77: People Leave; A Podcast Style Keynote About Nonprofit Workplace Transitions
It’s time to reimagine workplace transitions and the way we say goodbye. Here’s the truth: People Leave. We leave towns and cities, and we leave relationships. We leave projects, volunteer opportunities, and appointed and elected seats. People leave jobs too, whether high powered roles and barely paid gigs.
Another truth is that organizations are exponentially terrible at preparing for and navigating workplace transitions. The combination of people leaving and the reality that our workplaces are ill-equipped for those situations makes for perpetually bad exits. I’ve examined the way people leave, and through the Leaving Well framework, believe we can reimagine and create the art and practice of moving on from a place, thing, role, or job, with intention, purpose, and when possible – joy, and want to invite you into the conversation with this episode.
Main Quote:
Leaving well is not just about avoiding dreaded PR nightmares, scheduling exit interviews, or scrambling to toggle off access to email accounts. It's so much more than the departure itself. It's about the way we handle transitions, how we prioritize people, and how we ensure the ongoing health of our organization in the face of inevitable change.
Additional Quotes:
Leaving well benefits not only those departing, but also those staying behind. It mitigates the loss of productivity. It protects the bottom line of organizations and prevents knowledge attrition. It builds company loyalty and a positive workplace environment.
Creating a culture of leaving well does not sow seeds of restlessness.
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This podcast is produced by Sarah Hartley
Transcript:
For this conversation, we're going to imagine that we are in a room with a lot of people and I'm going to ask a couple of questions at the beginning here that if you just imagine to yourself, what would be happening in the room as I ask them, it'll give a little bit better of an experience. So the first question we're going to imagine we're in a big room, maybe it's a conference center, maybe it's a large, um, conference room, maybe we're sitting outside together with a lot of people at a park.
Anyway, you get the drift. So I'm going to ask, uh, three questions. The first question is asking you to raise your hand if you are still working at your first job.
The, the key here is that if we're in a room with a bunch of people, we're pretending here, but chances are not very many people are raising their hands. The second question is for you to raise your hand if you've ever left a job. Now, again, we're going to imagine we're in a room with a bunch of people.
How many people do you think are raising their hands right now about having never left a job? Okay, the last scenario is raise your hand if you've ever experienced a colleague, a boss, or someone else who left a job and you stayed behind. Again, if we're in a room with a bunch of people or at the park with a bunch of people, hands are probably up all over the place.
I'm curious to know, how did you feel? During the time when you left your job. How did you feel during the experience when someone left and you stayed? How was the transition for you? The American Psychological Association reports that 81 percent of workers reported that they will be looking for workplaces that support mental health in the future.
The Future Forum polls shows that 21%, which is basically one in five, knowledge workers is likely to jump to a new company in the next year. And more than 56 percent are open to looking for new positions. Here's one more stat for you. From Power to Fly, a survey that they did, 49 percent of professionals that they polled were considering quitting their job.
Here's the truth. People leave. People leave jobs. We leave projects. We leave volunteer opportunities. We leave appointed and elected seats. We leave high powered roles and barely paid gigs. We leave towns and cities. We leave relationships. At the same time that all of that is true, that people leave, here's another truth.
Each one of us is exponentially familiar, already, with the idea of beginnings, and we are all each typically pretty good at starting something. New projects, launching initiatives, welcoming new team members, even moving to new locations to start a new job. However, very few of us contemplate the importance of endings, especially when it comes to the workplace.
To be quite honest with you, we suck at this. My relationship with leaving began with something that you've also likely done, moving house. As a young child, our family moved three times, and then I moved solo an additional four times between the ages of 16 and 20. After getting married, our family has moved an additional nine times in the last 20 years, including two overseas locations, India and Singapore.
We've also added six multi household moves, and it's safe to say that we have done a lot of leaving. When we landed back in the United States after our time overseas, I wrote a blog post sharing my struggles in the repatriation process. Which is the return back to your passport country. That blog post ended up resonating with thousands and thousands of people and ended up being the linchpin to an online community that grew to be 17, 000 people called I am a triangle.
During the fostering and stewarding of that company or that community, I met Jerry Jones, who wrote an article called Leaving Well, all about the practices and habits you should do when you leave an expat posting. This concept also applies for military, missionary, really anywhere that you are in service of something, and also finding yourself away from home or away from your passport country.
I began implementing the ideas from Leaving Well as we integrated back to the United States. We personally have a series of actions 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 see you later and to have one last meal with our favorite servers.
