Take This Job....

and rethink it

We all have those “Take this job….” moments.  You’re dressed down by your manager in front of a group, you work on a problem for several days only to have a co-worker explain the solution simply, you attend a larger event and it feels like “The Office” played out on an expensive stage set.  Work tension is good - until it isn’t.

Without some measure of tension, you don’t take risks and improve your skills, execution or network.

When you tool along and never get pushed, you either don’t see how and why your career options are narrowing, or you aren’t examining the sources of work anxiety that make the morning commute a chore. You see this in non-corporate settings when it’s an actor mailing in a performance, a musician pounding out their hits versus new music, or an athlete that seems to have lost the team’s heart.

How do you differentiate “OK, the coach needs me to play better” from “I really don’t belong on this team and need a trade?”  Frequently those feelings are fomented by a mismatch of corporate context: You don’t fit in with the culture, you see the end of the career runway, you’re running out of things to learn or ways to improve, or you simply don’t like the industry and its evolution.

I have these conversations, usually informally, probably once a month with people at various points in their career arcs.

There’s a hierarchy of role anxiety

I try to layer the job dissatisfaction from the most personal (and most controllable) to the most contextual (the company, its executive leadership or the industry).

1.     Do you have the right skills for your role?  This isn’t just an early-in-career challenge; you may find yourself in a director level role where financial management or conveying strategy are critical skills and you’ve not done them at the scale or within the timelines required.   “I don’t like what I’m doing” is a personalization of “I don’t have the skills required to be successful in this role.” 

2.     Do you and your manager jointly define success?  Feeling unappreciated is a symptom that you don’t have well defined metrics or don’t know how to contribute to the way in which your boss is measured. 

3.     There is nothing new to learn or nobody adept in your future skills from whom to learn.  Realizing that you’ve hit terminal velocity or the end of the runway (pick your flight metaphor) usually is a slow reveal. It could be that the skills you need to advance one or two levels aren’t accessible in your current role and you need to make a lateral move (cross company or cross industry).

4.     You no longer believe in the company or its strategic direction.  Possibly a change in executive management, a change in the competitive landscape or an erosion of customers and markets leave you wondering about the company’s (versus your own) runway.  When you are in a market that is being push from the lower levels by commoditization of its core services, and at the top from increased competition, it’s time to truly evaluate your mid- and longer-term options.

5.     You want to switch industries. While sometimes a later in career motivation, it’s also the admission that you won’t be happy even having solved the things above.  I have many friends who have switched in or out of technology domains, life sciences work, or corporate/non-profit worlds because they found the post-switch work more meaningful or challenging. 

Am I Coachable or Not?

I try to dissect the skills tangle by ranking the types of tasks and work products that excite (or annoy) someone: What do you like doing? What are you good at?  What do you want to learn? What do you want to do more?  What will you do, grudgingly, and what do you despise doing?  The trick is to find a job that fills the first buckets as much as possible, with room to grow.

Every employee, at every level, goes through this hierarchy of work needs.  I switched out of technology into life sciences when I realized that my greatest joy was designing solutions for customers, not building the products to enable those solutions, and returned to my Sun Microsystems systems engineering roots by going to a customer.  It’s the pattern that some vendors used for pre-internet eons to move their employees into CIO tracks (or into newly created CIO roles) and gain brand loyalty.  The reverse is a current trend where vendors want to be more industry specialized, and the larger incumbents face competition from myriad startups and need more fine grain solution expertise.

How Do You Find A Role Coach?

If you’re considering a different career arc, or a different industry, take the time to explore those various skills, metrics and strategic intent variables with people whom you feel are in or have progressed through your target roles.  Use an alumni network, LinkedIn, friend of friend or large industry events to open conversations: “I’m currently making framistors and I’m interested in your journey to leading the hybrid sproingometer team”  (h/t to Bill Rosenblatt and Kevin Boyce who coined those phrases.) People who will be your informal mentors, coaches and career networking routers generally love to talk about their work and career journeys.

Ask good questions and listen aggressively, and find the echoes of where those informal mentors “took this job” through key decision points.