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Departing with Grace: How Executives Should Manage Their Exit Strategies

Departing with Grace: How Executives Should Manage Their Exit Strategies

It finally happened. Your carefully crafted elevator pitch, career documents, and interviewing techniques paid off and you’ve accepted a leadership position at a new company.

Don’t drop your guard just yet. You may be ready for the next stage in your career, but when you’re an integral part of the executive team, all eyes will be on your exit. A careless exit strategy could torpedo your credibility, negatively impacting your new role and burning bridges you may need down the road.

So how can you make a more graceful exit from a C-level position?

Must-Dos for Executive Exit Strategies

A quick or careless exit can undermine years of exemplary leadership, giving you a reputation for slapdash work or self-centeredness. Keep your professional reputation intact with these tips for a better executive exit.

Retain Your Perspective

They say that hindsight is 20/20, but your current role isn’t in the rearview just yet. Keep a healthy perspective regarding both yourself and your coworkers. Hold yourself accountable for mistakes you’ve made, consider the merits of your time as a leader, and don’t forget the people that helped you along the way. A careful contemplation of your time in this role will help you move forward with confidence and provide helpful insights as the company moves forward without you.

Honor Your Commitments

No exit strategy is perfect, but don’t let excitement over your new role or frustration with your old one derail your last days as a leader. Your departure will affect many of the people you’re leaving behind; wrap up as many loose ends as possible to ensure a smooth transition.

  • Finish up as many projects as feasible

  • Reach out to the executive board about ideal traits for your successor

  • Provide resources for your replacement

  • Prepare your staff for the transition

  • Support the executive team in onboarding a new leader

Come alongside the remaining leadership team to ensure a smooth transition, communicating clearly about your timeline and current capacity. Otherwise, you’ll wind up scrambling to train your replacement a week before your departure.

Lead Until the Last

Your staff depends on you as a leader, advocate, and professional resource. Don’t throw them to the wolves just because you’re moving onto greener pastures. Thank your team for their hard work, commitment to the company, and support for your leadership. Help smooth the transition for those who will be directly affected by your departure. Recognize that, in some scenarios, the departure of an executive will mean internal restructuring. Reassure your staff that they can depend on you to advocate for them, whether they need support in your remaining time as their leader or as a connection down the road.

Haven’t landed your dream job yet? We can help. Our executive resume writers have decades of experience in transforming C-level work histories into dynamic resumes. Call today for a free consultation.

How to Exit an Unfulfilling Job

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How to Exit an Unfulfilling Job

Career transitions present their own challenges, whether you’re leaving because of another job, dissatisfaction at work, or performance issues. The mark of a great leader isn’t finding 100% success, but in knowing how to behave when closing a chapter in your career. If you’re leaving your current career, build your personal brand by making a graceful exit.

Know When to Go

smiling male executiveWhether you’re stepping down voluntarily, abdicating for a new position, or simply reading the writing on the wall, how you leave a company can determine job recommendations, career opportunities, and your reputation with your former coworkers. If you’re leaving voluntarily, give your boss sufficient notice to replace you. Be honest about your reasons for leaving, but don’t burden your supervisors with too much information. Thank your team for the experiences, relationships, and skills you cultivated during your tenure at the company. If you’ve been let go, it’s still a good career move to strengthen relationships with your partners in the trenches. Gracefully recognize that one stage of your life is complete, and thank your board for the opportunity.

Make a Smooth Transition

Gain a reputation for competence and class by easing the transition for your executive replacement. Finish incomplete projects, document procedures, and forward any pertinent emails to the new exec in charge. Consider a few days of hands-on training with your replacement if asked.

Network

Just because it didn’t work out with current position doesn’t mean you wasted time. Maintain relationships with coworkers, clients, and supervisors you built connections with along the way. They’ve seen your leadership traits firsthand and may keep you in mind when executive positions become available in the future.

Transitioning jobs? Call Executive Resumes Atlanta to build your executive career.

Businessman Image from FreeDigitalPhotos

Overcoming Career Failures

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Overcoming Career Failures

In our achievement-driven career culture, the concept of “failure” is viewed negatively, the ultimate obscenity in the business world. While executives who take risks are commonly hailed as innovators and forward-thinkers, when these endeavors fail grandly, these same risk-takers may find themselves without a job. Sometimes companies who purport to learn from their mistakes instead assign the blame to a single division, group, or individual. It should come as no surprise that the most prosperous people have faced difficult—and often repeated—failure on their journeys to success. Whether you’re overcoming real or perceived failures on the job or in your career, how you deal with failure reveals your executive merits.

Admitting Culpability

It may seem counter-intuitive, but executives who publicly admit their mistakes are more likely to succeed than those who fix them privately. Admitting failure shows decisiveness, authenticity, and an honest belief in future successes. Just as job interviewers ask, “What is your biggest failure and how did you learn from it?,” investors, CEOs, and potential employers want to know that their top team members can accept failure gracefully, determine what went wrong, and develop a concrete strategy for moving forward. Examining failure publically often creates a positive perception of executive talents. Public admittance of a professional failure can offer new perspectives on the underlying problems, allowing executives to move forward with a better understanding of their failures.