We visit the library again. We take photos of the things that we hold close from that location. I also had my real estate license for 10 years. And one thing I always told clients is to take advantage of the time when you're leaving to say goodbye so that you can land in your new place in the best shape possible.
Some of those real estate clients also wrote notes on the inside of closet doors, allowing their kids to say goodbye to the homes that they were raised in. So what does this all have to do with the workplace? Let me tell you, after serving for a few years in a volunteer role as the Nebraska Chapter Lead for Moms Demand Action, I was recruited to take a director job at a nonprofit in the affordable housing realm.
I poured myself into my work and to my team of 10. We were very, very on the front lines with the community that the nonprofit was meant to serve, and I loved every moment of it. After a short time of integrating a really powerful series of programming and new ideas into the overall mission of the organization, I was named as a successor to the executive director at this nonprofit.
And let me tell you, I was so happy. I was pleased. I was proud. I was honored. It proved to me that I did indeed have value and that I brought worth to the organization. That is until I realized that it was in name only the nonprofit leadership team did not undertake any of the steps necessary to actually embed intentional and purposeful succession planning.
No plans were put in place for knowledge transfer, shoring up organizational health. Or communicating out this new plan. There are more details to the story, but the main point to share with you is that I realized it was time to leave. My values weren't aligned. My job description had major gaps between with what I had as decision making power to achieve and what I was tasked with.
And so I started making plans to, to depart. While I did that though, instead of just looking at when I would give my two weeks and what did I need to do to protect myself in the leaving, I really looked at the opportunities to embed some of those same practices from Jerry's leaving well examples of the things that should be done when you're pulling yourself away from something that matters a lot to you.
I embarked on a leaving well plan that was rolled out over about three months as I made my exit plans more than just about myself. In the end, I think what I would say about my own experience of leaving well from that organization was that while I wanted to leave well, I also wanted to leave out loud.
I didn't want to sidestep the reasons why I was leaving, and so I wrote a detailed letter to the executive director and to the leadership team about precisely 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, and I explicitly laid out the plans that needed to take place if they really did want a future, innovative, and meaningful succession plan.
Since that time, I received many calls and emails from others asking if I would help with their own leaving. And after many casual and meaningful discussions with individuals, I developed the Leaving Well Framework for the workplace. And I've since worked with hundreds of non profit organizations as they have navigated exits of executive directors.
I've worked with boards of directors as they manage transitions of their own membership, as well as inside the organization. And I've also worked individually with leaders as they've made decisions to stay, to wait, or to go. My mission is to expand this conversation about leaving well in the workplace and to change the way that we actually leave the workplace.
I'm excited to share a little bit of the framework with you today. So, tagline, is the art and practice of leaving a role, job, title, or project with intention and with purpose, and when possible, joy. How we handle departures and how we say goodbye directly impacts how we welcome new employees and staff.
Leaving well is not just about avoiding dreaded PR nightmares, scheduling exit interviews, or scrambling to toggle off access to email accounts. It's so much more than the departure itself. It's about the way we handle transitions. How we prioritize people and how we ensure the ongoing health of our organization in the face of inevitable change.
Whether an individual chooses to leave or we make that decision for them, the process can be transformative if done right. Remember at the beginning when I asked you about your experience with departures in the workplace? I have a few questions that will take us a little deeper on that topic. How was the departure handled?
Were there gaps in the knowledge transfer? Was there uncertainty among the team or an overall sense of chaos? Was that departure gracefully choreographed or tumultuous? Here's the kicker. Like I said at the beginning, we are masters of beginnings, but we stumble at the finish line. We craft elaborate onboarding rituals, but what about offboarding?
Why are we so avoidant when it comes to endings? I believe that leaving well is not just a buzzword or a feel good concept. It's a strategic imperative. Leaving well benefits not only those departing, but also those staying behind. It mitigates the loss of productivity. It protects the bottom line of organizations and prevents knowledge attrition.
It builds company loyalty and a positive workplace environment. It also involves comprehensive planning, transparent and transformative communication, and a deep understanding of your organization's values. When we prioritize, when we prioritize leaving well, we lay the groundwork for crucial mindset shifts and simple principles.
These can include continuity, Stability, preservation of reputation, innovative succession planning, the nurture of future leaders, and positive organizational health, all of these things lead to big ripples. If you are in charge of people, whether in the HR department or as a manager, you have the power to craft a culture of human centered leadership, and you can also provide tools to implement leaving.
