How to know when it’s time to quit your job

At the end of every year, Patty McCord used to sit down with her manager to discuss her performance. This usually meant sharing a bottle of wine together at the Sundance Film Festival in Salt Lake City, given that her boss was Reed Hastings, the co-founder of Netflix.

Patty had joined the company as one of its first employees in 1998, then became chief talent officer as it evolved into the streaming giant it is today. Patty is well known for her “radical honesty”, and every year, she ended her review with a particularly pointed question: “Am I the right person for the next year?”

Once you recognise why you are feeling stuck, it’s time to stand up for yourself and take the next step.Credit: Erin Jonasson

For 14 years, Reed’s answer was “yes” until one year, it wasn’t. McCord’s two rules for staff goodbyes were that they shouldn’t be a surprise to the employee, and you get to keep your dignity. As hard as it was to leave the company, she knew her time was up, and she left proudly with a mountain of achievements.

Now, the point of this story is not that we should all follow Patty McCord and Reed Hastings, as their style of management is not for every company. However, knowing when it’s time to pack up your desk and move on to new adventures is one of the most important skills you can master in your career.

The average job tenure in Australia is just over three years, meaning that we will change workplaces around 15 times in an average career. That’s a lot of goodbye cards to sign, but despite it being something we will repeat over and over, there are still common fears and opaque unknowns surrounding it.

In work, as in life, timing is everything. Knowing when to bow out on your own terms is something anyone can learn, so in the spirit of demystifying and taking away the stigma, here are three things to look for to know when it’s your time to quit.

Just ask yourself if there’s a noticeable issue within yourself, your workplace or your industry.

The first sign is going to come from you and no one else. We’ve all had those moments when our gut tells us there’s a problem before our mind has even registered one. Every job has a ceiling on the opportunities it provides, the skills you can learn, and the amount of care you can give it.

It’s perfectly OK to wake up one day and realise that you’ve accomplished everything you wanted to at work. When you start daydreaming about other work or that exciting career jump you’ve noticed someone else in your orbit make, take that as the first sign to begin the search for a new job.

The second sign will come from inside your workplace, especially if it’s the cause of discontentment. Early signs of burnout at work include occupational exhaustion, depersonalisation, and a decrease in feelings of personal accomplishment.

You should be on high alert for any of these, with research by two of the pre-eminent experts in this space, Christina Maslach and Michael P. Leiter, showing that burnout is a workplace problem, not a worker problem.

It occurs when there is a mismatch between employers and employees in one or more of the following areas: the amount of control a worker has, fair treatment, a sense of community, workload levels, the provision of rewards, or company values.

Within your workplace, you might also conclude that you simply don’t like your manager. You can try to work better with them or realise that the best thing to do is switch bosses, departments or, ultimately, jobs.

The final sign that it’s time to leave might come from outside your workplace, in the wider industry you’re a part of.

You may notice trusted colleagues and friends who are happier working for different companies, or another opportunity might come knocking that brings with it a higher salary or responsibilities. Staying connected to a broad network in your industry will help widen these options.

We don’t all need to be as radically honest as Patty McCord was when she asked her boss the same provocative question every year. Instead, just ask yourself if there’s a noticeable issue within yourself, your workplace or your industry.

If the answer to one of those is a “yes”, it might be time to polish up that CV.

Tim Duggan is the author of Work Backwards: The Revolutionary Method to Work Smarter and Live Better. He writes a regular newsletter at timduggan.substack.com

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