I recently joined The Great Resignation. It’s not the first time I’ve quit my job without a plan. Given that I likely have a multi-decade need to pay bills ahead of me (note to self: learn more about this crypto thing), it likely won’t be the last. This time felt different though. I wasn’t leaving a situation which felt actively bad. Rather, it was a slow burn towards the realisation that something didn’t feel quite right.
One thing I’ve realised about myself over the years is that I am someone who has a deep need for the work itself to feel fulfilling and meaningful to me, to what would be considered an unhealthy degree (but that’s an entirely different blog post topic…). As I was trying to figure out what exactly didn’t feel right, I spent quite a few months thinking about what are the components that make the work itself important to me , stripping away the external factors such as culture, compensation and security. While all important in their own right, they often mask dissatisfaction or make the more intolerable aspects of working life more bearable (I have a whole theory on how you can correlate the level of perks offered by a big tech company offers to how boring your job with them will be, but again that’s a whole other blog post topic).
Firstly, I’ll say I know it’s an immense privilege to be able to choose the type of work you want to pursue, and indeed quit your job without having anything lined up. I am super fortunate in that regard. I’m not advocating that everyone jump on the Ye-Olde-Resignation-Train and chart into paths unknown. By all accounts, it’s kind of a stupid thing to do. I’m writing this article as it’s one I wish I stumbled across while trying to figure out what the missing piece of my work puzzle was. There are many great pieces of content out there which tell you how to find out if a company’s culture is right for you or how to pick a career that actually fits you and your desired life. I wanted to try to figure out what the components of the actual work, the specific tasks, which I spend brainpower on trying to ship/solve/improve, mattered to me and why.
Questions
I listened to a podcast which Bruce Daisley, former Twitter VP, who wrote a book on company culture), who said (and I’m paraphrasing slightly here), that there are three things that people need in order to feel happy at work:
Connection - do I feel connected to my team, my manager, the mission?
Contribution - do I feel my work is making an impact and do I feel a sense of accomplishment?
Competence - am I growing in skills and capabilities in areas that I care about?
Connection
Humans have a fundamental need for connection. The degree to which this matters in your particularly circumstance, I think is in part largely determined by whether you’re mostly extrinsically vs intrinsically motivated (aka I’m here for the money vs I’m here for other reasons), whether you fulfil the need for connection in other aspects of your life and also your expectations around feeling connected to a specific role. If you’re an engineer who joined a startup as a fixed term contractor, then connection probably isn’t of huge importance. If, however, you’re an engineer who joined in part because you were excited by the problems the product was solving, then feeling connected to that mission and team building the product overtime is likely going to be of huge importance to your overall happiness.
Having reflected on my own situation, I realised I felt a connection-gap (to be clear I don’t think this is a reflection on the company, but rather on myself in relation to it). I firmly believe that you shouldn’t use work to fill a connection void in your life (there are trained therapists for that), but if you find yourself in a situation where, where what you spend 8+ hours a day doing seems to be creating a connection-void that you are not ok with, then it probably is best to start looking elsewhere.
Contribution
Unless you work in a role where success is highly-binary e.g. sale was closed/not, then how you quantify impact can be ambiguous, intangible and unquantifiable, at least initially. What constitutes being impactful can largely be down to individual preference and remit. For some, it might be shipping a pixel perfect design that cements a certain perception of the brand, for others it’s fostering a specific type of team culture by helping an individual stakeholder accomplish X and for others it could be the effect that a decision has on the overall company trajectory. Even if you are someone who doesn’t particularly care about or enjoy the specific work you're doing, if you felt like you were spending hours doing something you felt was entirely meaningless it would likely lead to a decrease in happiness levels. How happy you are with your level of contribution is again affected by the level of impact you feel you could be having. If there is a mismatch between what you feel like you could (somewhat realistically) contribute to vs what you feel like you can deliver due to scope/environment/other than it may be a case of fit-mismatch.
Competence
That last question in particular resonated with me. If you’re working at a startup or high-growth company, you gain competence by default. It’s impossible to be in an environment where there is so much newness, so much to figure out and not to learn something daily even if it is through osmosis. However, when I asked myself that last question, the answer was no. I was learning, but not in a domain that I could foresee myself enjoying working in even in the medium term. I very much subscribe to Steve Job’s philosophy that “the only way you can do great work is to love what you do”.
The best Product people I’ve ever worked with were as passionate about the craft of Product, as they were about the products they were building, Same with People people, marketeers and even the best Compliance people I’ve worked with. If you want to be truly great at what you do (and by no means do you have to be or to aspire to this - after all that’s probably just some ingrained capitalism), but if you do, then I believe the only way you can do this is to deeply immerse yourself in the domain, read the literature, listen to the podcasts, seek out the experts, far beyond what would ever be reasonably considered required for your 9-5. The domain itself becomes an obsession, whether short term (for a project) or long term for a career trajectory.
Framework
Summing the connection, contribution and competence questions together the question can be boiled down to “do I feel valued, do I feel like I’m delivering value, do I care about the value I’m delivering?”. It can be difficult to assess this, particularly when work is overlaid with a coat of busyness (how could I possibly not be delivering value when I’m constantly underwater?! The answer is very easily…).
A friend shared Apoorva Govind’s brilliant piece on How to Waste a Career, One Comfortable Year at a Time with me a few months ago, which includes a framework (see below) to assess if your current role is the right fit. It roughly aligns with the connection, contribution, competence framework above. Truthfully, I found it a brutally honest way of assessing my role. Few things felt very wrong when thought about in abstract. When faced with sea of reds in my own chart, this prompted some difficult internal dialogue as to whether I was on the right career path versus whether I was just growing complacent.
Conclusion
Organisations evolve and new opportunities will likely arise over time as will your feeling towards particular types of work. Making a decision on whether to leave a role based on the day-to-day work itself isn’t entirely wise as your ability to do good work will be affected by the culture, levels of sponsorship and the reputation you’ve built in a company. That being said, I think the *work* aspect of a role, often gets forgotten in the countless articles on assessing whether to leave a job. Life is short and if you're fortunate to be able to choose how you generate income, then identifying the core components that matter to you, and choosing to spend time on delivering work (whether that's in your core job or a side hustle) that you're intellectually interested in and gain a sense of accomplishment from seems like a good choice to have a happier life.
Josephine, I am 61 and have been self-employed since I was 25. I quit my job when I realized I didn't agree with the world's measurement of "success." To me, the ideal situation was one where I had the flexibility to be present to my children (who were still 4 years away from arriving, btw!). I was into work/life balance before it was a thing. Since then, I have found one of the most important factors in my job has been to remain challenged. I LOVE getting there but hate being there. I was talking last night with two high school seniors pondering college and while they are trying to answer the question, "What do I want to do for work?" (and therefore determine which college to attend) I encouraged them to think differently and create the work environment most desirable to them. Kudos to you for taking the leap. I think what you will find is that while you thought it was a cliff you just jumped off, it was only a ledge. You might land with a "thud" but you'll soon get up, dust yourself off, and look around at your options. Follow Steve Jobs' advice closely. Doing what you love to do is a critical factor in your overall happiness.
Bill
BillFarquharson.com