The meeting has a script on their side — prepared framing, chosen words, sometimes HR taking notes. Yours needs only five disciplines and a closing sentence, because the winning performance in an exit meeting is the one that commits to nothing while learning everything.
The Five Disciplines
Listen more than you speak — the meeting’s real function is discovering their position: what’s being proposed, how firmly, driven by what; every minute they talk is intelligence, every minute you talk is exposure. Ask for specifics, in writing — “what exactly is being proposed?”, “can I have that in writing?”: reasonable, professional, and converts fog into a document you can take advice on. Commit to nothing — not agreement, not figures, and not warm indications: “that sounds fair” has a documented career of becoming “as agreed”. Keep the temperature down — composure reads as strength, grievance-airing reads badly in anyone’s notes, and the relationship you preserve today performs your reference tomorrow. Never, ever resign in the room — the dignified-exit impulse is the single most expensive sentence in employment law: it converts a negotiable situation into a completed one and extinguishes claims a settlement would have priced.
The Closing Sentence — and What Comes After
Every version of the meeting has the same correct ending: “Thank you — I’ll take advice and come back to you.” Complete, professional, unimprovable: it commits to nothing, offends nobody, invokes a process the employer’s own document will require anyway, and hands you the tempo. Nothing about a first conversation requires an answer inside it — and the party who understands that holds the meeting. What follows: notes written immediately while memory is fresh (what was said, by whom, what was proposed); documents gathered (contract, anything touching bonus or benefits); and the call made — the conversations page for the framework you were just inside, the 48-hour review when the document lands, and for senior people, the quiet early call that should ideally have preceded the meeting — and absolutely should follow it.
If the meeting turns to pressure — sign today, decide now, the offer expires when you leave the room — the discipline holds and hardens: pressure to sign without the required advice is precisely what informed-consent law exists to prevent, the presented deadline is almost never the real one, and the closing sentence doesn’t change. Deliver it, leave, phone.
Meeting on the calendar — or just finished? Either way: 01 5827148.