The Last Straw

What Finally Led You To Quit Your Job?

Quartz has a piece, originally published on LinkedIn and aimed at employers, about the mistakes managers make that push good workers out the door.

When you do make mistakes, your best employees are the first to go, because they have the most options. If you can’t keep your best employees engaged, you can’t keep your best employees. … When you lose good employees, they don’t disengage all at once. Instead, their interest in their jobs slowly dissipates. Michael Kibler, who has spent much of his career studying this phenomenon, refers to it as brownout. Like dying stars, star employees slowly lose their fire for their jobs.

Some of those mistakes include treating everyone equally, regardless of how well their perform; going overboard on the rules; appearing uncaring; and not putting in any effort to make the job enjoyable.

All of that makes sense. In terms of what has made past jobs most frustrating to me, I’d also add management not having a clear vision for the job. This is otherwise known as the bait and switch. I’ve had positions, and you probably have too, where you sign up to do one thing, and it turns out the office, or maybe just your boss, actually needs you to do this other thing, and oh yeah this other other thing, and soon you’re spending most of your time on responsibilities you would never have chosen instead of the work you were hired to do.

Of course everyone should be accommodating, and as a member of a team you have to be ready to step up should a need arise. But if your job description is supposed to be 80% one thing, and you’re asked or expected to spend 50% of your time or more on something else, that’s a problem.

Another main frustration I’ve run into at workplaces is there not being a clear avenue for advancement. Even a happy employee won’t be content doing the same thing ad nauseum, ad infinitum. We want to learn and grow! Excelsior, baby, yeah!

Show your employees there’s some way for them to move up or expect them to move on out. With dispatch.

Last but not least, there is the issue of general dysfunction. If it feels like mom and dad are fighting all the time — mom and dad, in this case, being the boss and the board, or simply the people in charge — the kids are going to get squirrelly. Some of them are going to act out and some are going to run. Who can blame them? We want to have confidence in our leaders. We want to assume that the people in charge know what they’re doing, that they have plans, and that, to the degree that they disagree with each other, they do it civilly and behind closed doors.

Dysfunction manifests in other destabilizing ways, too, of course, like people getting hired and fired in quick succession. And it bums me out every time. I’ve never left a job without regret. As common as it is these days to hop from place to place, I like to stay put, to feel like I can develop within, and contribute to, an environment, longterm. Despite the rep Millennials have gotten, I believe many of us feel this way: that we wouldn’t quit if our jobs gave us incentives to stay.

What about you? What were the last straws that broke your back and led you to quit?

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