Maybe You Should Quit.

Last week I wrote an article about a friend of mine, Helen, who is thinking about quitting her job. The core issue is that the company goals don’t match her personal ones. You can read my previous article on intrinsic and extrinsic motivation for more details into this topic.

In the article, I suggested that in order to better engage their staff, Helen’s employer could make some adjustments to their employee goals and compensation structure. In this article I’d like to take a look at it from a different perspective.

This company values sales quotas above all else, with their employee goals and culture reflecting this value. This doesn’t work for Helen, so what can she do about it?

Helen has told me she is exhausted by working so many hours and needs a solution. After hearing her story, I could see that she is working so many hours at such an intensive pace because she is trying to meet two different needs. The first need being her personal goals of creativity and customer delight and the second need being the sales goal set by her company.

Despite working at this frantic pace, she doesn’t have the chance to fully flex her creativity or have the results appreciated. Yet, Helen still needs to be creative in order to be happy within herself and take pride in her work. So she works twice as hard to satisfy both needs.

Unfortunately, functioning in this double role for too long can damage her career and personal well being. If she continues to work more hours than she would naturally be able to manage, she will begin to suffer more health issues, mental exhaustion and reduced productivity. The short word is: burnout.

Helen has some choices to solve this. One of which could be to continue to meet her company’s goals without aiming for the same level of creativity or customer satisfaction that she has in the past. She can minimise her personal goals and focus instead on just her sales quotas. This would easily reduce her working hours and required effort. She could go back to the gym, have more time for her family and friends and maybe even find time for her hobbies. Since her company doesn’t value the creative aspects of her work, she will not cause any conflict or loose any financial rewards by letting go of her personal goals.

What’s really being said here is, in order to get more rest and take better care of herself, she could stop doing such a great job.

The idea of doing a bad job makes us all cringe, but unfortunately as many as 70% us do this exact thing. Maybe only when we’re sick or having a difficult time on a project. Yet many of us do this every day, just to get through the difficulty or the humdrum of daily tasks.

I have heard many times by friends, colleagues and parents that we are supposed to just ‘suck it up’ and go along with our jobs even when we are not happy or able to accomplish our goals. Employment reports show that a staggering 70% of workers are not engaged at work. This means that 70% of us, every day, trudge to work to only sort-of do our jobs until the end of the day comes.

When I’ve asked people, how doing a reduced job is able to solve our need for a sense of purpose, they often suggest focusing on a hobby or family. With the logic being that if you are more focused on your hobbies after work, you don’t mind your job as much and have something to look forward to at the end of the day. I don’t see this as a solution.

We spend at least nine hours in our office, and when we get home, we are often too drained to be able to put energy to our personal projects. Boredom is huge energy waster and creates a negative loop. I’m bored so I’m tired, being tired doesn’t allow me to do more engaging work, so I remain bored.

Since doing a less than good job, doesn’t offer a long term solution, then maybe its time to quit. Helen, like many of us, has choices. She has energy, intelligence and a great personal drive. She will continue to be wonderful in her career. It is all a matter of finding the path that allows her to do so.

Of course, life is not a bowl of cherries and we can’t only choose the tasty ones. We must manage things that we find distasteful every day. For me personally, its giving a presentation to a group of people, or that dreaded moment after dinner, when I realise I still need to do the dishes.

There are a variety of techniques to disengage from our jobs we when feel it’s too much or to daydream while we manage mundane tasks. We can at any moment on any day, decided to give less at work. However, these should be used only as temporary solutions when we really need them.

Lets be honest with ourselves, in our work, do we check out on occasion for a short moment to manage a temporary issue, or is it time we change something about our job?

While it seems controversial, changing jobs is not a bad thing. Humans are dynamic and with our current globalised world and engaged youth, we have generations that are poised to flex their skills in different areas. The generations in the workforce now, want to be valued, engaged and able to develop. Finding meaning in work is a often a stronger value than income and unbridled loyalty.

There is a wide breadth of company cultures that we can evaluate to individually decide what kind of environment and management styles are well suited to our success. As we see here, Helen works for an event company that values sales and their culture and goals reflects this. However, she is a highly creative and engaged person who would do better with a firm that wants their event managers to be creative geniuses and good people managers over just sales quotas.

As we grow and develop, I see it as our responsibility to take an honest look at the environment we find ourselves in and decided if this is what we need to be successful and healthy. A good manager or HR will be doing the same thing. Because they understand that when we are allowed to excel and grow, they directly stand to benefit. An innovative, healthy and engaged employee brings much higher gains than one with burnout.

We can hope to have a great manager and HR team but we also need to understand ourselves well enough to ensure these conversations are clear and end in good results. It might be worth also evaluating if there is some adjustments with your team, or work load that might be able to solve some of the issues.

It is hard work to identify what our personal values and motivations are. I understand that we do not all have the privilege or desire to manage the consequences of making changes in our work. Despite the fear and effort, I do believe that we all must take part in our personal development, however small, to better position ourselves to grow. With clarity and dedication, even the smallest changes will have positive effects on all aspects of our lives.

For a consultation on your career development or talent management solutions for your organisation, please email me at: arela@featuredpeople.com