Career Crossroads, When You Get Offered To Leave

You have a nice, steady role in a great company. You have been there forever it seems, rotating through different organizations, learning the way the company works, meeting new people, growing your institutional knowledge.  You have skilled up; learned the business, made great work friends and even more important, corporate partnership throughout.  You see many come and go, met plenty of consultants.  It feels great to be a company veteran in a solid company.

The House of Cards Starts to Tumble (Or Does It?)

Your company makes a few moves which seem inconsequential to you, or so you believe. They sell a building, they divest in a certain industry, there is a leadership change (or several).  This is what companies do, they move with the times, much like you have throughout your career there.

Then the unthinkable happens.  It starts with the organization (or company wide) listen-only conference call in the early morning.  Everyone you know is on the call listening attentively as your executive is laying out a plan to downsize, streamline and re-energize the organization. A deaf silence proceeds and the call is over.

Anxiously you reach out to your friends, colleagues, previous bosses to discuss the overall impact. You start to think, “Am I affected by these actions?”   You might start to wonder, maybe even second guess your career choices.  You do not stress things as you are working on a strategic company wide initiative.  You are in a business line that brings in revenue for the organization.  Your confidence swells, you see this as an opportunity.  The question is, what type of opportunity is it?

Opportunity Awaits (If You Can Identify It)

Soon enough, that company wide email goes out to the employees whom are both eligible and have been selected to take a voluntary package to separate.  If you land on this list, quite a few feelings rush through your body: anger, deceit, denial, disbelief, disloyalty, fear, joy.  You start to ask yourself, “should I take the deal or stay?”

Here is where you need to be true to yourself.  You have to take into account the relationship you have with the company, your history and reputation, your skills and how they play in this job market.  Now is the time you count the chips you have built for career:

1. How many projects have I worked on which made significant organizational impact?
2. Are you viewed as a subject matter expert in either technology, industry / business process?
3. Have you established yourself as a collaborator, solution facilitator / provider.
4. Are your skills transferable between teams, projects, organizations, industries?

Opportunities are very objective.  You have to be able to see far past the opportunity in of itself and strategize how you can maximize and convert an opportunity into your opportunity.  When looking internally, thinking about the long game is vitally important.  Conversely, this can be just the opportunity to leave (with a bag in hand) to trust your instincts, knowledge, experience and education and be the writer of your next chapter.

Jump At The Opportunity To Grow

Self growth is usually at the center of your professional career.  Money of course is important but you can only make more money as you skill up and provide additional value to the organization.  Although receiving the option for a package does not mean the company does not value you, it does give you an indication that the company is moving in a different / new direction.   As a person that is not afraid of change (I actually welcome it), confident in my abilities and always learning, I have always cherished transparency and having the choice to be part of change within the organization as well as the  ability to leave and pursue my own change (and getting paid for it).

Anytime a company goes through something like this, there is a paradigm shift.  This is a great way to set a new norm in the organization.  As this is happening within the organization, this is your time to think about what is your next growth spurt.  Are you aligned within your organization to continue your prosperity or is it time to cash out?  Now is a great time to think about what you desire out of your career.

There are no right answer whether to stay or to leave.  This is not a decision you can outsource.  This is a very personal decision, much as it is to get a new job, change careers or taking a package.  You can take it personal or you can take it objectively and strategize knowing the information you have on hand.  At the end, this is now your opportunity to make one of the bigger decisions in your career, maximize it.