5 alarming signs that you've stayed too long in a company

Staying for years in a company is apparently no longer a thing these days.

The numbers do stack. A Gallup article in 2016 showed that 21% of millennial workers report changing jobs within the past year with 60% of them open to different job opportunities at the same time. Culminate that with the fact that they make up 38% of the US workforce at the time of the study (75% of it by 2025 apparently), the notion of a one-company-man can probably be declared dead.

But things are never a catch-all in the complex tapestry of human society, especially in the ever-changing environment of corporate organisations. For one, millennials are not the only ones making up the workforce at the moment and even among them, there would be those that would prioritise stability over diversity in job scope. Engagement appears to be the dividing factor, with the same Gallup article reporting that engaged millennials are 64% less likely to say they will switch jobs. But engaged or otherwise, is there a point where you have to accept that perhaps you may have stayed at an organisation for a little too long. And how long is too long?

No hard and fast rule on an acceptable tenure, but instead here are five signs that perhaps you may have stayed a little too long in an organisation and should probably be thinking about leaving.

You are constantly looking for reasons to justify your stay

Forget the fact that your work day mostly resembles a spurting war field with generous burst of flames and the off-putting odor of napalm, as your boss, colleagues and clients come in for kills and double kills; one rare nice thing said to you by your boss or colleague and it's 'work's not so bad' again. Granted work should not come down to avoiding challenges and currying compliments, but the danger with this is that you've lost perspective on what you want to achieve out of work and you're basically struggling to keep your current work situation palatable to yourself and others, at the expense of basic logic.

You throw around internal acronyms like they are industry-wide ones

'Acronyms' are part of the colloquial makeup of any organisation. Humans are sometimes chronic in their need to slap an acronym on a project, process or person. I've already pointed out the dangers of fostering that here, but it's another level of danger if you've forgotten the difference between acronyms that are common speak industry-wide and the ones that are really only used in your department. If you find yourself using your colloquial acronyms to explain something to someone who is not from your company, that's usually a sign that you've become a bit of a furniture around the place and you really need to start making plans to move on.

You dismiss recruiters even before they've pitched you the job

You get a call out of the blue from a recruiter, thinking the outdated three-year old CV you deposited into an online recruitment platform is worth looking into. Before they can even pitch you the role they have, you halt them and say 'not interested' or you blow an annoyed 'I'm not looking out' their way. Never mind that they could well be offering you the opportunity of a lifetime but the very fact that you've gone so comfortable in your current role that you are not even considering something potentially better is a huge red alert that something desperately needs to change.

You only offer internally developed solutions for every problem

You've become the company almanac, the one that quotes an internal textbook solution to every problem the team encounters. You've lost perspective on the realities of the different challenges in a business environment and the full suite of potential solutions that may be available market-wide. You've become the darling of the internal stakeholders who need someone to champion their expensively-designed programs because you truly believe that every problem can be solved using something that was developed internally.

It's been at least 12 months since you've done something innovative

Humans can fundamentally be creatures of habit if given enough incentive to be. And there's no greater sign that you've settled into a comfortable sludge than the fact that you're no longer innovative in your role. New environments and people can often challenge and motivate us to strive for greater heights and achievements, to inevitably be more innovative in the way we approach work. But people who have stayed a little too long in a company would've found a way to manage the internal stakeholders well, navigate into the comfortable pockets in processes and have found a way to do just enough to keep their job but not too much that they get tasked with more responsibilities. If that's you, get out. Get out quickly.

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