Leave well, and land well

Resign properly

You will meet these people again. European strategy consulting is small enough that the partner you resign to is a referee, a competitor, a client and possibly a future colleague — sometimes all four. Leave in a way you would be happy to have described back to you in five years.

• Tell your sponsoring partner first, in person, before anyone else hears it. In a partnership the injury of hearing it second-hand is disproportionate and long remembered. One conversation, on video if you must, never by email and never after the news has started to move.
• Say it once, and do not argue it. State the decision, not the case for it. Litigating your reasons invites rebuttal and turns a resignation into a debate you cannot win. Have the written letter ready and hand it over immediately — it fixes the date your notice, garden leave and covenant clocks all run from.
• Thank the people who built you, by name and in private. Almost nobody does this and everybody remembers it. The partner who put you on your first big account, the one who backed you when a project went wrong, the mentor who told you something you did not want to hear. Say what they actually did for you, and do it separately from the resignation itself so it cannot be read as management.
• Volunteer a written handover before anyone asks for one. Clients, live engagements, pipeline, team, internal commitments. It is the professional thing to do, and if anything is ever contested it is the strongest evidence of good faith you will have.
• Take nothing. Not a contact list, not a proposal template, not a deck, not a client file. This is where good departures turn into litigation, and file access logs are routinely checked. It is also not only a contractual problem: taking a client contact list can be a criminal offence under data protection law, and copying material you were not authorised to access can engage computer misuse law. If you need something, ask in writing and accept the answer.
• Say nothing you would not sign. Not in the exit interview, not to the team, not on the way out. Exit interview content is not confidential in practice, and anything you put in writing may have to be disclosed if it ever ends up in litigation.
• Stay in touch on purpose. Not for the pipeline. Because a long career in this market is built on people who would take your call, and the goodwill you leave behind compounds for far longer than any notice period.

What actually transfers

The most useful finding in the research on senior moves is also the least comfortable: performance that looks individual is substantially firm-specific, and it does not travel intact.

Read this before you agree a year-one number, not after.

• Star performers who change firms suffer an immediate drop that persists for years. The best evidence comes from a large, long-run study of individually-branded knowledge workers whose output was measured by independent third parties. Those who moved declined immediately, and were still below their old level five years on. The capability was real — a large part of what produced it belonged to the platform.
• There are two conditions that protect performance, and only two. Moving to a genuinely stronger platform, or moving with people. Where either applied, the decline largely disappeared. Where someone moved alone to a weaker platform, it was most severe. If neither applies to your move, discount your own forecast before somebody else does it for you.
• Where the client buys the institution, very little is portable. Portability varies enormously by the kind of work. Where the buyer is really buying a brand, a methodology and a bench, the individual carries far less than they expect. Strategy work sits closer to that end than most partners want to believe.
• When lateral partners fail, the reason is almost never capability. In the research on lateral hiring in professional services the same two causes come up: the business did not come, and no new relationships were built. Lack of expertise is named a fraction as often. Most of those partners were not dishonest — they were wrong about themselves, in the direction everyone is wrong.
• You will be measured against the case you wrote to get in. It does not get filed away. It is re-read at six, twelve and eighteen months against what actually happened. The most expensive sentence in a partner move is a number you were optimistic about in an interview.
• The relationships that carry are the ones the client has with you. A client who calls you because you solved something for them personally is far more likely to move — subject to what your non-dealing clause actually permits, which is the whole reason to read it. A client who calls the firm and gets you will stay with the firm. The honest test is who initiates.

The first hundred days

Two things run at once: becoming useful, and becoming known. Most new partners over-index on the first and assume the second happens by itself. It does not — in our experience peers give a new senior joiner less support than anyone else, and in a partnership a few of them have a quiet interest in your struggling.

Start in the notice period. The people who land best have almost always begun before day one.

What not to do

The failures at this stage are unusually consistent, and most are committed in the first fortnight — often before anyone thinks to take advice.

• Do not assume you know what you are, contractually. People carrying the title Partner in consulting firms are variously employees, members of an LLP, or true partners — and the three have materially different obligations about what you may do before resigning. Most candidates do not know which they are. Check the document, not the business card.
• Do not read only the non-compete. It is the clause a court scrutinises hardest — enforceable only where the firm has a legitimate interest and nothing narrower would do, judged as at the date you signed it. But since 2019 an English court can strike out offending words and enforce what remains, so do not assume an over-broad clause simply falls away. And the clause that usually constrains you commercially is the non-dealing one: often the same length or longer, easier to justify, and it bites even when the client approaches you.
• Do not sign without checking for a garden leave set-off. There is no automatic offset in English law, so six months of garden leave and a twelve-month restriction can in principle run consecutively. A court weighing an injunction can take a long garden leave into account and may occasionally decline further protection, but you cannot plan on it — negotiate the set-off into the contract rather than argue it afterwards. Check too that garden leave is an express term at all: without one, requiring a skilled person not to work can itself be a breach.
• Do not discuss the move with anyone who might come with you, and do not sound anyone out informally. A team move is where individual departures turn into litigation, and liability can reach the recruiting firm as well as you. Take your own legal advice first and let any such move be structured properly from the outset — independently advised, sequenced and documented. We will not coordinate approaches to your colleagues, and you should be wary of anyone who offers to.
• Do not answer a direct question dishonestly — and do not assume silence is always safe. “Are you going anywhere?” is usually a question you may decline to answer. Answering it falsely is a different thing entirely. But if you are a director, an LLP member or an equity partner you may owe a positive duty to disclose, including about a team move, and concealment has itself been held to be the breach. This is exactly where an hour with a solicitor pays for itself.
• Do not accept a counter-offer to solve a problem it cannot reach. Ignore the statistic about how many people who accept one leave within a year — it circulates in half a dozen incompatible versions and traces to no real study. The honest question is why you were looking. If it was money or title, a counter-offer can genuinely fix that. If it was the platform, the strategy, or who you report to, the money touches none of it — and the research on senior managers says the reason you were searching, not the counter-offer, is what predicts what happens next.
• Do not spend a hundred days selling and never deliver. The partner who appears on no engagement acquires a reputation as a hunter who thinks delivery is beneath them, and sells work without knowing what the bench can execute. That produces the second failure: an over-promised engagement that damages the one client relationship that did travel.