In Praise of Leavership
Image: Gina Rosas Moncada
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 developed an astonishing range of rituals to mark this rite of passage. There are speeches and yearbooks, pranks and parties. Pomp and Circumstance.
After all, we have invested a significant amount of time in figuring out who we want to be when we grow up, and it is a big deal when we finally step out onto the trail.
But there’s a sort of happily-ever-after-ishness to this narrative. At best, it disguises the fact that many of us go through multiple beginnings and endings during our working lives, all of which can be terrifying and almost none of which are given the same kind of support as our first transition into work. At worst, it may lead us to stop questioning what we should do with our lives, allowing choices we made in our teens and twenties to keep us tethered to careers and organisations that do not bring out the best in us.
And at a time of profound upheaval, more of us will find ourselves needing to restart. For some, this need is arising from the contraction of their profession, driven by factors from the political to the technological. For others, as James wrote in last season’s Bramble Quarterly on the Dreamer Drain, it stems from the sense that an environment that once felt creative and inspiring no longer does.
The Summer 2025 edition of the Bramble Quarterly explores what we’re calling “leavership”: the conscious transition from one work life into the next. Drawing on interviews, narrative archetypes and personal experience, we ask: How might we make an art of these transitions, and what might change in the world if we did?
Why leavership matters
In May, I had a conversation that completely changed my perspective on leavership. The decision to move, the man sitting across from me contended, is one of the only moments of real agency we have in our lives. In that single decision, we are choosing which bodies will govern us, where we will pay taxes, and the baseline resource intensity of our lifestyle. Where we live dictates how easy it will be to see loved ones, or see the stars. And where we live can also dictate how easy it is to leave.
Choosing the work we do is consequential in a similar way. With each move, we are determining who will have authority over us, which resources will feel abundant and scarce, what kind of lifestyle we might be able to afford, the purpose to which we are committing our time and talents, and the kinds of opportunities we might have later.
The capacity for high agency is, of course, not evenly distributed; many studies suggest that challenging life circumstances can reduce our sense of agency, and it turns out that even senior executives can feel trapped. And although Bramble believes that our ability to discover and use our agency is key to evolving the systems around us, it’s helpful to acknowledge that this agency might also vary over time.
We notice this dynamic play out in the leadership programmes we run. In each cohort of leaders we work with, we see natural variation in participants’ underlying orientations towards their futures. There are always a few that drink up every new tool, opportunity to reflect, and source of inspiration we can offer them. These leaders are no less stressed and busy than their colleagues, but for some reason they invest more in their own development. On one programme where we ask participants to start by drawing an adventure book-style map of their professional quest, I remember a senior leader confiding in me that she had done two – one for the job she had currently, and one for the bigger quest she was holding in her life. She was actively considering her next move, whether within her company or beyond, and wanted to make sure that it would be the right one for her.
On the other end of the spectrum, we have worked with many people who are, for whatever reason, considering their work with less agency. They may be perfectly satisfied in their current roles. But even if they are not, 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.
Moving is costly – not just financially but emotionally. The need to know where your next paycheck is coming from is one kind of urgency, one leader who left a corporate executive role and now works as an independent consultant observed. 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.
But not moving might be more costly. 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 a company money. It's never good when someone feels stuck. Aside from the strain on them, there is the effect it has on their teams. If you’ve experienced working with someone (or in any kind of relationship with someone) whose heart is no longer in it but hasn’t figured out how to move on, you know what I mean. Some exceptional employers pay for coaches to help valued employees retire with dignity or find new roles that are right for them. More commonly, employers offer financial incentives to encourage team members to leave, pay expensive consultants to help them restructure and hire lawyers to help them terminate contracts.
On the other hand, inviting the exploration, just as any other investment in a leader’s development, can pay dividends. The leader who mapped two quests for herself had been seriously considering leaving her job, but she ultimately decided to stay and take on a new role. There is an enormous difference between staying because you don’t feel you have a choice and making a choice to stay.
There is a basic principle in healthy ecosystems: resources should always flow to where they are needed most. Indeed, leavership is essential for our systems to evolve well; the Berkana Institute’s Two Loops model describes systems change as the cumulative result of pioneers leaving the dominant paradigm, finding each other and forming a new alternative.
