Becoming a leader can often be tough on a family. Typically leaders will get promoted often early in their careers. Promotions in many cases will involve a relocation, sometimes every few years. Eventually the moves will become less frequent especially if you are promoted to a position at corporate offices.
Becoming a corporate leader may also mean moving from one organization to another. These career changes may be your choice to realize a better opportunity. In other cases, you may need to move on because your position is eliminated.
These moves can be tough to deal with, but there are strategies for moving on that you may wish to follow.
- Think about the consequences if you don’t accept the promotion. In many organizations, turning down a promotion could be the end of opportunities for you. But you can make the move easier for you by negotiating conditions for the move. These include:
- Compensation
- Assistance in selling your home
- Start date
- Temporary housing accommodations
- Travel for your family to visit their new home.
- Develop a family strategy for the move. You want to have each member of the family feel they have a say in the move. The types of accommodations that you might include in their strategy might include:
- The date your family will move (e.g. do children get to finish the school year?)
- The family’s wishes for a new home, school, church, etc
- Decisions about what will be taken with you and what will stay behind.
It’s useful to develop a relocation checklist with new items added as your experience moves.
- Work with your spouse on how to accommodate a change in his/her career. This is often the toughest of the challenges you will face in moving on. There are no easy answers for this one, and each case is often unique.
- When a move is necessitated by a loss of a job, you will have more say on where you live. You and your family will want to discuss options that you think may be available to you. Once you have a list of options, you can then start the pursuit of a new position (see the topic: Seeking New Opportunities.)
Moving on is often the hardest test that every developing leader will have to face. There will be some who decide that they don’t want to move, and they are content with a career that does not have leadership potential.
