Against The Grain. Switching Jobs Rather Than Trying To Bend An Organization To Your Will
Work presents a huge possibility. It can add color and magic to our lives—a place to learn, build our careers, and make connections. On the flip side, it can be a total drag—a place that sucks the energy out of our bodies and the light from our souls.
If you’re going to spend a huge amount of your life somewhere, it’s important to find a good fit.
Organizations and employees are like puzzle pieces—they don’t all fit together. This doesn’t have anything to do with good employees or bad employees, or good businesses or bad businesses. If two pieces of a puzzle don’t fit together, we don’t level judgment at either of the pieces—we simply accept that they don't fit.
When you’re young and entering the workforce, you’ll likely have to pay your dues or have a purely functional job (my first job was at McDonald's in the mall), but once you’ve identified an area of interest or a skill you want to develop, you need to be intentional with your workplace choices.
If you find yourself stuck in a place that doesn’t feel right or your career progression isn’t going the way you’ve planned, it’s a better strategy to switch workplaces than to try to mold your current organization to your vision or wait around hoping they’ll change.
At Cat & Cloud, we’re rooted in our mission and vision, and guided by our values. We have a well-developed sense of short and long-term goals. We’re agile enough to respond to the challenges of doing business, but no one person’s needs or desires are greater than the whole. Some people who have been with us for 7 or 8 years have influence in areas they’ve shown a high level of competence in, but at no point could any one team member shift Cat & Cloud’s fundamental way of being.
In dysfunctional organizations that lack a strong sense of mission, values, and systems, the story is still the same. Their lack of a culture by design is a culture in and of itself. It existed long before you were an employee and is likely to continue long after you’re gone.
An organization is not easily changed.
It’s not so different than dating. Your significant other might be attractive, charming, and have an impeccable sense of style. But if there’s a personality mismatch, while you might desperately want to want them, you know deep down that all the effort put into trying to make it work would be wasted.
It’s more fun and fruitful to work at a place that has a well-defined sense of mission and values, and as employers, the clearer we are about those things, the more we attract the right people. As employees, the clearer we are about what we want out of our careers and where we hope to be in one, three, or five years, the more we can make informed decisions about where to spend our most precious resource: time. It makes no sense for either party to waste their time and energy on the other when they fundamentally want different things.
Cheat Sheet
You’ll have to pay your dues
Be intentional: Treat your work life as a career arc rather than simply a string of jobs
The more you work on yourself, the more options you’ll have
Trying to bend an organization to your will is fraught
Find the right place (you might have to move) or create one