To tell, or not to tell your boss?
As some of you might know, I am planning to go to business school full-time starting next fall. For the last 6-7 months, I have been completely consumed by the preparation (GMAT, school research, essays, recommendations, financing options etc.).
Recommendations play a very critical role in the business school application. Many schools ask for two professional recommendations and they strongly advocate that both recommendations come from the the workplace rather than from school professors. Many top schools explicitly want 1 recommendation from the current supervisor. When I first decided that I would quit work and start business school, I never thought once that I could jeopardize my career prospects at my company! Within weeks of deciding to pursue my MBA, I prepared recommendation packages (more about that in future posts) for my current boss and my former boss (she is still working for Corillian in a different department). I did not hesitate a second before approaching them and requesting them for recommendations (remember I approached them more than a year before my school start date). Both of them gladly obliged (although they later admitted that the process was far more intense than they ever imagined). My current boss did not panic a bit but simply requested that I train or hire somebody to step into my leadership role before I quit.
Anyway, last week when I was talking to a friend, the topic of recommendations came up and we went into a heated debate on whether or not to give your boss pretty much a year’s notice. I generally don’t have strong arguments for many things just because I tend to see people’s preferences from both sides. But in this case, I strongly argued that it is in one’s best interest to tell the boss as early as possible. I was heavily biased from my own experiences with my great bosses (yes, you can simulate the “sucking up” noises on my behalf) but I would have done the same thing with any boss. First of all, it just makes sense to get the recommendation from people that can truly represent you in your professional life and a current or former boss is the perfect person to do that. Secondly, I would have felt really guilty and embarrassed, if my boss came to know about my plans through someone else. I work really closely with my boss with bi-monthly 1×1s and what not. My boss assuming that I am hiding something from her would be the worst thing to happen to my career.
Another reason is that if my boss were to put my career progression on hold just because of this reason, I would say it would be his/her own loss (at the risk of sounding cocky)! Any true leader would want to leverage the strengths of his/her best employees until the last day and getting a year’s notice will serve as a blessing in disguise and bring many things into perspective. I will give you a perfect example. When an opportunity came up at Corillian last year to work in our offshore office in Bangalore, India, I immediately told my manager I wanted to pursue it. Eventually, I backed out of that plan because of immigration concerns. However, just a few months later, I was offered a key leadership role in the same group. I like to believe that my management team realized that I was outgrowing my role and hence the offer for a more challenging leadership position.
On the flip side, if someone were in a very narrow industry or technology, it might make more sense not to burn bridges. But I think very few people in this world work in such narrow fields and it is not a major risk to keep your boss in business school admissions loop.
I have not repented any of my open decisions at work so far and I am not going to shy away from doing so in the future even if have 1 or 2 bad experiences. Feel free to share your own personal experiences about truth at workplace in the comments section.
