Professional Divorce

 What is Professional Divorce?

Divorce happens when we go through a separation mode or disaasociate from anything underlying. Professional divorce considers the feelings that one goes through when he/she moves from one professional option to an entrepreneurship or any other professional life.

Everyone in this world has 24 hours per day, which can be effectively partitioned into three equal partitions of 8 hours, i.e. 8 hours of personal life, 8 hours of professional life & 8 hours of sleep.

Professional life do carry equal/more weightage when compared to the Personal life and a work-life balance is what makes anyone to be compassionate about a particular profession/career.

More weightage is carried for profession, because what we do with 1/3rd of our day's time slot decides the 2/3rd of our life style.

Professional Divorce can be triggered due to difference vision, mission, values, beliefs, strategy, tactics and culture (attributes of character) between self and the articulated superior/supervisor or even the underlying culture.

According to Gallup survey (https://q12.gallup.com/public/en-us/Features), people leave organisation because of their immediate superior (more than the organisation). Given that if you have worked with too many different managers, then the reason can be attributed to the company culture as well.

Professional divorce disrupts the comfort zone, where in the collective face value garnered over the years will be left to the dock. Any disruption always brings the best if the intentions are right. Maybe it allows everyone to find their own passion as a freelancer, entrepreneur or a deserving professional break/change.

Some of the few steps to be done as a good will before professional divorce are as follows :-

• Guide the team members working under you, so that they can plan their career aspirations in that organisation.
• Provide feedback to the team members who are looking towards you as a leader to guide them in their professional life.
• Handhold the new professional guy who will take over the baton from where we had left it in that organisation.
• Inform the customer and bring confidence in them so that they can be good customers to you as well in the future.
• Collect feedback for improvement.
• Leave a legacy or a foot print that will always allow you to come back to your Alma mater from where you have learned the professional lessons. (Don't burn the bridges).

Gone are days of sending last day thank you emails and other details, professional divorce are updated in social media sites as feedbacks/takeaways. (like LinkedIn, glassdoor etc)

"Change is permanent", we need to learn unlearn and learn, keep moving. A person's self evaluation and emotional maturity is what is tested during the professional divorce is my take.

It's a transition & it's for good as always.

Note :- The above article is just a capture of feelings, during my professional divorce. There are no intentions of bringing any discredit to any of my previous organisations or brands. All my work engagements have really helped me grow to my current level and has helped me to understand my shortfalls as well.

Professional life has been used widely in the article as a combination of Job plus Career (Long term)