Two weeks ago, I bent over to pick up a sock and threw out my back. I would have preferred a more noble reason for this injury, like lifting heavy weights or hoisting a sick dog into a car. One small dumb action. And it was my birthday.
It’s like this when you decide to leave your corporate job. Your plan begins the moment you resolve to leave, but it usually fails to include what will happen if you get surprised by something along the way, and the impact of your surprise on others.
So today, we’ll look at how to make plans more elastic and less like armor against surprise.
Everyone’s Got a Plan
You might have heard this old boxing quote: “Everyone’s got a plan until they get hit.” So many things can interrupt the careful plan you make to finally leave your job. Reality shows up to change everything.
I once gave 6 months’ notice for leaving a job, thinking I could work with colleagues on a slow and steady transition plan. But then my boss forbade me from telling anyone for four months. Plan foiled.
One of my clients decided to leave his company with the idea that he’d move over to his wife’s corporate health plan. Then she got fired.
So is the plan still worth creating if any random act can blow it out of the water? Yes.
The big role of your exit strategy is to create emotional separation from the work, the politics, even the toxic system you realize you’re in. That separation is the buffer that will help you manage surprises.
Let’s say you decide to leave in 5 months. You talk with your family, your financial advisor. You make a plan for health care, for time off. Even if you tell no one else, your departure has started. Nothing might change at work – you go about your job duties, though maybe cut back on weekend hours. You’ll keep performing because you want and need that time, but you don’t volunteer for as many side projects. All good.
Instead, you’ll lay the foundation for your life outside the company. You get in touch with old friends and invent reasons to meet up regularly. You make time for a hobby, knowing you’ll need something to occupy your time that isn’t typing and staring at a screen.
If you aren’t sure exactly how to prepare for this life on the outside, look to your personal values as a guide. Whatever you believe strongly in, whether that’s belonging or generosity or something else, move toward that. It’s a way to stay close to your own integrity as you move through this big change.
This is what preparation looks like: bolstering your life outside of work. Making it matter.
The Punch
And then something happens. Your team is re-orged and people scatter. A new directive comes from the CEO that has you scrambling to learn what agentic AI is. Or you get laid off.
Your plan did not allow for this. It required your presence and paycheck for every week of that five months. So now, even though you planned all along to leave, you are thrown into a tailspin.
The system is working as designed; it doesn’t care about your plan. But now there is a gap between your aspiration and reality, and that’s where suffering happens. You might be tempted to cancel all the coffees and quit your pottery class. What’s really needed in this moment is for you to close the gap; to stop being a victim of the plan’s failure and start being someone who can adapt.
You’ve been surprised before, so you know what it feels like. For me, it all happens in the gut, which gets the information first. A roiling, churning sickness as my brain tries to fight off what is actually happening. That all settles down once I stop fighting.
Besides, clinging to the gap between aspiration and reality keeps the focus on you and your discomfort. You get to decide how to respond to the situation. The gap is yours to close. If you have even a nominal leadership role at work, others will look to you for how they should respond.
Those other people around you? Let’s talk about them for a moment.
The Armoring Problem
When you make an exit plan, you probably consult family members and close friends. You steel yourself to emotionally disengage from work so that once it gets here, leaving will be easier. But there’s one nuance worth addressing: the people you work with don’t know your plan. They don’t understand why you’re distancing yourself. If you’re a manager, this might create panic in your direct reports, who suddenly wonder if they’re in trouble, that you’re unhappy, or that you’re holding some company secret that could affect them.
Your exit will itself be a surprise to others. You can expect that one of your final tasks as a colleague will be to help other people through the shock of your departure. You are part of a system of relationships, and those relationships will need tending.
So while you’re disengaging from the company itself, it’s time to pay a little more attention to the individuals at work that you care about. Can you shift a few degrees toward the “people” side of management? If so, you increase the chance of feeling proud of the legacy you leave behind. What you do for these folks over the next few months – how you show up, protect them, how you help – that’s the tone you’re setting for your departure. They will remember how you treated them on your way out.
Protecting yourself against awful politics and soul-deadening work is great. But armoring against people could create a lasting impression you don’t want.
Preparing for Changing Variables
An elastic plan isn’t the one that prepares for every variable. That’s an exhausting prospect that ends up as a convoluted set of contingency plans rather than an actual exit strategy.
Your plan can be solid and retain its flexibility in your final months when you let your values influence your behavior. And when you remember that you’ll probably cause more surprises than you’ll receive. You aren’t the only one whose plans are about to go sideways.
You get to choose how you respond to any piece of new information. If you can stay nimble, that punch won’t land quite as hard.
