Tuesday, February 19, 2013

Strategic Health Care Marketing published my article: "Letting Go Is Hard to Do...Knowing When to Leave Your Job"


On the morning of December 12, 1941, just five days after Pearl Harbor, newly minted Brigadier General Dwight D. Eisenhower was summoned from Texas to meet with Army Chief of Staff General George Marshall. He was directed to present Marshall with a strategy within just a few hours to lead to victory in the Pacific. Without delay, Eisenhower drafted a three-page memo outlining his strategy. His action is illustrative of one of the most important leadership tools too seldom used in health care marketing today: strategy.

Executives, managers and others in transition (for example, many of President Obama’s first-term marketing campaign staffers) need a personal strategy to guide them in their careers. Their strategy should have benchmarks by which they can judge whether the time is nearing for them to move on in their careers and not overstay their welcome.

Successful health care marketers typically possess a strong strategic bent, substantial conceptual skills, an engaging personality, and proven analytical ability. Yet few seemingly deploy personal strategies in their own careers. According to executive search firm Spencer Stuart, chief marketing officers across all industries average just 43 months in a particular job. This relatively short tenure suggests that marketers would definitely benefit from a strategy to guide them in their professional pursuits.

You, as a health care marketer, must be able to discern when the time has come to leave behind a comfortable, challenging, or captivating job-however difficult that may seem. Knowing when it’s time to say goodbye is a sensibility that’s often lacking. A career strategy can help immensely.

Robben Fleming told me about five years into his job as president of the University of Michigan that a decade was a “pretty good rule of thumb” as it enables leaders to accomplish most of their goals and hopefully avoid “wearing out one’s welcome.” Fleming left the university to become president of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting 10 years after he arrived in Ann Arbor. Like Eisenhower, Fleming served in World War II and clearly grasped his mission. He had an overarching strategy to succeed and the requisite skills to ably guide the university during the turbulent Vietnam War years of student protests.

When you, as a marketing vice president, director or manager, feel the need to make a career move, chances are your instincts are probably correct. Even when close friends or family members may not perceive your instincts as logical or strategic, it doesn’t mean they are not valid.

Achieving most of the goals you originally projected is an excellent benchmark for coming to terms with a timetable to move on. But there are other cogent reasons for doing so. Consider if any of these situations applies to you—or your boss:

§                  You have become seduced by the trappings of success.
§                  The relationship with your supervisor is in a downward spiral.
§                  Your skills have begun to erode.
§                  Your organization has become increasingly unreceptive to your ideas.
§                  You have become isolated from key constituencies.
§                   It’s becoming increasingly difficult to alter your course quickly.
§                  The organization’s culture is not in sync with your principles.
§                  You seem to have lost passion and vision.


The truth is that people look for new career opportunities for many reasons, and they differ with each individual. Whatever the situation, keep in mind five key guidelines about leaving one job and settling into a new one successfully:

§ Don’t burn your bridges. Keeping relationships at your old hospital or health system intact may help you in many ways in the future, especially if you plan to stay in the same industry.

§ Leave something important behind you—something you can be especially proud of, not simply something to put on your resume. That will contribute to your own sense of purpose.

§ Take the lessons you learned and apply them to your new situation, but be careful not to treat your new job as your old one. Be open to a new environment and new ways of doing things. You have great skills to bring with you, but they will be used in a different context, so don’t expect people and situations to be the same. Learn the lay of the land before instituting too many changes.

§ Be friendly and respectful to all the new people you meet. Wherever you go, some people see new hires as a threat. Treating everyone respectfully will help you earn the trust and support you need and will let people see you as a welcome member of the team. Be open, receptive and forge an honest working environment.

§ Challenge yourself to learn fresh skills in your new position so you can contribute to your organization in important state-of-the-art ways to bolster its competitive advantage.

When you confront this question of whether the time has come to move on, perhaps Ralph Waldo Emerson’s words of wisdom will help: “To map out a course of action and follow it to an end, requires some of the same courage which a soldier needs.”

Ritch K. Eich, Ph.D, former Editorial Advisory Board member, is the author of Real Leaders Don’t Boss (Career Press) and served as the chief marketing or public affairs executive at St. Joseph Mercy Health System, Indiana University Medical Center and Stanford Medical Center. He is Principal of Eich Associated, www.eichassociated.com.

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