Ep 037: How to Know When It's Time to Leave
Today we’re going to talk about When It’s Time to Leave.
This episode was inspired by a phrase I keep seeing in the media. The Great Resignation.
This is the name that’s been given to the wave of mass resignations supposedly taking place inside companies across America.
And the typical explanation for this great resignation is the pandemic. We all know it’s upended our lives and careers and everyday norms. And the narrative out there says that because of this, people have started to rethink what’s important to them.
And supposedly, this trend is spanning all age ranges. Meaning it’s not JUST the younger generations like Millennials or Gen Z, who you might think would more naturally gravitate to big moves in a desire to continue to climb the ladder. It’s supposedly something the older worker – Gen X and the Baby Boomer – is doing as well.
Most of the articles I’ve read point to remote working policies as the culprit. And while I’m sure that’s it for at least some – maybe even most – of the people, it made me wonder…you know?
Is this “mass resignation” really just about remote working? Or is there more here?
Because while I’m sure there’s a lot of truth to remote working policies and maybe even vaccination policies as being a catalyst.
But I believe these two things are just skimming the surface of what’s really going on.
I believe this Great Resignation is a symptom of something much deeper, much more important, and much more PERMANENT than the pandemic. AND I think it’s about something that’s been shifting in our culture for a very long time.
So, what IS going on?
I believe the power dynamic between employee and employer is shifting. At a very rapid pace.
Further, I believe it’s been building for a decade or two.
And for me, this belief is rooted in a meeting I attended more than 20 years ago. Let me explain.
As I’ve said before on this podcast, my corporate career was spent as a brand marketer. And in brand marketing, we rely on data and insights to develop our promotional and creative strategies. So we’d watch general market and cultural trends and we’d field special studies, all to gain insight into how people think and what they care about.
So, when I saw the headline on the Great Resignation and I read a few dozen articles, I immediately thought of a meeting I attended about twenty years ago.
At the time, it was the year 2000. I was early in my career in brand strategy and I was working inside a wireless company just a few years after they launched their nationwide service. The meeting I was attending was a read out from a market trends study from Yankelovich, a market research firm.
It’s been too long for me to remember ALL the details of that study, but at a top level, it was talking about the “Age of Personalization.” And it said it would be coming about in the next twenty to thirty years, driven not only by a shift in the diversity of the population but also by the realization of the potential of the internet.
In 2001, we were still in the early days of the internet – way before the invention of social media – and everything from websites to online advertising was very 1.0. It seemed so cutting edge at the time, but it was very archaic when you compare it to today.
But what I remember so vividly from that meeting was the way they described what success for marketers and companies would look like in 2020 and 2030. That it would no longer be a ‘one s
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