Should I stay or should I go?

I handed over my resignation letter in March 2020. It was a well thought decision, as you do not leave a company of 23 years on a sudden TGIF happy hour impulse. It had been brewing for a while. To make it simple, I was not recognizing myself so much in all this. We had grown apart. I could not see enough in it my values, such as integrity, care for people, care for business and care for the planet. And frankly, “dual career management”, or lack thereof, had become too personal, and too overwhelming. My wife works for this same company, and we were clearly told about the dual career management policies (or lack thereof). One of the two had to become a second thought, a “trailing spouse”. I did not want to endorse a system where such a “glass ceiling” exists – it was too disturbing, too personal, and a huge breach in my perception of equity and inclusion. And I was the one told to watch her grow from the side-lines, so I left. And I have been the happiest ever.

Since then, Covid 19 has caught up with the world. Unprecedented demand destruction” has emptied the coffer of many “very strong balance sheets” and has syphoned at the same time many of the good things that employees of such companies were looking for – including financial stability and future developments. Oil and Gas - where a lot of my network is, was hard hit.

By total randomness, I had become a trailblazer, in the sense that my own resignation was decoupled from the current crisis but came right before “a big wave”. In about 15 month I talked and exchanged with more than fifty former colleagues, friends, connections, many of which – in this hectic context - are forced and/or tempted to change course and re-envision their life, outside of a company that they worked with for 5, 10, 20 or 35 years. And it is not easy, and each situation is different. But funnily enough, I think most of them are going through the same pattern of 5 or 6 questions. I had about the same when I started this journey.

“I do not know what I want to do.”

The most obvious conversation starter…and a learning in disguise. You know that you do not know everything, but it really means considering change of course is not off limits anymore. Questioning your belonging. That’s progress towards re-harnessing the future. Staying? Leaving? To do what? For some, this is the first questioning after 30 years of relinquishing all decisions to an almighty organization, or for others it might me just wondering whether they are cut for the job they just took last month. But for many I have talked to, it really seemed like it was the end of a period of certainty, or of a certain compromise. Trading freedom for certainty – the deal is broken. They feel like “they need to think”, that “something must break” but do not know quite yet where this is leading to.

After all, some will reconfirm their vows, some will part, but for all it will now be a conscious choice.

“I do not want to do the same thing for another company.”

The conversion conversation then goes typically wild, building on the “I don’t know” question… “I always wanted to be a teacher”, “I want to do something good for the planet”, “I want to open a restaurant”, “I want to change Industry”. “I certainly don’t want to do the same thing for X or Y” (name the most obvious alter egos / competitors).

From all the conversations I had so far, when dust settles and we toy together with other opportunities, discussion reveals it is more a rejection of a context than a problem with the job itself. In most cases, “your job” is something you feel good about, at least comfortable with. It is probably not the problem… I would say you have to identify your pain point and resolve this one first, not throwing the baby away with the bath water.

Is it a problem of the company vision, that you do not adhere to? Is it the location? Is it about how you feel valued, or rather, undervalued?

In my humble opinion, there is more difference between companies, than between totally different jobs within the same monolithic culture.

Just taking oil and gas examples:

• You are a gasoline trader, but have come to dislike the traditional “drill-refine-burn” antediluvian business model? Your trading skills might be valued in a company more in tune with your environmental values, and biomass is gaining traction with other refiners who really want to tackle climate change. It will be different.
• You hated the politics of functionalization and the multiple layers of management? I have worked with companies of similar sizes that have totally different organization. With much less layers, true P&L accountability, and real empowerment. Total change.
• You hate being assessed, ranked, told what to do, and what to do next? Many companies have a totally different approach on career management. You are more likely than not to find elsewhere a more human structure, where you play a more active role.
• You do not like the (ever changing) location, because you want stability for you and the family, and manage dual career management better? Some companies have a totally agnostic approach to location now and move the job where the people are. For many organizations that learn fast, Covid-19 has been a detonator of “remote working”. The job will not be the same.

