In Praise of “Leavership”
It’s graduation season in the place where we’re local. Students all around us are wrapping up their last assignments, studying for exams that will test what they’ve learned and preparing to celebrate the end of an era. Ahead lies something else. A change of scenery. New people. A different structure to the day.
We have infrastructure and institutions, financing mechanisms and rituals dedicated to helping us figure out who we want to be when we grow up. But most of us experience multiple beginnings and endings in our working lives. And at a time of profound upheaval, more of us will find ourselves needing to restart.
But as we heard from interviewees, moving is costly – not just financially but emotionally. The need to know where your next paycheck is coming from is one kind of urgency. But you realise that there are so many factors that drive urgency. You crave that feeling of belonging, of validation, of being needed – all the other reasons that make us want to work in the first place.
Still, not moving might be more costly, both for individuals and for employers. Some of the people we spoke to described a situation that is all too common: they can’t really imagine leaving, even as they sense that circumstances might force them to do so. Their situation has started to erode their mental energy and even health, which makes it even harder to muster the inner resources they need to make a different choice. Meanwhile, it is perhaps counterintuitive, but we believe that inviting and supporting employees to regularly test their alignment with their roles – from both a skills and values perspective – can save an employer money.
There is a basic principle in healthy ecosystems: resources should always flow to where they are needed most. Career moves are essential for our systems not only to thrive, but to evolve well.
So how can we get better at leaving? One answer may lie in the stories we tell about it. Taking stimulus from heroic journeys described by Joseph Campbell and Maureen Murdock, the 12 Step programme used most famously by Alcoholics Anonymous, and the funerary text known in the West as the Tibetan Book of the Dead, we offer three ingredients to anyone seeking to bring more agency to our working lives:
Reconnect with lost selves – the qualities and dreams we suppress in order to succeed in one career can be our most important resources in the next
Look into the moral mirror – an unflinching acknowledgment of our own patterns of behaviour and their consequences allow us to approach the future with more intention and agency
Find the others – new communities provide invaluable fellowship and inspiration during difficult transitions