Leaving High-Touch Jobs

Leaving any job can be a trying experience, but leaving a job in which you work closely with colleagues, clients, suppliers, or other stakeholders can be especially trying. And leaving one job for another creates additional complications. Because we expect wrinkles and speed bumps when taking on a new set of responsibilities, we're unlikely to experience surprise when we encounter the challenges of a new position. What can be surprising, though, is the other half of the task of changing jobs — leaving the job you had. And among the jobs most likely to present difficulties upon departing are the jobs we call high-touch.

The term high-touch was coined by John Naisbitt in his 1982 book, Megatrends: Ten New Directions Transforming Our Lives. [Naisbitt 1982] An activity is high-touch if it entails interacting with full human beings, as opposed to interacting with a screen or voice. Examples of issues that arise in high-touch interactions include those related to emotion, trust, intuition, inspiration, memory, recall, nostalgia, reputation, legacy, motivation, relationship, engagement, conflict, or, organizational politics, to name just a few.

A high-touch job is one in which high performance requires unconscious competence in high-touch activities. [Adams 2011] View some examples from Zipecruiter.com.

Kinds of departures

Because leaving a high-touch job can disrupt relationships, the departure can be painful and disruptive for everyone involved. The person departing An activity is high-touch if it
entails interacting with full
human beings, rather than
interacting by screen or voicen do much to ease the transition, but the range of possibly mitigating actions depends — possibly strongly — on the factors that precipitate the departure. Here are some examples of categories of departures. Notice how different they are in terms of how the person departing can mitigate the effects of departure. Next time I'll explore tactics for mitigating the effects on colleagues of our departing high-touch jobs.

Career choice

Departures that result from employees making a career choice are those most likely to enable the person departing to mitigate the effects of the departure. Others tend to have high expectations that the person departing will undertake mitigating actions. Usually, expectations are that the departure is permanent.

Employer-driven

Employer-driven departures include buy-outs, layoffs, reductions-in-force, reorganizations, early retirements, and the like. Usually, senior management decides the parameters, but sometimes employees can negotiate timing. Usually, others have a low expectation that the person departing will undertake mitigating actions. Also usually, expectations are that the departure is permanent.

Personal matters

These departures result from unplanned but critical life events or health issues. The person departing rarely has much control of timing, nor reserves of energy to devote to mitigating the effects of the departure.

Maternity or paternity

Although these cases have much in common with personal matters, the date of departure is often better known to others in advance than it would be for other personal matters. This advance knowledge makes possible mitigating actions by the person departing. It also creates an expectation that some mitigating actions will be undertaken. Moreover, there is often an expectation that the person departing will return in the same role.

Last words

Concern for our colleagues keeps some of us in high-touch jobs longer than we would otherwise stay. But there is much we can do to mitigate these effects after we depart. More next time   Next issue in this series   Top    Next Issue

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