Say the word “resign” and most of us picture the same three things: the letter, the difficult conversation, the walk to the car park. We rarely stop to ask what the word actually means. It came into English through the Latin resignare — to unseal, to cancel, to give back. Its older sense was not abandonment but return: the handing back of an authority once marked as yours. An office, in other words, is entrusted rather than owned. Done well, resignation does not end a mandate. It passes it on.
Democracies have understood this more clearly than many corporations do. Leadership is powerful partly because it is temporary. South Africa limits a president to two terms, ordinarily no more than a decade. The United States sets four-year terms and permits election twice. France runs five-year terms with a limit of two consecutive. These are not some unwritten global law; they are constitutional choices, and several parliamentary systems impose no comparable ceiling at all.
The principle matters more than the arithmetic. Term limits protect checks and balances, force renewal, and reduce the risk that an institution becomes indistinguishable from one individual. They give a leader enough time to pursue an agenda and build systems, while making succession unavoidable. Corporate leadership is not public office. But it can borrow the question buried inside these arrangements: should responsible leadership have a visible horizon?
A recent conversation with one of South Africa’s leading corporate social investment specialists returned me to that question. When should a person resign? Most of us only ask it once work has become unbearable — after conflict, disappointment, exclusion or exhaustion. By then, resignation is no longer a career decision. It is an emergency exit.
Sometimes an emergency exit is precisely what is required. No job is worth your health, your safety, your dignity or your ethics, and where those are at stake, leave quickly. Outside those circumstances, resigning at the height of anger is a risk. Unprocessed conflict travels. It follows us into the next organisation, where the first six months become a campaign to prove a former boss wrong. A new employer should not have to host an old argument.
So what is the right tenure? There is no universal answer here either. Three years, five years, ten years — each can be far too short or far too long. Tenure is properly measured against a mandate, not a calendar. Did I come here to build, repair, scale, transform or stabilise? Is that work substantially done? Am I still learning, still contributing, still creating value — or am I repeating last year’s success with less and less energy?
The journey from Egypt to the Promised Land gives us one of the oldest images of succession we have. Moses led the people out of bondage; Joshua led them in. Moses died at 120 with his strength intact, which is the whole point: he had not run out of capacity, he had reached the edge of his mandate. The leader equipped to bring a people out of captivity is not always the leader required to settle the land, divide the inheritance and build institutions. Responsible leadership prepares a Joshua long before the journey reaches its next terrain.
Sometimes, then, the healthiest moment to resign is when things are going well. From strength you can choose rather than flee. Relationships stay intact, the handover is credible, the work is left standing. Yet success on its own is not a signal to go. The sterner test is alignment: have my contribution, my growth, my values and my sense of direction begun to diverge from what the organisation actually needs? If they have, and a meaningful next chapter is already taking shape, then staying because I am comfortable becomes its own quiet form of stagnation.
Nyimpini Mabunda’s Take Charge: Life Lessons on the Road to CEO offers another lens. His movement across organisations was not movement for its own sake. It reads as a deliberate accumulation of experience — industries, markets, widening leadership responsibility — in service of a destination. The lesson is not that ambitious people must keep changing employers. It is that every move should answer a strategic question: what capability must I build next, and why is this the right place to build it?
Before resigning, give yourself a period of disciplined reflection. Write down your reasons, and separate fact from feeling. Ask honestly whether the problem can be repaired — through a frank conversation, a change of responsibilities, coaching, or a move within the organisation. Consult the people who will challenge you rather than flatter you. Test the financial consequences properly. Define the next role by purpose, responsibility and learning, not by title and salary alone. And wherever possible, decide only once the emotional temperature has dropped.
How we leave determines whether resignation serves progress or merely ends it. A leader’s final responsibility is not to make the organisation feel their absence; it is to make continuity possible. That means developing successors long before any announcement, documenting the decisions that shaped the work, protecting institutional relationships, closing critical commitments, and giving the incoming leader room to lead differently. Succession should begin on a leader’s first day, not in their last month.
The right resignation is neither an escape nor a performance. It asks for enough self-awareness to tell a difficult season from a completed one. Leave when you can explain your contribution, your learning, why the next chapter matters, and how the institution will carry on without you. The strongest exit proves nobody wrong; it leaves both the leader and the organisation more capable of moving forward.
Every seal is handed back eventually. The only question worth asking is whether you will be the one to hand it back — and whether what you return is stronger than what you were given.
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