How Not to Resign

Hey folks, I'm Swati.

Welcome back to my weekly newsletter.

This newsletter is those conversations: what I'm seeing, thinking, and what I'd tell you if we were grabbing coffee.

This week's edition is about how to resign from a job.

But before that:

In February this year, Deepinder Goyal wrote to every former Zomato employee, whether they had left on their own or been asked to leave, and told them the door was not closed.

He invited them back, listed what was hiring, and asked them to reach out directly.

He received 8,000 emails in a week, then posted again to say over 400 people at Eternal were already in their second or third stint there.

This reminded me about a friend who used to work at Flipkart.

She left about eighteen months ago, after a stretch where she felt her growth had stalled and a conversation with her manager had not gone the way she expected.

She sent her resignation and served her notice period, but she stopped coming to team meetings.

She left before the working day ended.

When her replacement was being onboarded, she was not available to answer questions and chose not to complete the handover.

About 2 months ago, she applied for a more senior role at Flipkart through someone she knew here.

She didn’t make it through their hiring rounds.

She reached out to a colleague to ask what had happened.

Here’s what she heard: her former manager had been asked informally before anything moved forward, and despite two years of good work, those last four weeks of her employment made it difficult to trust her.

And you can probably relate to the logic she was running, if not the situation.

She felt the performance conversation had been unfair, and that she had given the company everything and been let down.

So she decided around week two of her notice period, that she did not owe them her best effort anymore.

That logic felt justified and it cost her the one thing she hadn't thought to protect: her standing with the people who'd watched her leave.

Most people who resign feel entitled to it.

Most people who resign have never actually had the conversation about what it would take to stay.

It could be a different manager, or different scope of work.

That conversation requires the ability to have a difficult conversation with someone who has power over you, which is harder than writing an email at midnight. 

So most people skip it.

Your manager is not averaging two years of your work when someone asks about you.

They are remembering your best moment and your last few weeks.

Which is why the notice period carries a lot of weight when they remember you.

A few things I would do differently.

If you're about to resign over a difficult manager or a role that stopped making sense, check whether you've actually said that to someone who could change it, and not vented to a colleague, but said it directly to your manager or theirs..

Most people walk into the resignation conversation focused entirely on what they have decided.

The moment you resign, your manager has a gap to fill and a story to tell upward.

If you walk in and acknowledge that, and tell them you want to help make it as clean as possible, that framing changes what they say about you for years.

Sending an email before having that conversation does the opposite.

​​The handover document is the last visible piece of work you do at a company and the one people still talk about after you are gone.

Write down every live project, every pending decision, every contact your replacement will need.

Do it early enough that your manager can ask questions before you leave.

In India, the relieving letter your next employer will ask for is issued at your current company's discretion.

The professional circles connecting your previous manager to your next one are much closer than most people account for when they are deciding how seriously to take those final weeks.