, but really the main point that I want to bring is that I realized that it was time for me to go. It was time for me to make sure that my values aligned with the places that I was working, and I started making plans to leave.
While I did that, though, instead of just looking at when would I give my two weeks and what did I need to do to protect myself in the leaving, I really looked at opportunities to embed some of the same practices from Jerry's Leaving Well post, from Jerry's Leaving Well examples of all the things that should be done when you're pulling yourself away from something that matters a lot to you.
So part of what I did when I thought... around the opportunities to embed leaving well in action with my team, we started doing some really practical but non traditional things. So one of the things that I had my team do is bring me their resumes and we compared and contrasted those with their job descriptions from when they first hired on at this non profit.
On the job description side of things, we looked through what they thought their job was going to be and what they said yes to in the beginning. And we kind of took it piece by piece. Is this job component still happening? Is this skill set being used? What is being put on your plate that's not reflected in this job description?
What's on the job description that you wish you had had a chance to do, but due to other priorities coming on? It's just been left behind. So that was one component. Then on the resume side of things, we looked in that same vein. What did you bring to this job that's not being utilized or not being maximized?
What have you done in the time you've been here that we need to make sure you capture on that resume? So many times the only time that we look at our resumes is when we're in the pickle or in the moment of needing to use it and send it out to pitch ourselves for a new job. Often in those moments, there's so much going on that we tend to shortcut our own value and our own worth and our own experience and we miss putting relevant things on that resume.
So we did those two things. We looked at our resumes. We looked at our job descriptions. And when I tell you that the team looked at me as though I had five horns coming out of my head, but the reality is when we talked about why it was so important, they really got on board. Another thing that I did as I processed the fact that my time at this nonprofit was soon to be over was looked at in depth, the relationships that the organization had with the community and with external partners in those relationships. I looped back around and said, Hey, we talked about this potential, really amazing project. Can we get that back on our plates? Uh, I reached out to folks that we had MOUs, memorandums of understanding inside of partnerships to say, could we get those signed? Could we get this project launched? I also looked back at that journey map of the client that this nonprofit was existing to serve, and I looked at where legacy work could be launched and implemented. So a couple of things that we did was bring in the kiddos. One of the gaps in that journey map was that we never took into consideration the children in the affordable housing infrastructure ecosystem.
What was it like for them to move? What was it like for them to be in a new neighborhood, a new school? And we developed workshops. We even had the opportunity to work with a psychologist who had written a beautiful book about moving. And she created a unique custom version for this nonprofit … all for the kiddos.
So we really looked at legacy work and how could we implement some things, knowing that my time was short. We also implemented a couple of programmatic changes to bring in the legacy of homeownership through wills and estate planning, even working specifically with some title companies to make the process simpler.
In the end, I think what I would say about my own experience with Leaving Well from that organization was that I wanted to leave well, and I wanted to leave out loud. I wanted to not sidestep the reasons why I was leaving, and so I wrote a detailed letter to the executive director and to the leadership team about why I was leaving.
I made no bones about the fact that I felt they should have been more intentional and realistic about naming a successor. I explicitly laid out the plans that needed to take place if they really did want to have an innovative and meaningful succession plan. What followed that time, as I left Well, was a series of reachouts from folks continuously asking me to help them with their own leaving.
They had heard about the way that I left, or people were talking about it, or I had shared, and people came back to me to say, I would like to do the same. After a couple of casual interactions with folks, sending an email with, here's an idea, here's something you could do. I developed the Leaving Well Framework and I've since worked with nonprofit organizations as they've navigated exits of executive directors.
I've worked with boards of directors as they manage transition inside of the organization. And I've also worked individually with leaders as they've made decisions to stay, to wait or to go. I launched this podcast because I think that we need these conversations out in the open. I think we need conversations about leaving well to be had out loud.
So this podcast will be an exploration and a co-created journey to uncover what it means to practice leaving well in our workplaces, in our relationships, and in our lives. The reason I say co created is because I don't have all the answers. I only have a deep, deep desire to make it more normal and to have it be an untraditional, non traditional, yet soon to be practiced practice.
Our workplace is often the place where we spend the most time during our day. And if we can start to have habits and practices and policies, whether it's on an organizational level or individually within our own power, it's To navigate transitions with intention, with purpose, and when possible joy, we can bring the human back to the workplace.
So that's a very short version of the origin story of Leaving Well. I'm so excited that you're on this path with us. As always, you can learn more about Leaving Well at my website. And one thing I would encourage you to do every time you listen to an episode is pull out the things that resonate with you and tell someone about it.
Tell someone that you listened to this podcast about this crazy new concept called Leaving Well and you wanted to share something that you've learned. Thank you so much for listening. I'm Naomi Hattaway.
To learn more about leaving well and how you can implement and embed the framework and culture in your own life and workplace visit naomihattaway.com It's time for each of us to look ourselves in the mirror and finally admit we are playing a powerful role in the system We can either exist outside of our power or choose to decide to shift culture and to create transformation Until next time I'm your host Naomi Hattaway, and you've been listening to Leaving Well, a navigation guide for workplace transitions.
