Frustrated at work? How to decide if you should stay, pivot, or quit

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by Kate Wieczorek

 

Feeling occasional job frustration is normal. However, when the bad days start to outnumber the good, it’s time to assess how to improve your work life.

 

Identify The Root Cause

First, determine what caused the frustration. Figuring out the reason will provide insight into which actions to take. Scenarios triggering work frustration could include:

  • Going through an organizational change
  • Being overworked and unappreciated
  • Navigating a new boss dynamic
  • Experiencing boredom
  • Given false promotion promises
  • Dealing with a toxic work culture
  • Feeling overwhelmed in a new job

Next, have a conversation with your boss. Great leaders want to know when their subordinates are unhappy. Collaborating with your manager on opportunities to alleviate job dissatisfaction builds a strong working relationship.

The Case For Staying
A successful conversation with your boss ends with a clearly defined action plan detailing specific check-in points and deadlines. Strong leaders and companies recognize the importance of keeping employees happy. It is worthwhile to stay and see if the changes result in increased happiness and less frustration.

Change is difficult to navigate. It can take three months, sometimes up to a year, to adjust to a new job. Company culture changes can take multiple years to fully integrate within a business. Be compassionate and evaluate if the negative aspects subside as you acclimate to a new way of working.

Time To Pivot
If multiple conversations with your leader did not yield an improved work experience, transferring departments or roles is an appealing possibility. Utilize your access to various departments and explore different opportunities. Gain unique insights through collaborating on projects together, job shadowing, or chatting over coffee.

Conduct extensive self-reflection and identify your career non-negotiables. Would you be okay with increasing your workload if a role piqued your interest? How would a lateral move align with your long-term career goals? What if a new role required different work hours? Gathering data and self-assessing will improve the likelihood of renewed job satisfaction in another role.

If pivoting internally is the right decision, create a clear transition plan. Allocate time to offload your current responsibilities and onboard into the new profession. Confirm with all stakeholders on the final date of transition and overall expectations. This mitigates the risk of executing two jobs on one salary.

Knowing When To Quit
Quitting is the best option when there is a lack of career growth prospects, misalignment of job tasks with your work interests, or the overall work environment is not improving. Changing jobs is normal. American workers will have on average 12 occupations during their lifetime, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. One job experience lends itself to another, curating skills that form your unique career portfolio.

Always look elsewhere if you find yourself in a toxic work environment. Never remain at a company solely to justify an ‘acceptable’ tenure. The long-lasting impact on your mental and physical well-being is not worth it. According to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, more than 44 million Americans quit their job in 2023. You deserve an improved work experience and to feel happy again.

Feeling frustrated at work isn’t always detrimental. It may indicate that a higher-level role, different workplace culture, or a new industry would be a better fit. Ultimately, it’s a sign to reassess your current job against your career needs. Acknowledge how you feel while recognizing that options exist to improve a challenging situation.

 

Source: forbes.com

CAREER RESILIENCE: STRATEGIES FOR OVERCOMING CRITICS, SETBACKS, AND MARKET VOLATILITY

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by Tresha Moreland

 

 

In my 30-years of leadership experience I’ve weathered my share of career challenges, uncertainties, and yes – critics too. One thing I’ve learned through the years is career resilience that I’d like to share with others. Resilience is a crucial trait for professionals navigating the twists and turns of their professional journeys.

Here are insights on handling critics, overcoming setbacks, and maintaining a resilient mindset despite market volatility.

 1. Differentiating Between Constructive Feedback or Noise

Career resilience starts with the ability to navigate and leverage constructive criticism. However, we are surrounded by people who want to offer opinion whether its relevant to you or not.  Discerning between constructive feedback and mere noise is important for healthy growth. Constructive feedback offers specific insights and suggestions for improvement and growth.

While noise tends to be vague, unsolicited, lacking in substance or offers that you aim for lower versus higher goals. Learning to filter and prioritize feedback is key to maintaining focus on your professional goals.

3. Bouncing Back from Setbacks

Setbacks are inevitable in any career journey. Resilience lies in the ability to bounce back stronger from challenges. Instead of dwelling on failures, analyze them objectively, extract valuable lessons, and use the experience as a springboard for personal and professional growth.

Continue reading →

How the Right Team Can Outshine Star Power

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by Vlad. N. Mares

 

The future of innovation belongs not to geniuses but well-combined teams.

In the pursuit of breakthrough innovation, it is easy to be dazzled by star performers, from successful CEOs and prominent lawyers to award-winning scientists. Mention electric vehicles, and Elon Musk springs to mind; radioactivity research, and Marie Curie comes to the fore. However, this fixation can overshadow the crucial role played by the constellation of collaborators – most of us mere mortals – that surround the star.

In a new study published in Management Science, my fellow researchers* and I challenge the prevailing notion that stars are the dominant drivers of progress. Our analysis of more than 500 research projects at a leading university highlights the synergistic effects when talented individuals join forces. The most successful teams, we found, are those where neither the star nor their less-renowned colleagues dominate.