So how do we implement leaving? Well, I'm going to give you three golden tickets. So the first one is knowledge transfer. You think that you're doing this well, and I know that you're not, you need to have a plan in place for sharing expertise and institutional knowledge. This principle works magically for organizations who are not anticipating upcoming workplace transitions and is also a saving grace for folks who are actively thinking about departing.
Another golden ticket here is to regularly check in with employees to understand their needs and their aspirations. Now, I have something to share with you that I feel is a truth. Exit interviews only protect the company. HR really doesn't actually care what about when you're leaving. Instead, what my recommendation is, is stay interviews.
These are reflective reviews of resumes for those who stay. And it also helps to normalize hard conversations. This allows you to create a culture where leaving is discussed openly and without fear. Normalizing conversations about necessary endings. renders them no longer taboo, but actually encourages them.
I have more information on my website about stay interviews. And you can also email me at Naomi at eighth and home. com. The number eight T H a N D H O M E. com. And I can send you some information about how to conduct stay interviews. The third and final golden ticket here is to trust people. I know what I'm asking you and I know that your inner cringe is on fire right now.
Our workplaces are not designed to demonstrate trust in employees. We treat them like assets until they become liabilities. There are also scores of examples of bad actors and bad apples, I know, where trust feels like the worst thing you could possibly offer someone. But, trusting your employees to contribute, to transition, and to uphold the organization's mission, even after they're gone and even after they've given notice, allows you to trust them to spread their wings and to not burn the place down on their way out.
When you start trusting people to leave gracefully and intentionally, here's what happens. We treat them like adults. We gain their trust. Building trust is always a consideration and should always be a journey. Imagine that with a few well prioritized and intentional actions, implementing leaving well becomes your own personal heroic act.
While HR often focuses on shielding the company, what if we redefined that role? What if we made it easier for people to leave, not out of negligence, but out of respect for their growth? I envision a world where we have built consensus that paves the way for a new era of farewells. I believe in us to shake things up and get this right.
Being a human centered organization is more than well written job descriptions, motivational posters in the break room, and national chain food on Fridays at lunchtime. It's about how we handle endings. It's about how we wrap up chapters in our work and our career story. At this point in the discussion, most people begin secretly itching for a spreadsheet, a checklist, or something to organize Leaving Well into a SOP with a bow.
As part of the process of working inside of the Leaving Well framework, my clients do walk away with beautiful templates and guideposts, riverbanks for knowledge transfer, organizational inventory, internal and external communications. But for today, the biggest value that I hope you take back to your workplace is not a free download or a how to guide, but instead a reframe of your understanding that not only do people leave, but in prioritizing the leaving, you can really navigate trust.
You can prioritize knowledge transfer. Now, brace yourself for another powerful truth. Creating a culture of leaving well does not sow seeds of restlessness, I promise. Quite the contrary, it fosters loyalty. Imagine that. And in this journey towards a more humane workplace, leaving well actually becomes your manifesto, your organizational boon.
Leaving well also allows you to bring that humanity back to the workplace, even, even while saying goodbye. Leaving well is not just an individual responsibility. Like I said before, it's an organizational imperative. As we embrace this conversation, we're not just pioneers in this area. We're taking back power and shaping the narrative around endings in the workplace.
Ask yourselves the tough questions, ensure that your values align and start building legacies that you're proud of. I encourage you and challenge you to not just be a part of the conversation by listening to this, but instead choosing opportunities for you to lead the conversation in your workplace.
Let's stop commiserating about awkward, terrible, and traumatic goodbyes in the workplace, and let's carve a path instead towards leaving well. Join me in being a trailblazer who can rewrite the narrative, be a champion of goodbyes, knowing that they are just as important as the hellos. I would love for you to join in instilling a legacy that echoes long after we ourselves have moved on.
And let's make leaving well an unspoken culture that weaves through the fabric and culture of our organization. As you prioritize leaving well, you're not just making a difference in your organization. You are driving a movement that redefines how we approach the human experience in the workplace. My dream for the workplace is that every hiring manager or HR director knows how to answer the question from a potential candidate.
What's your leaving well policy? Try not to be an organization or a leader that only cares about beginnings. Be the one who knows how to finish strong. Help make your workplace a place where everyone, from the intern to the CEO, can have that hero moment of leaving well. Let's revolutionize the way we say goodbye.