I'm not a career coach who helps people find their next professional role, and my clients are typically senior leaders in positions they expect to hold for the foreseeable future. But I've worked with a number of clients through a transitional period, usually triggered by a business event such as an acquisition, or by their conclusion that it was time to move on and the business would be better served by new leadership.
I've written previously about effective transitions, but ineffective transitions generally involve taking a job too soon, against your better judgment, or for the wrong reasons. Here I discuss those topics at greater length, drawing on my work with clients who accepted offers they later came to regret.
Don't Take a Job Too Soon
Poorly managed transitions are often the result of attempts to quell anxiety, and that's almost always the case when someone takes a job too soon, without sufficient consideration of their other options and the opportunity cost. As an alternative, you can seek to regulate your anxiety [1,2], starting by acknowledging that it will be a feature of what author and consultant William Bridges calls "fallow time," referring to the period between crops when land is left uncultivated: "First there is an ending, then a beginning, and important empty or fallow time in between. That is the order of things in nature." [3]
Anxiety may not be an issue at all in the initial stages of your transition. You may well feel the need for some rest and relaxation, and an empty calendar looks appealing. However, Bridges reminds us, this sense of ease is difficult to sustain, in part because contemporary culture no longer reflects the agricultural rhythm that makes a fallow period necessary: "One of the difficulties of being in transition in the modern world is that we have lost our appreciation for this gap in the continuity of existence. For us, 'emptiness' represents only the absence of something." [4]
More specifically, you probably enjoy being busy and productive, and once the "vacation" phase of your transition is over, you're likely to feel some unease. This is one reason why it's so important to have a plan, as noted in my previous piece--daily routines and long-term goals help to assuage the discomfort evoked when a clear calendar begins to feel like a void. But the intention isn't to distract yourself with a dizzying schedule of activities, because part of the value of a fallow period is to be found in the emptiness itself.
At a distance, a fallow field looks lifeless, but at a molecular level the soil is replenishing itself to prepare for the next growing season. A sleeping person looks inert, but their brain is a hive of neurological activity as it prepares for the next period of wakefulness. Similarly, the spaciousness that you experience as your transition progresses may feel merely like an "absence," and yet it's worth considering that this may be the necessary condition for the emergence of something uniquely valuable that could only occur in a fallow period.
Don't Take a Job Against Your Better Judgment
In my experience it's very rare for people to be entirely surprised when a new job doesn't work out. In almost all cases where a client came to regret accepting an offer, they recall doing so against their better judgment. Even if we stipulate a degree of hindsight bias, it's clear to me that intuition has a meaningful role to play in the process of charting our professional paths, and we ignore it at our peril.
We need not regard intuition as some form of mysticism. Economist and psychologist Herbert Simon offers a matter-of-fact definition of the process: "The situation has provided a cue; this cue has given the expert access to information stored in memory, and the information provides the answer. Intuition is nothing more and nothing less than recognition." [5]
The challenge is that this recognition often occurs on the margins of consciousness, triggered by subtle cues that can be difficult to identify explicitly. Further, we may discount our substantial expertise in sizing up people and situations because these particular people and this particular situation are new to us, and so we may ignore our misgivings because they seem "illogical."
Years ago my colleague Bonnie Wentworth taught me to distinguish between A) an intuitive sense that something is amiss, and B) the cognitive interpretation of just what is amiss. Even when the latter isn't quite accurate, the former is usually worth exploring further. I don't believe that intuition is always an unerring guide to right action, of course. But before you accept an offer against your better judgment, ask yourself: Am I looking for reasons to say yes? If so, consider the offer from the opposite perspective: Look for reasons to say no, and be sure to factor in your intuitive response.
Don't Take a Job for the Money
I'm not suggesting that compensation is irrelevant or that it shouldn't factor into your decision, particularly when choosing from among competing offers. There is a positive correlation between income and life satisfaction, although this does not imply causation, and in general the relationship between money and happiness is complex and not fully understood. [6] I'm also keenly aware that many people don't have the luxury of making tradeoffs regarding compensation because their personal obligations compel them to take the highest-paying work available.
But if you're like many of my clients you don't face that kind of financial pressure. You may have been well-compensated in past roles, and upon your latest transition you may have negotiated a severance package or realized a substantial windfall. But even under these circumstances you may still place substantial emphasis on your earning power and future compensation. An offer may come along that's "too good to turn down."
In these cases it's worth bearing several factors in mind. First, we often confuse our material needs with material wants. Determine what you must earn in order to satisfy your needs. Also, note the inevitability of what psychologists call "hedonic adaptation"--we readily incorporate changes in our life circumstances and take them for granted. [7] It's a near-certainty that the boost in well-being you experience from increased compensation will wear off sooner than you think.