Reframe Professional Failures

finding career success after failureBig or small, professional or personal, failures shape who we are. They can negatively impact our self-esteem, leading us to believe in our professional inferiority, or they might spur us on to greater success. Whether you’re most recent failure lies in a seemingly endless job search, frustration with an inability to advance professionally, or a quantifiable failure in your executive duties, failures teach us valuable lessons.

How to Learn from Failure

  • Step back from the situation. View it not as how you failed, but why you failed.
  • Create a new business model, taking into account miscalculations and missed opportunities from past failures.
  • Recognize that low-risk careers mean settling for mediocrity, but accepting failure can drive a culture of high performance.
  • Move forward. Once you’ve gleaned all you can from a setback, dig in your heels and move on with your career. Lingering in a failure leaves little room for future success.

The successes and failures of a career tell a story. They display leadership skills and executive competencies, give insight into business acumen, and portray failures as learning experiences. Call Executive Resumes Atlanta for a professionally written executive resume and expert reputation management services.

photo from FreeDigitalPhotos

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Horrors, I’ve Been Fired!

Being fired can come as a jolting shock, and nobody ever expects that it will happen to them. Unfortunately sometimes circumstances align that create wholly unexpected situations and results that have nothing to do with performance.

Such scenarios that we’ve seen include an executive who was fired by his employer of 10+ years after a breach of corporate policy by one of his direct reports, and in another instance an executive firing following a change in the senior leadership team and the escalation of a serious clash over philosophy and company direction.

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Is Your Resume (and Job Search Strategy) Obsolete?

As a result of the economic downturn that began in full swing in 2007-2008, many previously secure executives unexpectedly found themselves caught in wide-scale reductions-in-force, plunged without warning into a fiercely competitive job market. While the economy has righted itself to some degree since then, many companies continue to operate in “lean” mode, and so budget cuts and reorganizations remain a relatively common occurrence.

Right-Sizing & Executive Vulnerability

It’s always prudent to ensure that your Resume is polished and up to date, but it’s particularly important now. With so much flux in the business world over the past several years, there is no guarantee that a position will remain intact.

“Right-sizing” refers to the process of reorganizing or restructuring a large company via cost-cutting, reduction of workforce, or reorganizing upper-level management. The term right-sizing is often used  as a softer sounding alternative to the term “downsizing” as it provokes a more positive image, e.g. “right”; while it can reflect the growth of a business, in most instances it is a reduction in the workforce and synonymous with downsizing.

Frequently senior managers and executives earning at a higher compensation level are more vulnerable, as businesses looking to cut overhead can reap a higher cost-saving return on a lesser number of executives than a broader right-sizing (down sizing) lower level staff. A common practice during a massive restructuring is removal of an entire layer of management  from the organization.  Over the past several years, we’ve seen a significant increase in this type of situation with our clients. Sometimes the executive is downsized, but other times is demoted to his or her previous role. This action derails the executive’s career path, and frequently prompts preparation for an exit and a search for a more stable company or industry.

Other Compelling Reasons to Maintain a Current Resume

Aside from having the advantage of always being prepared, there are plenty of

Who’s looking for you? While you may not be actively searching for a new opportunity, recruiters and HR managers may be looking for you! By maintaining an up-to-date resume (and LinkedIn Profile), you can present all of your current accomplishments, and this could lead to an unexpected offer. We’ve worked with many executives whose career path took an unexpected – and welcome – turn at a time when they had no plan to make a major career/job change as an opportunity found them that was simply to good to pass up.

Internal promotion opportunities. Ensuring that your resume is fresh and updated with recent achievements enables you to take advantage of advancement opportunities that open up within your organization. Opportunities can open up unexpectedly, e.g. an executive spot opens due to a vacancy or retirement. It’s always better to prepare for these eventualities and  get your name in front of the decision makers early than to scramble under pressure to update your resume.

Alignment with Current Trends/Norms. If you have been in the same company or industry for a number of years, chances are you either haven’t needed a resume, made do with an old, and now obsolete resume or maintained a brief career outline. However, as the job market, the search process, career industry trends, and technologies continue to change, your career marketing documents – along with your approach to the job search – should reflect those changes.

These developments – driven in large part by technological advancements – have been significant over the past decade. For example, in the 21st century. the first review of your resume is much more likely to be a software program, known as an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) rather than a human screener. The ATS is a database virtually all large (and some midsize) companies and government agencies use to store and access the large volume of resumes typically submitted via online portals. Your resume should be strategically developed in alignment with these systems to improve the score (key word hits) your resume receives.

Job searching via online social media is another more recent development. Your LinkedIn Profile should be maintained in tandem with your core presentation resume. After your resume makes it through the ATS system, it will be viewed by a human. This screening process may entail an online search, including a review of your LinkedIn Profile. Thus it’s important that your Profile is up to date, and provides a professional reflection of you as a senior candidate.

Also new on the job search horizon are variations of traditional career marketing documents such as the E-note, which is a brief introduction sometimes used as an alternative to a formal introduction letter.

Partnering with a career professional can help expand your job search success and ensure you are prepared in the face of unforeseen changes within your company or industry, as well as pursue unexpected opportunities that may have a profound impact on your career.At Executive Resumes Atlanta we employ a strategic, collaborative process to identify your unique selling points and create powerful career marketing documents that help you succeed in a highly competitive and volatile job market.

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