Admitting you want out

If you have a good relationship with your manager, it serves you to tell them about your job hunt

abstract geometric style, hunter holding a bow, figure in background appears disoriented / DALL·E 3 & 2

If you love your manager but are looking for a new job anyways, you should tell them that.

Ow, OK, I immediately hear millions of voices suddenly crying out in vigorous disagreement. Let me address them one at a time:

My manager is the reason I’m leaving!

If you’re fleeing your manager, this advice is not for you. Close the article, and maybe read about interviewing instead.

My manager isn’t the reason I’m leaving, but I don’t trust them.

Have they given you a reason to distrust them, or are you haunted by the ghost of a past manager’s betrayal? Regardless, I suppose it’s not worth investing time to build trust in a relationship you’re already trying to get out of. This advice is not for you. Close the article, or maybe share it with someone it might be better suited for!

I generally trust my manager, but don’t they have an obligation to treat me differently if they know I’m looking for the exit?

Ah, now it gets interesting! My answer is a resounding “It depends”. Let me quote one of my favorite writers on this subject:

The key is to pay attention to how your employer has handled other employees who resign. Are people shown the door immediately? Pushed out earlier than they would have otherwise planned to leave? If so, assume the same may happen to you, and give two weeks and nothing more. But if your employer has a track record of accommodating long notice periods, has been grateful to employees who provide long notice, and has generally shown that employees can feel safe being candid about their plans to leave, take your cues from that. Some employers "earn" long notice periods and employees who keep kicking butt through their final day ... and some don't.

–Alison Green

I couldn’t say it better myself, so I won’t try to.

To be fair, if you read the rest of her article, you’ll see that Alison generally leans towards the “keep it secret” side of the decision. But that’s because¹ she undervalues the benefits of divulging. Speaking of which—

I’ve looked around the company, and I gather that I’m unlikely to be punished for divulging. But why take the risk? What do I stand to gain from admitting that I’m looking for a new job?

Once you’ve determined that the probability of punishment is low, there are so many potential benefits to telling your manager:

• Depending on what you’re looking for, the manager might be able to find it for you internally.

  • For example, one manager I know was frustrated that their report left solely because another company was able to provide faster visa sponsorship: “If I’d known they cared enough to leave, I could have leveraged that with HR to speed up the process!”

  • Another manager was able to get their report a raise, and explained how the offer the report was considering² was not as good as the report thought it was.

• Your manager knows your work better than anyone, and if they’ve done any performance reviews for you, they know how to talk about you to other people. So they’re a great resource when prepping for behavioral interviews.

• A soon-to-be-former manager is the ideal reference check. I’ve done a bunch of reference calls myself, and none were more impressive than hearing “I wish they weren’t leaving my team, but I can’t pay them what they deserve” from their current boss.

• If you give your manager plenty of time to fill your shoes, they will remember and appreciate that. Former coworkers and managers are the linchpins of your professional network, so this will pay dividends.

If that doesn’t convince you, think about how the C-suite does it: the most successful executives give their peers and board plenty of advance notice, for all these reasons. They know that they’ll be hard to replace, and they know the high value of keeping the esteem of their peers and leads.

Measure the risks and the rewards

Again, this advice doesn’t apply to everyone. If you have a bad-to-neutral relationship with your manager, or the company has a tendency to hurry people out the door, it’s not worth the risk. Otherwise, I strongly recommend it.

1. In my humble opinion, at least! To Alison’s credit, she does have a few thousand articles over me.

2. Technically, the report accepted the new offer before they talked to their current manager, and realized staying was the better choice. So that made for quite an awkward conversation with the other company.