“You can quit … but I am not going to pay you to leave.”
They were offering packages to leave for certain job titles, and as fate would have it, I had ended up being labeled a Senior Sales Engineer – the job family open to packages. I applied… and was denied by… the Division President. The great thing about IBM was that you could always appeal decisions through their well-known Open Door policy. I did, and got an audience with him.
I made my case, and he very Powerfully said “Look Mark, I know you’re not a Sales Engineer, you know you’re not a Sales Engineer. If you want to leave, that is your decision, but I am not going to pay you to leave”. Clear and crisp, it was my decision.
…the meeting you already know the ending of…
You know the feeling. The strategy changes and you are the last to hear. The work that used to light you up now takes 2 cups of coffee to start. The people you hired are ready for your job, and you are the one in their way. You have seen every one of these signs, and you have explained every one of them away. The longer you wait, the more the decision gets made for you.
You can stay a year past your season without ever deciding to. You did not miss the signs. Nobody asked you to write them down, so each one arrived alone, and each one alone was easy to excuse.
…the voice who observed it first…
Steve Walsh sang in White Clover before it became Kansas, and for most of the next 41 years his voice was the sound of the band. He did not always have the songs. On the first day of rehearsals for Leftoverture, by Kerry Livgren’s account, Walsh came to him with nothing, not a single song. He walked out briefly during the next album, left for good in October 1981, and came back in the 1980s.
Then, in 2014, at 63, he wrote that he had to go, and that it made him sad to admit it. Rich Williams said later that Walsh had been struggling with his voice for years, and had stopped enjoying it. His last show was in Sioux City, Iowa, on August 16, 2014.
You will see the signs long before you admit them. Write them down while you can still read them.
…what it takes to observe your own Time in a role…
To observe is to pay attention to what is happening, and to what you are missing. We are good at observing our teams, our markets and our numbers. We are bad at observing ourselves, because the person doing the looking has the most to lose from what they find. So we let the calendar, and other people, decide for us.
The trap is waiting for a single clear moment. It rarely comes. What comes is a pattern, and a pattern only shows up if you write it down and check it against a date. Pick signs you can see from the outside: the meeting you stopped being invited to, the decision that used to be yours, the Sunday night dread that now starts on Saturday. Then pick the day you will look at them again, and put it on the calendar where you cannot move it without noticing.
…the wall they built together…
The Wall is the second song on Leftoverture, and one of only 3 songs on the album that Walsh helped write. It was never a single… one of the reasons I love it. Rich Williams plays the solo that opens it, with Robby Steinhardt harmonizing on violin. Livgren said he tended to like the more bombastic things, like The Wall.
It has stayed in the live set for decades, and it was on Two for the Show, the live album of the 1977 and 1978 tours, while all 6 of the men who made it were still on the stage.
…what I observed at IBM, and when…
And leaving at that Time was hard, and looking back, SO important for all the rest of my career. I had 3 small kids, was the sole breadwinner, and my Dad had stayed at IBM for most of his career. He couldn’t understand why I would leave the stability and income for… what? I didn’t know either…
but I did know that from where I was, the company was a shell of who he worked for, and the reasoning of The Wall ahead of it was going to be catastrophic… Sure enough, in less than a year, it had laid off 60,000 while I had landed in a place that was… well we would see with Time…
Your “Simple… Not Easy” move: Write down the 3 signs that would tell you it is your turn to leave, and put the day you will check them on your calendar.
If writing those 3 signs down makes you uneasy, and you want a second set of eyes to observe them with you, let’s talk. Schedule Time with me here.
Write the signs down this week, before they turn into… The Wall
