If you feel unhappy and unfulfilled at work and wonder “Should I leave my job?,” the answer might be “Not necessarily”
Not for reasons of security or because the grass might NOT be greener elsewhere, but because you might be able to morph your role into one that fits your strengths, skills, interests and personality…without having to leave.
“I’ve had enough of this. I need to leave.”
Jennifer (not her real name), a 50 year old manager for a non-profit, felt overworked, underutilized, and underappreciated at work.
Because she was a hard worker, had a “can do” attitude, and was a quick study, her boss continued to add responsibilities to her position.
This resulted in her being assigned administrative tasks that bored her, and didn’t play to her strengths in the “people skills” domain.
Not only were the new tasks draining her energy, they did not play to her strongest talents
While she had always received positive feedback on her performance over the years, and had even excelled at the tasks that were outside her job description, she questioned her ability to secure a job outside her narrow niche field in another organization.
When she came to Heart at Work as a client, her goal was to determine her transferable skills that would be applicable to other organizations and jobs.
In short, she wanted to get clear about the following:
- What am I good at that I enjoy doing?
- What skills do I have that I could apply to other jobs and careers?
- Do I really have the background to make a leap to another job and employer?
Jennifer and I worked together for several sessions, exploring these questions. Given her strengths in teaching and facilitating, and her strong commitment to helping people, I connected her with two colleagues in relevant positions for informational interviews, so she could determine if her skills were a fit.
One colleague was a leadership coach, trainer, and organizational development consultant working within a company; the other helped high-risk individuals get their lives on track and find employment.
After four sessions, Jennifer wanted to take some time off to process the information from the self-discovery process.
After three months, I reached out to see how she was doing.
To my surprise—and delight—Jennifer said she had decided to stay with her employer because she had transformed her job into one that she loved.
Jennifer’s story was fascinating and instructive, so I asked to interview her for an article that might benefit other job changers.
In the rest of this article, I explore the key takeaways from her process that may help you determine if you really do need to leave your current job to find a better fit.
Get Clear on What You Love Doing…and What You Don’t
When I asked Jennifer what led her to change her current job rather than find a new one, she said the first step was career coaching, which “sped up the process for me by years.”
She described how immobilized by fear and limiting beliefs she was prior to our initial session:
“I think I would have been stuck, frustrated, and disgruntled because I would have been afraid to step out of the job, because of paycheck, health insurance, etc…plus the thought of leaving was really scary. I didn’t see myself outside that organization. I had convinced myself of a lot of things about my not having transferable skills…something I realized, through you, wasn’t true.”
Then she described the process of identifying her strengths and what she loved doing:
“In our sessions, each time we would do some sort of activity…like the card sort exercise…it kept reflecting back to me what my interests were and where my gifts lay. I could see what I did in my job that I loved and was really good at…there was just all this other stuff that was also there. I didn’t know how to clean that up. I thought I had to leave. I didn’t think I had the option to do that in the job.”
The Power of Informational Interviews
The informational interviews that I recommended early on in the process with two colleagues in careers that required her skill-set seemed invaluable to her discover process.
My hope was that this activity would not only give Jennifer useful and accurate information about those careers but also help her recognize that she DID have transferable skills…that the skills she had learned on the job with her current employer were totally transferable outside of her specific organization.
Jennifer described the impact of the these informational interviews in the following way:
The informational interviews with those two women, and having them reflect back what they saw in me, was powerful.
They didn’t know me. They weren’t a friend or co-worker who knew me for decades.
They had no emotional attachment, yet just from our conversation, they said “if you came to apply for a job in my company…I would definitely hire you. Here are the gifts that I would want to nurture and cultivate”.
It was finally something I could believe and not just think “They’re my friends or family…they love me…they’re just trying to build me up and give me a pep talk”
They were very honest in sharing what they thought I could work on and sharing in their own journeys about how they had gaps and how they got the training they needed.
The two people whom she interviewed saw her without the filters she had when looking at herself — filters that kept her from recognizing her value and potential. Her limiting beliefs included:
“All these things I do well…they’re no big deal…anybody can do them.”
- “I’ve worked in this type of organization for so long, I don’t have what it takes to work in any other context.”
- “I don’t have a formal degree in the things I learned to do on the job, so I’m not legit.”
“Maybe I Can Stay and…Have a New Job”
After those two informational interviews, Jennifer’s mindset shifted beyond her limiting beliefs.
Looking back, she thought that having those beliefs were totally “blown out of the water” creating a ripple effect. It caused her to wonder how else she was limiting herself.
It opened my eyes and shattered the walls I had put up, and I had never known they were there.
That’s when I realized “I could make the job I’m in to be the job I want to be in”
I realized I had nothing to lose. If it didn’t work out, I could leave. I thought “Wait a minute, I haven’t even tried…what the hell…why not try…what’s the worst that could happen?”
