Stop quitting your job to ‘have impact’.

Every week I meet well-meaning individuals who want to ‘drive change’, ‘have impact’ and ‘do good’. Every week some of those people tell me about how they are planning on leaving their current work environment, and even profession in order to drive that change.

I once met a woman who worked at a very large multinational organisation. She was giving a presentation about how to follow your dreams and have impact through leaving your job and getting stuck into your own entrepreneurial journey.

Now, not to be reductionist, but I have heard a bunch of these presentations and they all go something like this. “I had the dream life, well, it looked like a dream, high paying job, nice car, holidays and I was high up in the corporate world, but I wasn’t that happy. I wanted to do more, change more, so I quit and went out on my own.”

Change is about building environments that allow people the opportunity to better look after one another.

The kicker was that at the time she was looking to ‘drive positive cultural change’, and empower people to have better, more fulfilling jobs (this woman has since morphed several times into promoting different variations of the ‘leave your job’ message).

Now, I don’t have an issue at all with wanting to drive positive change, indeed it is my life’s work, and I don’t have an issue with people promoting different ways of doing things, but this woman was operating off the savings that she had accumulated through her very high paying corporate job and was telling rooms of people to quit their jobs and follow what makes them feel good. Rooms of people that may not have the economic security required to ride out the cash-flow poor beginnings of any enterprise.

In passing, it was noted, that her job at this giant corporation made her responsible for ‘the cultural evolution of the business, role modelling leadership behaviours and attracting and retaining top talent’, she also mentioned that she had a budget in the realm of $20 Million to achieve this.

That job was the one that she left, in order to ‘drive change.’

My question was “did you not think that having the role, title, responsibility, budget and handle on this huge multinational, massively influential organisation was actually a better place to drive change than to pop out to rooms of a couple dozen aspiring entrepreneurs to tell them to quit their jobs and do what makes them feel good?” and the response was “No one has ever asked me that”.

I couldn’t believe that no one had ever asked, that a person in charge of culture, left a resource heavy environment, where they had authority and a mandate to make cultural change, in order to tell others to make cultural change?

If you can’t drive change inside your organisation in a hurry, I am here to tell you that it is not easier once you are out of it.

Scale of impact matters, and it is time that we talk more honestly about what it means to drive change. Change is not getting a chance to simply tell ‘your story’ and tell a room full of people what ‘they need to do in order to have a positive impact.’ Change is about building environments that allow people the opportunity to better look after one another, it is about improving access to support, improving education about the real nature of disadvantage, keeping people engaged and creating a character-led community of well supported people. What better place to do that than inside the institution where we spend a good third of our adult lives, our workplaces.

Most of the time, the major opportunity for driving change is inside your current workplace. Yes, its hard. Yes, it takes a long time. Yes, it can be thankless. But not many organisations have a budget of nearly $400K a week to drive cultural change, so to give that up is a significant decrease in your capacity to drive change. Even if it is only 10% effective, that’s still $2 Million worth of change, change that can impact a significant percentage of the thousands of people inside and outside of the organisation.

If you operate in a team, being able to create and environment that keeps them employed, keeps them engaged, supports them in and out of work and benefits your workplace is an opportunity for impact that is very hard to replicate in the real world with people whose lives you have very little to do with.

Cultural change is hard. It is particularly hard because most organisations get in a room with butchers paper and post-it notes and write a few things down with little to no accountability, direction or actionable directions. There are disconnects between management and operational staff. The aspirations for the staff and community are not tied into bottom line aspirations with any creativity or long-term thinking. Very few organisations build frameworks that are responsive, dynamic and consistently pointing to their vision through clear principles about how things are done.

If you can’t drive change inside your organisation in a hurry, I am here to tell you that it is not easier once you are out of it. If you need help driving change internally, or have an organisation that clearly lacks the tools to evolve in the right direction, you can engage the Just Be Nice Project to ensure that there are top to bottom improvements in impact literacy, management and culture. This isn’t simply a bunch of terrible staff engagement surveys, this is about building robust frameworks that improve agency across the organisation while benefiting the stated aim and day to day operations of the business too.

Before you think about quitting to drive change, remember;

1.      It’s really hard.

2.      It takes a long time.

3.      Being ‘right’ is not enough.

4.      Engage*, Educate, Enact Change. (*hint; you already have some engagement in a place that you work)

5.      It’s really hard.

6.      Not everyone will get it. (and that’s ok)

7.      Chances to engage people with what they don’t understand will help build understanding over time. (Look for the ways to engage people, based on what matters to them).

8.      To lead, you first need to take the time for people to understand and see where you intend to lead them. Blaze a trail. Go first. Don’t worry about gathering everyone together before you go, worry about what you’re doing and improve the way you communicate that.

9.      Once you have established what you are about, people will slowly make their way over to supporting your mission.

10.  It’s really hard, and it takes a really long time.

If everyone continues to leave their organisations to have impact and drive change because It’s too hard to do it inside their current workplace, we will end up with more and more disappointed potential change agents, more disengaged businesses, and worst of all, more and more places where business-as-usual means not doing the best they could do.

The Just Be Nice Project

If you'd like to make 2020 the year where your impact is amplified and those who need help for any reason get it, don't hesitate to get in touch. Or support the Just Be Nice Project for the long-term here. In the meantime, consider also looking for ways to build support around your employees, family, friends, neighbours and those you interact with every day.