The heroic leaver
Consciously or not, anyone that was an impressionable age when the Star Wars trilogy was released is familiar with the narrative structure Joseph Campbell calls the “hero’s journey”. In it, the protagonist sets out on a quest, receives guidance from a wise mentor, encounters challenges, finds companions, faces the ultimate test, earns a reward and finally returns home to share that reward with others.
According to this structure, departure is fundamentally heroic. What makes Luke Skywalker and Neo and Frodo exceptional is that they choose to leave the worlds they know in search of something more.
The stickiness of this story is perhaps in part why we instinctively frame job departures as a way of answering what Campbell described as the “call to adventure.” Indeed, judging by LinkedIn, wishing people well on their next “adventure” has become one of the most common ways to refer to the unspecified-but-definitely-very-exciting thing that we will be doing after leaving our current roles. It’s like the professional equivalent of giving each other copies of Oh, The Places You’ll Go.
There are plenty of good reasons to put an upbeat spin on what might well be a painful experience. We have been taught that the ability to see opportunity in crisis is an essential leadership quality. But what could this positivity bias, so deeply ingrained in many of our work cultures, be obscuring? And what different practices might leavership require?
Reconnecting with lost selves
In her 1990 book The Heroine’s Journey, therapist Maureen Murdock argued that Campbell’s structure didn’t capture the experience of women who “sought validation from patriarchal systems and found them not only lacking but terribly destructive”.
“Working as a therapist with women, particularly between the ages of thirty and sixty, I have heard a resounding cry of dissatisfaction with the successes won in the marketplace… These women have embraced the stereotypical male heroic journey and have attained academic, artistic, or financial success; yet for many the question remains, “What is all of this for?” The illusory boon of success leaves these women over-scheduled, exhausted, suffering from stress-related ailments, and wondering how they got offtrack.”
Murdock proposes a “heroine’s journey” that at first resembles its masculine counterpart. Immersed in a dominant culture that celebrates the hero’s journey, Murdock argues, many women ready themselves to embark on their careers by first separating themselves from the aspects of their personality they consider to be feminine. Thus armoured, they “ride into battle” alongside the boys and emerge victorious – at least according to conventional standards.
It is here, in Murdock’s representation, that the road divides. The hero is supposed to return home to enjoy his hard-won reward (at least until the sequel); the heroine attempts to do the same, but finds herself feeling ill at ease and even, perhaps, literally ill. Awakening to this period of “spiritual aridity”, she descends into a period of darkness and silence, recovers the feminine parts of herself she once rejected and ultimately re-integrates both feminine and masculine.
Although Murdock describes this alternative narrative structure in the language of gender, I have heard similar experiences described by leaders who are queer or neurodivergent. Indeed, as one male colleague pointed out, you can be a neurotypical, straight, white, middle-aged, middle-class man and still resonate with the heroine’s journey Murdock describes. The common thread is a realisation that you have masked some part of yourself in order to succeed in mainstream terms, and can only lead at your full potential when you embrace your whole self.
A growing number of leadership practitioners are seeing this story of separation at the root of the extractive paradigm that is currently dominant in the industrialised world. In their book Regenerative Leadership, Giles Hutchins and Laura Storm describe parallel separations—between human and nature, between masculine and feminine, between inner and outer and between left brain and right brain qualities. Only through undertaking journeys of reconnection and reintegration across each of these divides, they write, will we arrive at the kind of leadership we need for a regenerative world.
Integral Coaching, which several of us at Bramble have studied, puts this reintegration at the heart of its practice. Rather than focusing on specific goals relevant to their current contexts, Integral Coaching invites clients to examine their full selves and to engage in both personal and professional development. As in the heroine’s journey, we are encouraged to work not just towards goals, but towards wholeness, in the belief that this deep inner work can precipitate a liberating new direction for our careers.
Looking into the moral mirror
In some ways, according to Murdock, the heroine’s journey is a recovery from an achievement addiction, and the 12 Steps programme – used most famously by Alcoholics Anonymous – suggests additional ingredients that can been deeply valuable for leavership. One of these is its call in Step Four for addicts to “make a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.”
The moral inventory is an exercise in building awareness. Only once we recognise our patterns of thought and behaviour and the harm they may have caused ourselves and others can we truly begin to take responsibility for those patterns. Without acknowledging the role our own actions have played in our current predicament, it is difficult to feel agency over the different course we might take in the future.
