This week's idea
I wrote this thought down nearly 10 years ago...
"How you leave says more about you than how you arrived."
Most people think about the impression they make when they walk into a room. There are endless LinkedIn posts, blogs, talks etc that all state the importance of making a good first impression, but I don't think enough is said about the impression people leave when they move on.
Endings are revealing. And often the small things are noticed, often more than you realise.
I've been thinking about this a lot lately, as this was my last week at G Squared.
Useful takeaways
The exit is part of the body of work. How you handle it reflects the same standards you applied to everything else.
People remember the ending. Not always consciously, but they do. It colours everything that came before it.
The best thing you can do when you leave is to try to make it as easy as possible for the people taking over.
Where people get this wrong
We've all seen it before, once someone has resigned they they start rocking up late, leaving early, and generally their demeanour has changed - and in some instances these people try to poison the well on the way out because they feel their responsibilities are relinquished.
This is not the lesson.
I've always tried my best to make it as easy as possible for the person on the receiving end of my workload, and "show up" instead of "turn up" to the very end.
Your industry is smaller than you think. The reputation you build on the way out travels just as far as the one you built on the way in.
Storytime
In 2016, at Saatchi & Saatchi London, we had a work experience kid come through for a month. Sixteen years old. Let's call him Marcus (not his real name).
I'll be honest: my expectations weren't high. Work experience recruits tend to arrive in one of two forms:
A client's kid, doing a favour for their CMO mum or dad. Or someone with a loosely explained connection to the agency, once memorably a minor royal, who needed somewhere to be for a few weeks. You smile, you find them something to do, you move on.
Marcus was neither. Within about five minutes of meeting him, I knew he was different. Full of energy, genuinely curious, and happy to be in every room he was put in. And quietly running his own web development business on the side, with clients he couldn't name because he was under NDA. At sixteen.
I started bringing him everywhere. Client meetings, shoots, and rooms he had absolutely no business being in. I didn't think twice. You just knew he'd add value to some degree.
When his month was up, I gave him a Saatchi Moleskine on the way out. Hot property at the time, everyone wanted one. And upon receiving it, he almost cried. I was really taken aback by just how much care and effort he put into everything, right up until the end.
I never heard from him again directly. But I watched him move through his A-levels, then uni, from a distance on LinkedIn. And then one day, a video of him went quietly viral. Standing at his graduation ceremony, he called out the university publicly, calmly, with evidence, for failing to mark papers on time and pitting students against lecturers. Students walked out. Papers were ripped up. Marcus stood in the middle of it, clear-eyed and completely himself.
He left that institution on his own terms, with his standards intact, in front of everyone. And last I checked, he's an accomplished Civil Servant.
A sixteen-year-old on work experience left a bigger impression on me than most people I've worked alongside for years. It's a big part of why I've always tried to leave places better than I found them.
Thanks for reading, and see you next week (in a somewhat different role)!
Murph