Exit, Voice, or Loyalty- What Do You Choose?

A long time ago, I began a PhD program in Economics. For reasons that seemed complex at the time – I couldn’t figure out what to do with my life – and also simple- I met the woman is who now my wife of 32 years – I never finished the program. But during that time period, I read a short economics book by Albert O. Hirschman called Exit, Voice, and Loyalty.

Hirschman’s message was relatively simple, especially for an economist. He said that in any given situation, when you are a member of an organization or a member of anything else, and you experience dissatisfaction, you have three choices:

• You can exit, perhaps because you find the organization to be too dysfunctional, or because you are being asked to do things incongruent with your values, or because you are stuck.
• You can voice your dissent, in an effort to improve the situation, certainly for yourself and perhaps for the organization as a whole.
• Or, you can find the good in the organization, and remain loyal to the its mission and goals.

As you would expect from an economist, Hirschman then went on to explain how the benefits and costs of these options would logically affect your choice. As a simple example, if you are a decent software engineer in the Silicon Valley your costs of exit (to another job) are pretty low and your value to your organization is pretty high – which gives you bargaining power, especially if you band together with your fellow engineers.

So, what does the work of a somewhat-obscure economist – Hirschman died in 2012 – have to do with career choices today? In my view, everything. Because Hirschman got it right. I’ve worked in many organizations and, while some were much better than others, none of them were perfect. All organizations have their ways in which they don’t live up to their espoused values, and as soon as you have more than one person there are politics going on. There are always unfulfilled hopes, frustrations, and possible improvements that seem too hard to realize.

I have also worked with many people in these many organizations. Some of the most genuinely unhappy people that I ever worked with were those who could not choose whether to exit, to find their voice, or to just salute and remain loyal. It was clear they had an internal debate going on in their heads that they could never quite stop.

I am forgiving about their unhappiness. These choices – to stay, to go, or to stay but be willing to voice your dissent – are some of the hardest that we have to make. They have consequences, both expected and unanticipated ones.  And we are a very long way from the world where you could expect a lifetime of loyalty from any organization, which in turn places more burden on those doing the work to figure out exactly where their loyalties start and finish.

However, I came to the point-of-view over time that it was just better to make a choice- a conscious choice – about exit, voice, or loyalty – even if that choice was never a permanent one. At a minimum, this choice can free up your mind and energy to focus on the other challenges that are usually staring you right in the face.

Exiting, of course, is always an option. In general, the barriers and certainly the stigma associated with exiting were reduced over the course of my full-time career- as Hirschman would say, the costs of exit went down. And, as I’ve pointed out, there are almost always reasons to leave – uninspiring leadership, dysfunctional cultures, challenging business conditions, or simply being stuck in a role where you’ve already learned most of what you will learn – to name a few. But exiting itself has its costs and logistical challenges. The most obvious is that a healthy paycheck is usually a good thing to have. Less obviously, we can find that the very problem we are trying to escape from is more prevalent than we previously thought, and in fact turns out to exist at our new job too. Finally, the choice to exit is also the choice to forgo the learning that we would get from actually trying to change or improve the organization we are leaving. And, of course, the best way to really learn about something is to attempt to change it.

Loyalty also has its merits. The more an organization has a clear sense of purpose and mission and deals with the “why we are here” question, the easier it is for us to be loyal to the organization. But, in my experience and certainly in my own case, it’s easier to be loyal to a group of people than to an organization. Sometimes, the best and most legitimate reason to keep going is that you are working with people who are smart, dedicated and on-the-whole great to work with. For me, loyalty to the “rest of the team” was always a stronger pull for sticking around than loyalty to a boss. Of course, I wasn’t ever very good at saluting; indeed, I once told a boss of mine that I didn’t like the whole idea of having a boss, which really was not a very smart thing to do.

Some of my own best work experiences came when I found my voice, usually through trial and error. I learned that you can say about anything to anyone regarding what was going wrong and how it might get fixed, as long as you had the right intentions and said it unemotionally and perhaps even with some humor thrown in. The best organizations that I ever worked in had plenty of conflict, and yet the conflict was healthy – it was about how to best move forward, and it wasn’t personalized. There was a focus on results and action, and an underlying tone of deep personal respect. When you find that you can be yourself at work, say what you think, and you don’t need to “put on your game face,” that’s when you know you should stay someplace for a while.

Which brings me back to Albert O. Hirschman. A good twenty years after I read Exit, Voice, and Loyalty – okay, I admit it, it was more like thirty years, I came across a great biography of Hirschman’s life,  Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman by Jeremy Adelman. By then, I was running a software company, which is perhaps not the ideal time to pick up a book of more than 650 pages; then again, it took me over a year to read the book and it helped me get back to sleep more than a few nights.

It turns out that Hirschman led a fascinating life – with plenty of decisions about exit, voice, and loyalty. Of Jewish descent, he fled Berlin in 1933 – a savvy exit if there ever was one- and became quite adept at forging identities and passports, a very useful skill at the time. He emigrated to the United States where he became an international development economist, and he spent a great deal of time advising South American governments. Hirschman led a relentlessly curious life, believing deeply in learning and discovery.

He was also massively distrustful of any academic theory that was not field-tested. Adelman, his biographer, wrote of Hirschman, “Underneath it all, Hirschman had a sense that human actions and choices were the engine of social possibilities and that any history of possible futures … starts its life as an observation of the human by another human.”

As you read about him you understand that when Hirschman wrote of exit, voice and loyalty, he was writing not only about organizations but also about whether to abandon or stay in a country. And his own life was an elaborate case study of such choices. He believed that humans could improve themselves and their decisions over time. But he also believed that many life choices and economic decisions have unintended consequences and side-effects – which are often more consequential than the original choice.

Hirschman lived to be 97 and he lived a big life. For him, for you, for me, the choices never stop as long as we are alive. We can only make them as best we can in the moment.

So, what will it be for you – exit, voice, or loyalty?