100 Days Out: Reflections on making ‘life after McKinsey’

100 days out. Moving forward in one’s career often entails a spirit of not looking back, keeping one’s eyes firmly on the future. But with such a significant chunk of my life spent at ‘the firm’, I took the opportunity to reflect on the journey of leaving, from a hundred days out. I don’t tend my LinkedIn garden that well, but given its mission to “connect the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful”(!), perhaps these reflections might encourage others on the cusp of meaningful transitions.?

Move with the sea changes. A friend told me as I was deliberating, “it’s never a good or a bad time to leave the firm”. For all practical purposes, Q1, when I conducted most of my search, was decidedly not a great time to take a risk or make big moves! With a medical scare in the family, my toddler then getting Covid-19, being pregnant followed by having a miscarriage, plus an impending house move, my plate was certainly full, never mind the macro nosedive in the global economy we all saw happen. But sometimes upheavals come all at once, for a reason, and all one can do is manage the process, whilst minding the bandwidth from what else is happening in the full, irreducible scope of your life.?

It’s a funnel, after all. Against that backdrop, I took career navigation as any other project to be done, as one would. I had 3 hypotheses of paths, which I market-validated through a series of lined up conversations, from both proactive and passive leads coming in, with each conversation influencing the scope and criteria in a broader set of observations, reflections and intentions. As new information comes in, so does one’s understanding of goals and the options — which is always for the better.

Distance makes the search grow easier. As job-hunting can be a highly fraught experience, I found adopting a somewhat clinical approach (“it’s just like laundry,” I chimed to friends & colleagues – also self-talk, if anything!) helps regulate the emotional highs and lows of the ride. Grooming an ‘opportunity tracker’, as one would in any product development or sales pipeline process, is one strategy for maintaining a healthy level of detachment in the process of making an important (though not irreversible) life decision, enabling the insights to emerge and inform your next moves, which is all that really matters and that you can control.

Be explicit on criteria & own the trades. It can be difficult to own and define what you want — especially when you’ve been employed in a job or in situation where you were operating in service of others most of the time (cue Newton’s laws of motion). The search for me, as for many of us, was a wonderful time to reconsider and rebalance what matters, and a precious window to reshape your situation around these attributes. To make the loosey-goosey process of ‘what do I want, really” more defined, I applied my “all-spice, 7-P framework” to evaluate the opportunities more squarely and have since shared it with friends also searching. Whatever your considerations are, write them down; externalise and refer to them, whatever the state of play.

Be open to the unexpected. The real outcome of taking such a ‘process management’ approach to my search was it allowed something that I had not anticipated to emerge. Eventually, I accepted a role that did not neatly fit any of the 3 hypotheses I actively pursued, but that encompassed aspects of the intent of each, and that I could never have engineered on my own. More on where I’ve ended up later, a story for next time :)?

Engage your village. Job-hunting is in a sense a ‘go-to-market’ for yourself, and prior to any real deals (which is the acceptance of an offer), I was truly grateful to have a number of almost ‘friends-and-family’ rounds — people who either invested time to listen and ideate with me, shook the trees of their networks,?or simply gave an invaluable injection of confidence capital to run down the path unseen. If you’re like me, reach out and get unstuck; engaging resets connection to reality. The real game is played outside your head.

Always, make-it-your-own. As an employee, you’re encouraged and supported to ‘make-your-own-McKinsey’, which also speaks to the entrepreneurial nature inherent and almost required in joining one of the world’s largest and oldest partnerships. A hundred days out, with an exciting runway ahead in my new role, I’m proud to be taking these abiding intentions with me and give thanks for my McKinsey chapter, as I make it further out.