Quitting Without Burning Bridges

Author: Rebecca Knight

Leaving your job can come with a range of emotions. If you’ve grown tired of your role or the company, you may be feeling more than ready to move on. (Who hasn’t fantasized about walking into the boss’s office, saying, “I quit!,” and then marching straight out the door?) For many people, though, leaving a job is bittersweet. You’re excited for the next opportunity, but you might miss friends, coworkers, and a role that you’ve enjoyed (and maybe you’ll even miss your boss). But no matter why you’re quitting, it’s important to leave a good last impression, since how you quit will stick in people’s minds long after you’re gone.

What the Experts Say

Chances are, you’ll get a lot of practice quitting jobs over the course of your career. The average worker today stays at a job for 4.6 years, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. “People are more accustomed to the comings and goings of colleagues than in the past,” says Daniel Gulati, the coauthor of Passion and Purpose. “It’s all part and parcel of company life.” And yet, there will inevitably be some curiosity about your departure. “Colleagues may be trying to read you and understand why you’re leaving,” he says. Remember, he says, “you set the tone.” According to Len Schlesinger, a professor at Harvard Business School and the coauthor of Just Start, “The bookends—how you start and how you end—are the most important parts of any professional relationship.” The trouble is that people tend to spend a lot of time preparing for and strategizing about their first impressions and rarely give much thought to their last ones. Quitting your job for any reason—whether it’s because you’re deeply unhappy or you’re embarking on a new opportunity—“requires sensitivity and planning,” says Schlesinger. Here’s how to handle it.

Be flexible

To leave an organization with anything less than two weeks’ notice is simply “bad form,” warns Schlesinger. And while two weeks is customary, you might consider “offering to work even longer if you haven’t already committed to a start date at another organization,” he says. The higher up you are in an organization, the longer it will take to extricate yourself and possibly train the next person coming in, so you may need to give closer to a month if possible. On the other hand, giving too much notice—more than three months, say—is not necessarily wise, says Gulati. “The moment you tell people you’re leaving, you’re perceived as an outsider,” he says. You most likely won’t be invited to certain meetings, and team-bonding events will take on a different dynamic. “You don’t want to be hanging around too long.”

Tell your boss first

Once you’ve decided to resign, the first person you should tell is your manager. The reason is obvious: You “don’t want your boss to hear the news from anyone else,” says Schlesinger. After you’ve revealed your plans, though, “you’re no longer in the driver’s seat.” Decisions surrounding the nature and timing of your departure are best left up to your supervisor. You may, however, weigh in on how your resignation is communicated, explains Gulati. Will the news be announced in a team meeting? In an email? Are you responsible for telling key people in the organization? “You want to establish that up front” to keep the rumor mill at bay, Gulati says.

Be transparent

While you’re under no legal or moral obligation to reveal your next career move, it’s worthwhile to take the “long view” on this one, advises Gulati. “In this hyperconnected world, your [former coworkers] are going to know all about your new role and new company” the minute you update your LinkedIn profile. When you’re honest and straightforward about your plans, you “own the narrative,” he says. “The more transparent you are, the more likely you are to preserve and build on the relationships you already have.” Former coworkers are a crucial part of your network, and you want to keep those relationships intact.

Don’t gossip

“There are no secrets and no off-the-record conversations in the workplace,” says Schlesinger. If you give different reasons for your departure to different groups—if your boss hears one story, for example, while your close colleagues hear another—expect that you’ll be Topic A at the watercooler. “Learn the essential lesson of being a politician: There is only one story, told one way, and you stick to it,” he says. “That way nobody can ever say they heard anything different.”

Be strategic about your time

Regardless of your reasons for quitting, you have one final responsibility to your company—and that is to engender an “orderly and positive transition,” according to Schlesinger. “Your only orientation [during your notice period] is to make sure you don’t leave your boss in a pickle,” he adds. To that end, you need to “collaborate with your boss.” Ask your manager for direction and close supervision on how you ought to tie up loose ends. After you leave, “you want your former boss and colleagues to feel nothing but positive about your professionalism,” Schlesinger says.

Express gratitude

Even if you’re ecstatic to be leaving your job, you need to adopt an appreciative mindset about the position and people you’re leaving behind, says Gulati. As he points out, “Even in the worst situations, there are parts that you enjoy and colleagues you like working with. You need to be grateful for the things that went well.” Modest farewell gifts or thoughtful notes to your direct supervisor, mentors, and other people you worked with leave a good impression. If, however, you’re dealing with a supervisor or direct reports who are taking your departure personally by “acting emotionally or accusing you of disloyalty, you need to just chalk it up to collateral damage,” says Gulati. “It’s not productive to waste your time and energy trying to change their minds.”

Beware the exit interview

It might be tempting to be brutally honest during your exit interview and offer up detailed information on everything that’s wrong with your company. But Schlesinger warns against this overly negative approach. “The exit interview is not the time to give the feedback you wished you had given while you were a full-time employee,” he says. His reasons are twofold. “First, you’re not guaranteed anonymity; it’s a small world. Second, your feedback is not going to change the organization.” If you like your job and had a wonderful relationship with your boss but got a better offer, “feel free to talk about it, but don’t feel obliged,” he says. Gulati’s exit interview advice: “No venting. And no emotional conversations.”

Case study: Take the initiative to create a smooth transition

Nancy Twine had spent close to seven years at Goldman Sachs. She began her career in the commodities sales division and was later promoted to vice president. But Nancy felt she was at a crossroads. For the past two years, she had spent nights and weekends pursuing a side project: a business selling natural shampoos and soaps inspired by a family tradition of making those products from scratch. “I finally made a decision: I was going to leave my job and focus on my business full-time,” she says, adding that it was important to her that she leave Goldman on good terms. “I had learned so much over the years, and I had built a lot of strong relationships.”

She planned to give a month’s notice because she knew from experience that abrupt departures cause turmoil on a team. When the moment came, she was honest with her boss. “I said I was going to pursue an entrepreneurial venture in the beauty business—that it was something I’d been wanting to do for a while and that now was the right time.” Her manager took the news well, but she did ask whether Nancy would be willing to extend her notice period by two weeks. Nancy agreed on the spot. “I knew I could spare the time, and it would help smooth the transition.”

During her remaining six weeks at the bank, Nancy put together a detailed spreadsheet of all her accounts and went over this information in several meetings with her boss. “I wanted to be a team member until the very end,” she says.

Today Nancy is the CEO of Briogeo Hair Care. She is also the youngest African American woman to ever launch a line with Sephora, the cosmetics chain. “Even though what I do now is very different from my old job in finance,” she says, “I use a lot of what I learned there in my day-to-day—how to be strategic, how to see a project through from start to finish, and how to communicate. It was the right decision to leave, but I am grateful to have worked there.”

Rebecca Knight is a future-of-work journalist based in Boston. Her work has been published in the New York Times, the BBC, USA Today, the Boston Globe, Business Insider, and the Financial Times. In 2023 she was a finalist for the Reuters Institute Fellowship at Oxford University.