Your Resignation: Beware the Retaliatory Strike

If your intent to make a job adjustment is sincere, and nothing will change your choice to leave, you should still sustain your guard.
 
Why? Because unless you realize how to diffuse your current employer’s retaliation, you may end up psychologically offended, or right back at the position you expected to leave.
 
The most appropriate way to safeguard yourself from the unavoidable mixture of emotions regarding the act of sending your resignation is to remember that employers follow a foreseeable, three-stage pattern when faced with a resignation:
 
Tactic #1: Your boss will convey his surprise. “You sure chose a great time to leave! Who’s going to conclude the projects we started?” he might say.
 
The implication is that you’re irreplaceable. The company might as well ask, “How will we ever live without you?” To answer this assertion, you can reply, “If I were run over by a truck on my way to work tomorrow, I feel that somehow, this company would survive.”
 
Tactic #2: Your boss will start to probe. “Who’s the new company? What sort of position did you accept? What are they paying you?”
 
Here you must be careful not to divulge too much important information, or seem too passionate. Otherwise, you run the potential risk of nourishing your current employer with ammunition he can use against you later, such as, “I’ve heard some pretty terrible things about your new company” or, “They’ll make everything look great until you actually get there. Then you’ll see what a sweat shop that place really is.”
 
Tactic #3: Your boss will likely make you an offer to try and prevent you from leaving. “You know that raise you and I were talking about a few months back? Well, I forgot to tell you: We were just getting it processed yesterday.”
 
To this you can respond, “Gee, today you seem pretty concerned about my happiness and well-being. Where were you yesterday, before I announced my intention to resign?”
 
It may take a number of days for the three stages to run their course, but trust me, sooner or later, you’ll find yourself involved in discussions comparable to these. More than once, candidates have called me after they’ve resigned, to tell me that their old company followed the three-stage pattern exactly as I described it. Not only were they better equipped to diffuse a counteroffer effort, they found the whole system to be just about humorous in its predictability.