Is there any other two-word phrase you can use at work that conjures up such a variety of emotional contexts? Euphoria. Anger. Fear. Hope. Freedom. Bitterness. It’s the full roulette wheel of limbic possibility.
A current phenomenon, in our Covid-skewed world of work, is that people are leaving their jobs. Some expat workers are simply throwing it all up to get back to home and family; others, both expats and locals, are shifting companies – pastures new, heading for the greener grass, seeking out the next new promised land.
It probably doesn’t take a psychologist to unravel either trend. People have been separated from their families for a long time. Worries build. The rose tinted spectacles turn a deeper hue with each passing homecoming holiday missed. For some, the capacity for resilience is stretched beyond repair and breaks.
For a great many, ‘home’ is attached with an invisible but unbreakable thread that will always eventually pull them back, no matter if it has stretched to the other side of the world. Home can be many things, it can be safety, identity, belonging, or just the place where the sun hangs in the sky at the right angle and the afternoon shadows rekindle a childhood sense of warmth, comfort and wellbeing. I think it was Sitting Bull, who led the Sioux tribes at the end of the 19th Century, who said of his home that it was, “in the right place”.
But what about those who are not feeling the siren call of home but who are resigning to change roles? What of them? Ian Cook’s recent article in the Harvard Business Review, Who is Driving the Great Resignation? points very clearly to the reality of this trend in the USA and conjectures on some of the causes. The shift to home working with the associated autonomy and disconnection from peers is certainly a chief suspect. The need to exert control over at least some part of our lives in the face of global disempowerment must also stand accused.
Setting aside the accelerator effect of the past two years, how do you navigate through the minefield of resignation in more normal times?
When should you quit?
The famous Vince Lombardi aphorism, “winners never quit and quitters never win” may be a helpful inspiration for a team on the way to the Super Bowl but it’s not so helpful for a person trying to climb the career ladder and trying to decide on the right time to change horses (acknowledging an awkwardly mixed metaphor and that horses are generally unhelpful on ladders anyway).
Having quit at least 15 times over the course of a working life (call me a quitxpert), I feel I can offer some insights into the forces that are at play when this pernicious and sticky thought creeps into your mind – and what to do with it.
The first question to ask yourself is whether the feeling comes from your head or from your heart.
Heart Quitting
Heart quitting falls into two categories, remembering that the Vagus nerve connects your gut and your brain anyway so your head isn’t totally out of this scenario but it’s more in the back seat than holding the wheel. Heart thinking is all about emotional response. Turned down yet again after another internal interview? Blocked from getting your way by that b*****y man/woman/Board again? Crushed with a put-down in front of everyone in that meeting? Report rejected without any discussion after spending hours/days/weeks crafting it? Overlooked for professional development for the umpteenth time? Downgraded by an internal reshuffle?
Whatever it is, it hurts, it’s personal and you are done with the whole damn lot of them. What better way to release all that pent up rage than by rehearsing delivery a few times to the washroom mirror before bursting into a room and giving it both barrels: ‘I QUIT!’ Delicious. Satisfying. At least for a few minutes until you calm down and reflect upon what you’ve just done.
The main characters on the stage during an angry heart quitting scene are the ego (Best Actor), the hurt child (Best Supporting Actor) and the victim (Lifetime Achievement Award). Stephen Karpman’s Drama Triangle1 covers all of the cast members nicely. The victim hides under the bed, the persecutor blames anyone else they can think of for their failures and the rescuer re-secures her grip on martyrdom and prepares to double down on being misunderstood for the long haul.
Angry heart resignations are generally ill advised and most often symptomatic of deeper problems that lie with an individual or with an organisation or sometimes both. For example, if a person is regularly failing internal promotion opportunities, what is the response from the organisation? Who is offering help, coaching, development opportunities, care? Who is watching the head of steam build and trying to help mitigate the fall out? Conversely, who is asking whether it might be better to help this person out of the organisation if they truly have no capacity for internal growth?
The second category of heart resignations is different. These I refer to as apple-off-the-tree resignations. Everything has a natural cycle and job tenure is no different. There is research about this but nothing particularly coherent. The average job tenure without progression seems to be between 4 and 5 years but the best interlocutor for this situation is with your own sense of self. In my head, the cycle is around 6 to 7 years and I have never been in a post longer than 8 years – but that’s just me. Others have committed 25+ years to organisations and remain as fresh and excited as the day they started. It’s a personal cadence, not a rule.
I can remember with absolute clarity the first time I ever fell from a tree. It was my second teaching position at a lovely school on the South Hampshire coast. In that school, I had been promoted several times in a quite rapid period. On the first day of school at the start of my sixth year, I was driving to school in my stylish but technically flawed red Rover when the familiarity of the journey suddenly took me off guard. Without warning, the feeling was in my heart, ‘Oh, this again’. It felt, for the first time, and all of a sudden, unexciting, uninspiring, free from that tingle of adrenalin which had characterised the beginnings of the previous 5 years. All at once, I saw that I was too far inside my comfort zone and the year ahead felt like a lazy lap of the track rather than a hike to a bivouac higher up the mountain. Nothing ‘angry’ about this set of feelings – just a gut sense that it might be time to move on and that my best work in that setting was behind me.
