Changing Teams

Today I announced to my team that I was going to be leaving and working at another location. This afternoon I spoke with my manager and we had decided that today would be a good day to communicate the decision since next week I would be out of town. In previous experiences I do not advocate delivering a message before leaving for an extended period of time due to the impact the news might be. In this case instead of making it a mass announcement I took another approach that was very effective.

In this approach I brought team members into my office individually and let them know what was going on and why I made the decision. I spent time with each of them sharing stories of success and giving them feedback on what they have done well over the past months. I tried to take the focus away from the fact that I was leaving and focus on their own personal strengths. To my surprise there were a few that were very disappointed that I was going to be leaving and really enjoyed working with me. Although I have not been with this team for a very long time the relationships that we built were fairly strong.

The future will be very challenging for this team and the new leadership that comes in. At this point the team feels very damaged due to the amount of change that has taken place over the past few years. Today marks a new day for my career with this organization and I look forward to the challenge the upcoming year presents.