It is important what is the problem you want to solve, as the truth of the matter is that companies hire experience people mostly for what they can do (i.e., the job). And what you do right now – or at least of its components, which you are supposedly good at - is probably why they would take you in.

“But Maxime, I don’t have any skills”.

I am not a competency assessment professional of any kind… but my hunch is that if you have survived 5,10 or 35 years in a large company, you have probably developed some skills, and maybe even, if you are lucky, delivered some value. At the very least, you have survival skills! Joke aside, it is impressive to see this as a common trait in many of the folks I talk to. Lack of self-esteem when it comes down to facing the outside world. It is disturbing, and I only now start to understand the reasoning. Many in large groups got hired right after university and grew internally. In some cases, even commercial roles seem to be about telling the world what the central power thinks, rather than understand what customers and other stakeholders want. People are told how they should do things, what are the “right behaviors”, what they should think, and they are recognized primarily for their adherence to this internal standard. They lose total sight of what is a competence, a skill, in real life.

It is eventually a problem for such a company in the long run; replication and consensual uniformity undermines accountability and innovation, and also kills collaboration through internal competition). But it primarily leads to concerning self-esteem issues for the individuals. A lethal combo... assess performance on a 100% internal scale, and isolate people from the outside so they can't know what is important. They might never look out; they are told if they are good or not. For those entrapped in a forced-ranking assessment system, it is even worse, as eventually, the only way is down… There will always be failure at the end, at the very least failure to become the CEO… although in this track there is less than one chance per 100 000 – you have more chance of dying because of the consequences of a cataclysmic storm (1 in 58,669 in the US in 2019) than “winning” the Corporate Ladder climbing race.

I am sure you have developed skills that a myriad of other people don’t have, and one good way to understand what they are is to read peers tracks (Linked In is a good open source) and discuss with people from the outside, to understand what those really are. How the rest of the world is calling this. Decompose your list of jobs in a suite of learning and contributing stages of your professional career, that you could explain to anymore. It is hard to explain for a “deputy manager to SC Culture change” does (I am using acronyms here deliberately). Were you practicing team management, management of change? Were you leading a P&L redesign effort? Are you good at business process redesign? These are the gems in your crown.

You got this. So, breathe, relax. You must regain confidence and seek for help.

An external look. A buddy. Someone to challenge you and ask simple questions. Because the good news is that the world is big, but rather simple. You will be now in an “infinite game”, the problem stops being the few people better than you. It is finding about how you can help. It is about finding all the organizations who miss you, who do not have your specific skills in their teams, your unique personality, and the suffering it is causing. You can become someone else’s solution. National Champs are losers compared to World Champs, but who cares… as a District Champ, you can find lots of races to nail, shine, glow.

 “I like my colleagues”.

This is what I would call the “high school graduation syndrome”. Friends forever. Nothing will take us apart. Attachment to the instant… many of the folks I talked to are – simply speaking – afraid to leave “the group”, their herd.

An interesting set of questions can come at this junction. “Which colleagues? The ones that you work with now, or the group of colleagues you liked so much 5 years ago? By the way, from the chemical plant where you started, and you liked so much, that band of friends, how many are you still in touch with?” Probably very few.

It is relatively clear that we are human and therefore tend to value more people around us, in space and time… and it is no different here. From my year long travel “outside”, what I can say is that I have found new colleagues, new people, and I never felt alone. Oh, and these friends from 23 years of work? I still have them. I kept lots of these old connections very much alive.

Besides, I have opened my horizons a lot – now it is really a diverse set of individuals. My network has grown exponentially, and I really like my “new colleagues”. We might not be pursuing the same goal, work in the same country, for the same company, some might be clients, partners, or just contacts and virtual (covid-19 rules) encounters, but I pretty much like all of them. And I can choose.

Do not worry, lots of good friends await. 

"I do not even have a resume."

And it is OK.

I felt the same… obsessed by my resume. One more remains of busy-ness and useless deliverables culture, retrospectively. I was worrying about the quality of my resume, up to the point when I got a head-hunter on the phone. I quickly realized it was really a secondary issue. Just a tool. What I did not have at that point, which is more problematic, was a clear vision of what I wanted to do. Or not do.