Apple-off-the-tree quitting is OK (but see the coaching questions below). In fact, I would go so far as to say that not quitting when these thoughts sneak up on you is positively dangerous to professional growth. Without making a positive choice in this scenario, the apple (you) will dry on the branch, the wasps will come and chew holes through your skin and your career will shrivel. Might as well apply for the vacant ‘Staff Cynic’ position and get it over with.
Head Quitting
Head quitting is different but is susceptible to being triggered by false signals. We are all essentially two people during our careers: who we are and who we think we should be or should have been. I’ve written in other blogs about limiting beliefs and projection so I won’t expand on that here other than to say that the career ‘shoulds’ in your personal narrative loop are most likely the voices of other people that have weazled themselves into your brain over the years. If you hear yourself using should when talking about your own career, try asking the question, ‘Why should I?’ If you can’t come up with a convincing because… then it’s probably not your belief at all but an interloper from school, parents, peers, boss, the last Business Review article you read…and it isn’t serving you to make decisions which are in your own best interests..
Why should you get a better job? Why do you need more money? Why is it better to be a pilot than a plumber, an accountant than an aluminium salesperson, a surgeon than a soccer player? In the context of your life, what does ‘better’ even mean? What do you really want when you clear away the inherited noise of opinions from others? These are perfect questions to work through with a coach who can help you hold up your narrative to the light and set it some challenges..
Before you make any decision to quit your current job, try the coaching questions below to help you expose the traps that lie in wait for both the heart and the head. Quitting isn’t always the best solution and it’s a major disruption – so take the time to know that it’s really what you want.
One great way of flushing out whether you actually want to quit is to apply for another position. In my experience, people sometimes see this as an act of infidelity but as a leader I never discouraged it. Applications and interviews are free and rich professional development. Sometimes, it’s only by trying on a new pair of shoes that you work out whether you need them or whether your current comfy footwear just needs a re-sole.
Pre-Quitting Coaching Questions
So here are some questions that you can ask yourself to help find out if your heart and/or your head are telling you what you really need to hear.
Angry heart questions
- Never make decisions when you are angry. Period. The Science tells us why – when we are flooded with fight/flight thinking, the blood supply to the neocortex is cut off. You can’t think straight so don’t try. Give yourself 24 hours to cool off, you can still catch that train tomorrow.
- When you have cooled off, ask yourself some tough questions before you fall into Drama Triangle thinking of, ‘poor me’, ‘it’s their fault’, ‘this is typical’. What would resilient you say about this? What would advocate you do? What approach would coach you take to working this through? You don’t need to be in a hurry, take your time to get it right.
- How much of this situation did you cause by your own current or historic actions? Honestly? Is there anything about you that needs to change? Do you want to change?
Apple-off-the-tree questions
- How long have you been feeling like this? When did it start? When do you last remember feeling positive? What gave you that feeling?
- Who could you talk to?
- What other areas, internally, could you try and get into to stretch yourself?
- Would some coaching help here, to clarify your thinking?
- Is this really about the job or has your life outside work stalled in some way? Pandemic, relationships, intellectual stimulation? Is it really the job you need to change or something else?
- Before you quit, what else could you try to get the adrenalin flowing again?
- Could you be a ‘new you’ in this familiar context? What would ‘new you’ be doing?
Head quitting tests
- What is your narrative here? Why do you think you need to quit?
- What is your evidence to support this story?
- Can you challenge any of the evidence?
- Where do your career aspirations come from? Whose are the other voices in your head when you talk about what you want? Are these voices helping you?
- Are you clear what experiences and qualifications will and won’t help you to build your resume? How do you know this?
- Have you spoken to anyone who does the job that you want to do?
- What are your priorities? Financial? Status? Influence? Fulfillment?
- If you could change the story you tell yourself, what would it be?
- How would that story make you feel?
- What would you need to do to make that story come true?
- Are you prepared to commit to that new story?
- Do you need to quit?
- What exactly is the job that is going to be better?
The prospect of resigning can be seductive. It carries with it a promise of complete release from the burdens you carry and a chance to tell yourself fairy stories about how it’s going to be better next time. But different isn’t always better and it’s always worth spending time on the cost/benefit analysis to give yourself the confidence that you are making the right decision on your own terms.
If you do decide to apply to a new organisation, you don’t need to make a decision until someone extends their hand to you and says, “We’d like to offer you the job”. Up until that point, all you are doing is gaining experience and insight to inform your eventual choices.
1FAIRY TALES AND SCRIPT DRAMA ANALYSIS,Transactional Analysis Bulletin, Vol 7, No. 26, April, 1968, Stephen B. Karpman, M.D.
