Photo by Rupert Baynes-Williams on Unsplash
I’ve spent a good chunk of my career wondering if I should stay at the place that I am working or leave. I often fretted and worried about this. With a bit of hindsight, I can say with confidence that it was all a waste of time. I would have been far better off just focusing on my work, my mission, my relationships, and what needs to get done next.
I am an analytical person, which can be a strength but has also gotten me in a lot of trouble. In retrospect, it was my intuition rather than any amount of planning that told me when it was time to go. And, when it came time to go, my intuition never really failed me.
After all this unnecessary internal debate, I left jobs for the following reasons:
Ethical Problems on the Horizon.
I’m really not one to talk about ethics much, mostly because I’ve noticed that the people who do so are the ones most likely to make ethical compromises. That said, there are good and bad reasons to lose sleep at night about work. If you are losing sleep because you have to fire someone tomorrow, that’s good – it means that you are still human. But if you are losing sleep because you are afraid you are going to end up in a situation that compromises your personal sense of ethics, that’s bad.
Gratefully, I never worked for an organization that was fundamentally dishonest and unethical. But ethics can be subtle, and they are always personal. At one place I worked, I figured out that new investors were going to demand layoffs and cost-cutting well beyond what I believed was right for the business or ethically appropriate (at least in my view.) I was in a senior management role, and there wasn’t going to be anyway to dodge those demands once the new investors showed up. I got out before the new investors got in.
My take on ethics is that if you wait until you are between a rock and a hard place, you’ve waited too long. Once you are asked to do something which compromises your personal ethics, you are in an impossible position. And there is no job that is worth compromising your own sense of ethics, which is pretty much the same thing as compromising who you are.
You’ve Stopped Learning
If you’ve stopped learning anything, and if every year starts to seem like Groundhog Day all over again, you should take a step back and consider the costs of staying where you are. This is true at all career stages, but especially early in your career. In a knowledge-based economy, progress is less about what you know today and more about how quickly you can learn. And the surest way to lose your ability to learn fast is to keep doing the same thing over again.
It’s best to stay on a steep learning curve, which often pays off down the road in unexpected ways. The longest that I ever stayed in one organization was ten years, and that was in large part because every few years I was asked to take on new responsibilities. The more you are learning, the more alive you are.
Curiosity and the chance to learn more makes it much easier to wake up and go to work every day.
You Don’t Believe in the Mission (or the Leadership)
One time I took a job with a small tech company that seemed to have a lot of promise. My first day on the job was spent visiting our only customer, who was threatening to terminate our contract. (Which, in hindsight, might have been a clue that it was a bad job.) But we turned that customer relationship into a success and started adding new customers.
Right about when I was starting to feel better about the company, two things became clear. First of all, I noticed that conflict on the senior management team was going unresolved. I believe in healthy conflict, but the common phrase in that organization was “we are going to agree to disagree,” which just meant we were going to keep arguing about the same things over and over again. Secondly, the board brought in the consulting firm McKinsey to help us construct a coherent strategy. And then the management team proceeded to ignore the strategy; I’m all for challenging the high-priced consultants, but outright ignoring them is another matter.
I realized that I no longer believed in the company’s leadership or its strategy. And I was on the senior management team. It was time to go.
Your Personal Life Needs More Attention
I have often been amazed at how much people have going on outside of work. There are many times when work gets in the way of the rest of our life, but we need to prioritize getting something done at work and the paycheck that comes with that. But there are also times when our life demands more attention that we can give it, and we need to change our work situation. I don’t believe this is something anyone should have to apologize for. Anyone who has been on this planet for a while knows that difficult, even tragic, things happen in all of our lives.
Sometimes the events of our lives, often unexpected and beyond our direct control, mean that the job we had yesterday is no longer the right one for us today. We may find that we cannot give our family and close friends the attention that they need. The mature choice (which I tend to make after I have exhausted all other options) just might be to change your professional life.
Given enough time, talented people who work hard can accomplish much of what they want in life. But trying to accomplish all of it at once can be a mistake.
You Realize You Aren’t the Best Person for the Job
There were several times in my career when I believed I was well-suited for the job that I was in. I may or may not have always been right about this, but at least it helped me get through some of the hard days. And working to cultivate the ability to assess my own skills, with some help from others, also enabled me to change my job sometimes in ways that were better suited to my strengths.
However, once you start assessing your own skills and performance, there may come the day when you reach the opposite conclusion – that you are no longer the right person for the job that you are in. This is usually not even something to feel bad about; you may have been successful enough that your job now has a new set of challenges and you may no longer be the right leader for the situation.
This is when you need to be honest with yourself, especially if you are in a senior leadership position (like CEO). Of course, you still want to honor your own instincts for caring about what happens to you and those around you. But my experience that people are always better off deciding to leave when they realize they are not the right fit, before someone else decides to fire them. Plus, it’s the right thing to do, as long as you are thoughtful about how you leave.
This isn’t meant to be an exhaustive list of why to leave a job; it’s only the biggest five reasons why I did. Of course, every reason to leave can be a reason to stay in reverse. Staying on a steep learning curve, believing in the mission and the leadership, having a job that co-exists well with your personal life, and knowing that you are the right person for the job can be excellent reasons to keep on going.
Leaving a job isn’t something that should be treated lightly, of course, but I’ve more often seen the opposite problem – certainly in my own career. Many people stay too long in jobs which are no longer the right fit for them. It always takes both courage and energy to make a career change.
What’s become clearer to me over time is that no amount of analysis-paralysis can answer the question of whether to stay or go; nor will the answer yield to worrying and losing sleep. It’s more about learning how to trust your intuition, the voice inside of you- which on its best days holds the accumulated wisdom of a lifetime.
Learn to listen to that voice, and it will not fail you.
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