Our study has interesting implications for individuals and organisations across industries. Firms should prioritise building collaborative teams, where members complement each other’s strengths and weaknesses over recruiting and retaining top talent. Individuals should clearly define their unique value proposition and seek out complementary partners.

The rich become richer

Trying to measure individual contributions to a team is by no means easy or simple. The synergies among team members, the selection process that brings them together and the multidimensionality of their contributions are all factors to be considered.

One method relies on the identification of extreme events like the death of a CEO or star scientist, and measuring the pre- and post-event performance of their respective teams. Past research has identified two key mechanisms in the superior performance of teams with stars. The first is the Matthew effect. Often referred to as the “rich get richer” phenomenon, it describes how star performers attract more resources and opportunities, which amplifies their success and leads to more resources, and so on. The second is the spillover effect, where each party enhances the capabilities of their collaborator. The whole is then greater than the sum of the parts. Continue reading →

Build These 10 Habits to Become a True Leader (and Not Just a Boss)

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BY GINA FOLK

 

You know what’s funny? Being a boss is very, very easy. You tell people what to do, how you expect it to be done and when you expect it to be done. But being a leader? That’s a different matter. Leadership involves influence, mobilization of commitment and the ability to paint a picture of the future that people would want to be part of.

It’s about creating the right patterns that make you grow into the kind of person others aspire to be around or collaborate with. Here’s how to do it.

1. Vision, not just goals

When it comes to goal setting, anybody can do it, but when it comes to vision formulation, then one is talking of a leader. Think of Steve Jobs and his vision for Apple: forming products that are not only useful but also aesthetically appealing. Make sure you and your team are on the same page. Remind them why they are doing what they are doing and what it is that they are working towards. Once people have bought into the vision, they are more willing and ready to work hard and contribute towards its actualization.

2. Empathy over ego

True leaders realize that their good and bad performance means the good and bad performance of the team they are leading. Meet your team. Know their potential, their vulnerabilities and how they work. Be concerned with their lives. It doesn’t just take technical brilliance to assemble Tesla and SpaceX; Elon Musk consulted his teams, comprehended their difficulties and guided them. Continue reading →

How to Mitigate Resentment in Your Team

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by Nadav Klein

 

 

 

When conflicts in a team – no matter how minor – are left unresolved, it can eventually breed resentment. If unaddressed, this could lead to cynicism and distrust, as well as harm individual and team performance. How should leaders deal with this?

The intuitive answer might involve orchestrating frank, albeit difficult, conversations between the discordant parties. But such conversations are unlikely to lead to the desired reconciliation without a baseline of trust and goodwill. Research reveals that people become less cooperative when they expect others to be uncooperative. Instead, consider a slightly counterintuitive alternative: Get the employees who resent each other to rely on each other.

Think about the last time you desperately needed assistance from a colleague you didn’t particularly like but who was nevertheless able to deliver the help you required. You probably felt happy. Or relieved. Or both. At that moment, your prior issues fell by the wayside, and your positive feelings from receiving help were transferred to some extent to the individual who delivered. What’s more, the resentment likely subsided because you now have evidence that the other person can and will be motivated to help you.

This does not mean that longstanding conflicts were instantly resolved; that would require the frank and difficult dialogue mentioned earlier. But at this point, such a conversation can take place from a baseline of goodwill, making it more likely to succeed.

Co-dependency creates reciprocity

In the 1950s, psychologists Muzafer Sherif, Carolyn Wood Sherif and their team investigated how resentment and conflict can be quelled. They invited 22 teenage boys to camp out at Robbers Cave State Park in Oklahoma, United States. By all accounts, the boys should have gotten along famously. They had a lot in common, came from comparable backgrounds and shared similar likes and dislikes. 

But things went awry when the researchers split the boys into two teams and asked them to partake in various competitions such as tug-of-war and baseball, effectively pitting them against each other. Each team created their own team flags, hierarchies, customs and jargon organically. Soon, a spiral of escalation ensued. First came insults and name-calling between the two teams. Then, the stealing of valuables, including the rival team’s flag. Finally, one of the teams ransacked the other’s cabins in the middle of night. Surveying the boys, the researchers found they had developed starkly negative attitudes towards their rivals.

The researchers tried several ways to lower the temperature. An intuitive but mistaken first attempt was to ask the rival team members to engage freely in communication. Unfortunately, that evolved into a shouting match. The researchers realised that a baseline of goodwill and trust was needed, and found a better way: engaging the boys in tasks that made them depend on the rival team to achieve mutual goals.

The researchers were creative in orchestrating these situations. One day, water to the camp was blocked by a large boulder that could only be moved with the strength of the boys from both teams. Another day, the researchers let the boys rent a popular movie, but its cost and the convenient lack of budget meant that boys from both teams had to chip in. Over time, as the boys had to rely on one another, their hostile sentiments towards their rivals were replaced by favourable attitudes.  Continue reading →