That’s what empowered me.
Talking With Her Manager
Jennifer didn’t just blurt out to her boss her desire to change job responsibilities.
She chose a multi-step process to engage her boss in this conversation in a way that she thought was aligned with his style of decision-making.
In one of their initial meetings, she mentioned briefly how she was feeling in her job.
In another meeting, she shared with her boss how her list of responsibilities had grown, and the toll it was taking.
Her “planting the seed” eventually paid off.
During one of their meetings, he asked “What would you want your job to look like?”
Because she waited until he brought up the issue, he was in a position of receptivity.
How to Make it Easy for Your Manager to Say “Yes”
Jennifer wisely took ownership of the process and what she wanted as an outcome:
“That’s when I went back and wrote out something like a business plan, describing what I would like my job to look like and this is how it could happen. I wrote out a strategy about how they could shift the tasks I didn’t want to do anymore to others. I didn’t want to waste time with him trying to figure out how to do this.”
She didn’t just plop the problem in her supervisor’s lap. Instead, she took initiative and made it easy for him to implement a solution.
It’s Called Job Sculpting
Jennifer had engaged in Job Sculpting, a process first written about in a Harvard Business Review article in 1999, titled Job Sculpting: The Art of Retaining Your Best People.
The authors defined job sculpting as:
“…the art of matching people to jobs that allow their deeply embedded life interests to be expressed. It is the art of forging a customized career path in order to increase the chance of retaining talented people.”
The concept of job sculpting meshes nicely with the strengths-based approach to career and talent development. This approach recognizes that people do their best work, and are most engaged at work, when they are using the talents and skills which are:
- Their greatest strengths
- Those they most enjoy using
The result of effective job sculpting isn’t just retaining talent and boosting job satisfaction. It is also enabling an employee to make a bigger contribution to their employer, because they are doing work that makes use of their greatest strengths.
When I asked her how she came up with the idea of job sculpting, she said that I had used the term in a session, after she had described how she helps her direct reports make the best use of their talents by changing their jobs to fit their strengths and interests.
While at the time, she didn’t see job sculpting as a viable option, the idea emerged after she became more open-minded following the informational interviews.
The Result of Her Job Sculpting
When I asked what impact job sculpting had on her process, Jennifer responded:
I haven’t gotten 100% of what I want yet, but I see that coming. I’m really fine with that. I didn’t expect to get it all at once. I believe I can get it all in the next year. Before job sculpting, I was 100% done. My job satisfaction was at a 1 out of 10. Now I would put it at an 8….Today is Monday and I got up looking forward to work.”
Jennifer’s Closing Message to Employees Considering Job Sculpting
Based on her experience, Jennifer recommended:
“Find out what you really enjoy doing, not what you’ve been trained to do… not just what you have been told you do well. That’s what I had in my head and it had put me in a box.”
How You Might Use This Strategy:
- Recognize that you might not have to leave your current job if you don’t that it is a good fit for your talents, and/or includes too many tasks and responsibilities that drain your energy and leave you dreading work.
- Seek guidance from a professional on how to identify your talents and transferable skills, and determine which ones bring you alive. It’s that intersection between things you love to do and those at which you excel, that are key to identifying the transferable skills you bring to any job and should be at the heart of your job description. To get you started, check out the blog post I wrote on how to identify your strengths and transferable skills.
- Identify those tasks and responsibilities that tap your talents and skills and those that do not. Consider how you can communicate them, backed up with specific examples.
- Before bringing this up to your supervisor, think of how you can frame it in a way so that it matches their concerns, goals, and what’s important to them.
- Think about how to approach the issue in a way that best fits your supervisor. For someone who is risk and change averse, or who needs to be in control, a “step by step” approach may work best. For a supervisor who is more adventurous, likes change, and recognizes how important it is to match the individual with the job, you might have the complete “introduction to the concept” conversation in one session.
- Keep the conversation positive. Don’t imply that you’ll leave if your conditions aren’t met.
- Take responsibility for your vision and game plan. You’ll want to drive this, both because it is your responsibility, and because it’s also far more likely to happen if you take charge.
- Keep the lines of communication open. Check in with your supervisor to see how it is working for them and let them know about the positive impact it’s having for you.
- Share your successes! This will reassure your supervisor that they made the right decision to support this change for you.
To Build On This
In a follow-up article, we will explore how to identify your strengths and skills that both provide the most value to your employer—or any employer—and around which you want to sculpt your next job.
(Note: “Jennifer gave me permission to write this article and reviewed it before it was published)
For a no cost 30 minute exploratory conversation to discuss whether you should leave or stay, feel free to reach out at David@SoulSatisfyingWork.com
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