Why you should leave a job the way you started it

When you start a new job, leaving it is likely to be the last thing on your mind. Yet, how a person leaves the job, no matter what the reason is — personal choice, mutual agreement, or lack of fit with an organization — is just as important as how you’ve done while on the job.

In interviews and in conversations with references, we always ask why the person left — but we rarely ask HOW. What happened in the last few weeks or days before the person actually left (assuming the person was not just escorted off the premises, which is a whole different story)? Did the person make a special effort to wrap things up, to leave things so as to make it easy for his or her colleagues to carry on the work, or to make the entry of the new person smoother?

The people I think most fondly of today, including bosses, colleagues, and subordinates, are those who took special care to prepare the organization for their departure. An assistant who took weeks to train a substitute and offered to be available to answer questions when needed; a project leader who made sure there was sufficient funding in the project after he left; a colleague who assured the rest of the staff that he will continue to look for collaboration opportunities and has consistently done so.

Too often, however, when people decide to leave they mentally disengage from the organization weeks, sometimes months, in advance (this kind of disengagement is always a clue that someone is about to leave). This is understandable: you wouldn’t be looking for another job, conducting external job searches and interviews, if you weren’t ready to part ways. However, what happens in these last weeks or months is what those who stay behind are likely to remember most about you. You might have been a great contributor for years, but in these last few weeks or months it is easy to erase all of this great work from your colleagues’ memory — so by the time you actually leave, your departure will be either hardly noticed or welcomed.

So here is my advice: leave the job the way you found it. Leave it with the same enthusiasm that you started it with. Bring all of this to your last days, weeks, or months on the job. If you need the time to take a break and disconnect, plan to take time off between jobs, but don’t retire on the job. The last thing you want to hear when announcing your departure is? “Seems like you were already gone.”

This article is published in collaboration with LinkedIn. Publication does not imply endorsement of views by the World Economic Forum.

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Author: Marina Gorbis is the Executive Director for the Institute for the Future.

Image: A businessman walks through a station in Tokyo June 27, 2008. REUTERS/Yuriko Naka.