Although the 12 Steps were informed by their author’s Christian faith, the idea of the moral inventory is echoed in other spiritual and philosophical traditions. Bardo Thödol, the text known in the West as the Tibetan Book of the Dead but which translates literally to something like “Liberation in the Transitional State through Hearing,” aims to guide individuals through the transition between death and rebirth.
According to Buddhist scholar Joanna Macy, as we enter this bardo, we encounter the Buddha Akshobhya:
He is holding a mirror, for his gift is Mirror Wisdom, reflecting everything just as it is. And the teaching of Akshobhya’s mirror is this: Do not look away. Do not avert your gaze. Do not turn aside. This teaching clearly calls for radical attention and total acceptance.
The mirror reflects our past actions without distortion. This reflection informs the judgment, which leads to rebirth. But this is not a passive sentencing. Buddhist philosophy emphasises conscious participation as we confront the mirror; it is through recognition and right understanding that we may achieve a good rebirth or even liberation from the cycle entirely.
The significance of moral reckoning is not that we need a period of self-flagellation before we can be worthy of redemption. It is about shedding the distorting filters we have accumulated over time in a role – the stories that help us sell our work to our customers, our colleagues, our loved ones and even ourselves. Until we have done so, we can hardly make what Arawanna Hayashi, who uses dance for social change, calls a “true move” – a move that originates from our deepest personal sense of rightness rather than from an idea we have internalised from elsewhere.
Finding the others
Although the heroine’s journey, the 12 Steps and Bardo Thödol all emphasise deep inner work, it would be folly to conclude that leavership should be undertaken alone. Indeed, the 12 Steps begin when an addict admits their personal powerlessness over their drug of choice and surrenders to a power greater than themselves. Although the 12 Steps were developed by a man whose idea of a “higher power” was informed by his religious beliefs, subsequent practitioners have interpreted the idea to apply to the wider universe, or even simply the addict’s community.
What would it feel like to surrender ourselves to a community that could support and share our leavership journey? Leavership is often isolating; we aren’t just leaving roles or careers but networks that we rely on for friendship and belonging. But if we follow the logic of the 12 Steps, separating from our old networks is not the same as self-quarantine; only once we give up the idea that we must reject help can we be ready to begin our moral inventory.
The frame shift from individual to collective has a powerful role to play in facilitating personal transformation. In a study of 26 cultures, Dacher Keltner identifies “collective effervescence” (a phrase coined by Emile Durkheim) as one of the leading sources of awe. Moving in sync with others or making music together can connect us, Keltner writes, to a sense of “collective self, a tribe, an oceanic ‘we’.” There is a reason that these acts are woven into rituals from weddings to political rallies—they “sync us up physiologically, which enables lots of good things.”
This idea tracks with one pattern we described in our piece on the dreamer drain: dreamers leaving organisations in search of new places to do creative, purposeful work look for new networks to join. One fellow practitioner explained this instinct by quoting controversial counterculture figure Timothy Leary: “Trust your instincts. Do the unexpected. Find the others.”
Supporting better leavership
As any leaver will tell you, there are plenty of offerings – from coaching to retreats – that seek to support career transitions, albeit not associated explicitly with “leavership” as we are defining it. But many find themselves navigating the landscape alone, especially the more senior they get. Cost is not necessary a barrier for them – leaders regularly spend thousands of pounds on personal development – but they do cite the difficulty of finding programmes with other participants who are truly at similar points in their journey. Moreover, they don’t just want new tools and credentials, although these things are helpful; they want new communities that inspire them and hold them to account.
Based on what we’ve learned about leavership, we at Bramble are currently crafting a pilot programme that will help senior leaders reconnect with lost selves, look in the moral mirror, and find their others. (If you are interested in participating and helping us shape this programme, please connect with us here.)
For anyone hungry to approach your working life with more agency, whether you are actively seeking more meaningful work already, or want to be ready when the time comes, we think the three elements in this piece can serve as a starting point. What essential parts of yourself have you neglected in order to succeed in your current role? Is there an activity you could do or a place you could visit to reconnect with that lost self? What patterns in your own thoughts and behaviours might be holding you back? And who are the people that keep you honest and help you grow?
Wherever we are in our own leavership journeys, we can all contribute to creating a more supportive environment for others who are moving from one working life to the next. As employers, former colleagues and as friends, we can normalise transitions. We can hold space for healthy endings that combine both celebration and mourning. And we can demonstrate curiosity not only about what people are doing, but what they are becoming.