And despite the correlation between income and life satisfaction referenced above, note that all of the research on the subject that I'm familiar with shows that this relationship isn't constant. The level of income varies across studies, but there's clearly an inflection point beyond which greater amounts of income contribute less and less to our sense of well-being--so consider how close to that point you might be already.
Don't Take a Job for Your Image
We think constantly about other people, and we care a great deal about what they think of us. This is not only an unavoidable aspect of human psychology [8], it's actually a desirable trait. The capacity to envision ourselves as we appear to others and to improve their perception of us has a number of prosocial benefits. [9,10] But while this is a "feature" for the species, as individuals we can easily experience it as a "bug." We can become so obsessed with maintaining a successful image that public perception takes precedence over our lived reality, and we make suboptimal choices as a result.
This is often a factor when clients find themselves unhappy in a new role. They were unduly influenced by the high status conferred by the industry, the organization, the title, the perks. They were recruited by someone prominent in their field, and the attention was flattering. They liked the way the role looked on their resume, and the upward trajectory it portrayed. It was a bright, shiny object, and it reflected back an image of themselves that was pleasing and reassuring.
How we're perceived by others can have a significant impact on our relationships and our sense of self-esteem, and I'm not recommending that we feign indifference toward those perceptions. But when you find yourself attracted to an opportunity because of the image it represents, it's worth asking what you might be giving up in exchange. Over the years I've observed a distinct version of this trade-off in elite organizations:
In almost all situations the elite organization levies some sort of tax on its leaders--something is extracted in exchange for the desired opportunity. These trade-offs and taxes are critical elements in the relationship between an organization and the leaders who inhabit it... Many leaders within an elite organization feel anxious at the possibility of losing their position--not because they fear unemployment, but because their work is such an important part of their identity. [11]
Don't Take a Job to "Show Them"
Even if you initiated your transition, you may feel that you have something to prove to someone. You may feel an impulse to demonstrate to colleagues, friends, family, classmates, or mentors that you're as capable as ever. And if your transition was initiated by someone else who suggested (or concluded) that you're not capable, you almost certainly feel an urge to "show them." This is an understandable impulse--and yet just as when we allow an obsession with image to cloud our judgment, accepting a role to "prove something" or "show someone" can cause us to make bad choices for worse reasons.
Note how much power we give away when we get caught up in this cycle. Rather than rely upon our own assessment of our accomplishments and abilities, we give others the authority to make those evaluations. Rather than trust in our self-efficacy, we ask them to tell us what we're capable of. Rather than chart our course independently, we allow them to determine our path.
The irony is that the people we're seeking to make an impression on are thinking about us far less often than we imagine. As theologian Eric Springsted has noted, "We are subject to an illusion" that leads us to act "as if we were at the center of the world." [12] So if you find yourself drawn to an opportunity because you hope to "show them," ask yourself: Are they really thinking about me? Probably not.
And rather than allow "them" to make this decision for you, consider your own relationship with power and agency. What would it be like to decide for yourself, to make your own determinations, to take responsibility? As Stanford professor Jeff Pfeffer has written, a "responsibility mindset is simply seeing oneself as an actor affecting, or trying to affect, what goes on rather than being in a more passive role of having things happen to oneself." [13]
This is a companion piece to the following:
Footnotes
[2] Attention Surplus Disorder (Anxiety and Distraction)
[3] Transitions: Making Sense of Life's Changes, page 17 (William Bridges, 2004, Revised 25th Anniversary Edition)
[4] Ibid, page 133.
- I highly recommend Bridges' work for anyone going through a transition. For a further discussion, see William Bridges on Transitions.
[5] What is an "Explanation" of Behavior? (Herbert Simon, Psychological Science, 1992)
[6] Myths in the science of happiness, and directions for future research (Ed Diener, 2008)
[7] The Myths of Happiness: What Should Make You Happy, but Doesn't, What Shouldn't Make You Happy, but Does, pages 18-19 (Sonja Lyubomirsky, 2014)
[8] Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect, page 18 (Matthew Lieberman, 2013)
[9] Good Reasons for Bad Feelings: Insights from the Frontier of Evolutionary Psychiatry, pages xiv-xv (Randolph Nesse, 2020)
[10] What Other People Think About Us Matters. Here's Why. (Krystal D'Costa, Scientific American, 2012)
[11] How to Feed a Monster (Leading in Elite Organizations)
[12] "Will and Order: The Moral Self in Augustine's De Libero Arbitrio," page 92 (Eric O. Springsted, Augustinian Studies, Volume 29, Issue 2, 1998). This essay is also available as a chapter in Springsted's The Act of Faith: Christian Faith and the Moral Self (2015).
[13] "Changing mental models: HR's most important task" (Jeffrey Pfeffer, Human Resource Management, May 2005)
Photo by Open Grid Scheduler.