So do not worry about the infamous resume… applying to you what my mentor in Strategic Marketing summarized once for me… it is about knowing what is out there (the job market, in a broad sense including entrepreneurship), understand what you want (determine where there could be overlap between what would make you happy and what the world needs), and define what you need to get it. In this, the resume comes very last. I do not have the ambition to be able to help a lot here and give some advice or magic, as this very uniquely personal. This “personal strategy development” takes many different forms, from competency assessments, “soul searching” such as #switchcollective, discussions with alumni, “market studies”, ikigai… And eventually, a resume might be redundant. If you plan to approach the market as an executive, developing your (external) network and your visibility in the area you target will be more powerful. Maybe you resume will even be in the end be totally superfluous – or administrative. What is critical is summarize your “why” and your “want”. And your resume will just be supporting documentation, making the “why” clear, and the “what” legitimate.

By the way, experience hired have probably a better chance at being rather focused to be successful in job hunting. Your counterparts would know what to expect, and you would be more ensured to find that activity that makes you happy.

Besides, if you chose to stay, but repurpose the "why" you are staying in the same company, you might not need a resume.

In all cases, worry less about your resume. But be ready to tell in one sentence what you really want, and why you want it. It is the best chance to get it.

“I am well paid”.

Everyone has a different perspective on money, but I think you should approach your wealth and your revenue in a different manner. First, you might have to trade some dollars to buy yourself something else. Freedom of location, fulfilment, a future. You might be better off taking this now, it might be less costly than wait and be stuck in a location with a high cost of living for instance, or where your spouse cannot work, or where you cannot build own home equity because you are an expat, or where kids’ education costs an arm and a leg. Approach the problem holistically. Think about the balance, the ins and outs, for the whole family. Do not think monthly, think longer. For those of us at a later part of our career, it takes some psychological effort though. We have totally adopted the Pavlovian reflex of “salary = personal value”.

You would probably need to work on understanding what you really need from a monetary perspective. And understand this is a distinct problem from who you are.

Besides, my question could be “are you sure?”. I think you should never trust but verify. From my relatively short venturing outside, it is highly variable. I think if you had managed to be convinced that you would be successful inside a company, and fail outside, you might has well have drunk the Kool Aid that “you are well paid”. Do your research, reach out to peers, discuss openly with head-hunters. If you work for a big corporation, it is true that the pay scale extends high up. But if you are stuck somewhere around the bottom of the corporate ladder with vanishing opportunities ahead of you, it might not be so true. There is a free market for everything, and especially for skills, so it is likely kind of levelled.

The truth of the matter too is that you are to this point of the conversation because of a prospective enquiry. About understanding your future potential. From some I followed or approached, I am sure some took a financial hit when they left, to pivot, learn something new, and develop new skills (such as P&L management for instance). But they became CEOs of smaller companies, probably eventually amassing way more than what they would have had staying in their original track.

So, to summarize, explore, as you might have the cake and eat it: a better job and a better pay. If you stay, at least you know financial stability is one of your "whys". And if you don't, and take a revenue hit, it might just like buying yourself a big present with your hard-earned money.

“I don’t have the time to think about this.”

I do not have a magic wand – not for this. You are totally right; all of this takes time. A lot. Not one you can easily knock between a kid’s soccer game and a zoom call for work. You need space, you need to think. So you would have to set time aside. There are not so many ways – take days off. Resist the couch temptation sometimes. Do your research. The mere fact that you would need to seek help, discuss, find your way though the big range of opportunities that lie ahead of you, and find the one that works for you means a huge commitment.

I know that for some having an “accountability buddy” really helps. It does not need to be necessarily a professional coach or similar, just someone you would “report” your progresses to and would help you keeping yourself honest in your quest.

You cannot make that big jump without preparation. But I know you, you are totally worth the investment.

And I wish you as many failures and mistakes I personally experienced, as they are just as many learnings.

Take the time. 

Maxime Katgely, Allevard-Les-Bains, April 29th 2020.