If you have been thinking about quitting, you aren’t alone.
Almost 1 in 4 (23%) adult Australians are considering leaving their current place of employment, according to the NAB’s 2022 Behavioural Insight Report.
But as a leader in your business, how do you know when you should push through or leave?
You are quiet quitting.
You arrive at work right on time (or perhaps a little later, now you think of it). You do the minimum requirements of your job and ensure you put in no more effort or enthusiasm than is necessary.
The term ‘quiet quitting’ emerged in the early 2020’s as a buzz word for worker dissatisfaction. It can get you through for a while, you may even be happy that you are being paid to do the bare minimum – but ultimately it leads to more disengagement, job dissatisfaction and will likely end up in performance management.
You have ‘Monday-itis’ – just about every day of the week.
If you are filled with dread when your alarm goes off in the morning, it’s time to consider a change. It is normal to feel tired and slow moving, and hey, we all have days that we would prefer to stay home. But, if you are finding the anxiety around your work all consuming – you are doing a disservice to yourself and your team.
You don’t feel like your usual self.
Your physical health and general attitude can be indicators of your mental state.
Perhaps you’ve been feeling run down or getting sick more often. You might have noticed changes in your eating or drinking habits. Have you gone off food because of anxiety? Or is the opposite, turning to food or alcohol to distract and unwind?
Consider if your job dissatisfaction is causing tension in the workplace. Perhaps you are a little shorter with your direct reports or colleagues than you used to be. You might have even noticed a growing rift with the leadership team.
You can’t find the positives.
When someone asks you how your day was, you find yourself spiralling in negative commentary. You struggle to find the highlights or development opportunities in your role.
Try as you might, you’re finding it increasingly difficult to stay positive for your team. You find yourself slipping up or divulging negative details you would have normally kept under wraps.
You are consumed by the idea of leaving.
If you find yourself thinking about quitting on a regular basis, there’s probably a good reason. You may have toyed with the idea of applying for something else or started vocalising your desire to move on.
Make sure that you're considering leaving for the right reasons, and not just because you’ve had a bad week.
Try asking yourself:
If you have aired your worries with leadership and aren’t getting the traction you need, take this as sign you are ready for a new challenge.
When you are ready to take the plunge.
It is possible for a leader to quit gracefully with the right plan in place.
Wherever possible, it’s best to have another opportunity lined up. If you feel like you don’t have the time for a job search, get in touch with a trusted executive search consultant who will do the leg work for you.
Take time to understand the finer details around your departure, including any financial factors. Make sure you can give adequate notice. It always helps to come prepared with a succession plan or an idea of what your handover will look like.
Talk to your manager. Emphasise the benefits of your time with the company but be honest about your reasons for moving on. Ensure your feedback is constructive not negative. As a leader your feedback could help improve the environment for the team you are leaving behind.
If you are leaving for a new leadership opportunity, be clear about the things it offers that you were unable to find in your current role.
Ready for a change?
Boston Stanley opens the door for progressive leaders, ready and driven to make real impact. We empower our clients by consistently aligning the right talent with the right role. Follow us on LinkedIn to keep stay up to date with our latest industry insights.
It’s a time of high burn out in our industry.
End of year, holidays on the horizon and a mountain of seemingly endless meetings and deadlines.
In times like these, you can be forgiven for feeling unmotivated and stuck. It happens at all levels of business and experience, particularly in the lead up to the festive season.
These small productivity hacks can help you find your flow state and turn that intimidating mountain of work into a far more achievable (and dare I say enjoyable!) mole hill.
Start your day in flow state.
Think about an activity that you do in your everyday life that feels completely effortless.
Flow is a state of losing yourself in the moment; when you find your abilities are well matched to an activity, the world almost disappears, and you are achieving.
This could be your morning run, reading a great book, cooking a meal or even cleaning.
The positive emotions that accompany these experiences can create the sense of escapism, and enjoyment that you need to shift into productivity.
Whatever this is for you, use this to start your day and feel like you have achieved before you even set foot in the office.
Raise the bar to reinvigorate your creativity.
When you feel stuck, it can help to immerse yourself in a situation that would ordinarily be outside of your comfort zone. New environments and unpredictable situations force us to pay more attention to what is happening in the moment (Elaine Houston, B.Sc 2019).
Change the environment you are working in. Whether that is getting out from behind your desk for a walk, working from home or in nature.
This could mean taking a different approach to an old challenge. Stretching your imagination and engaging other people to help you see a problem from a different angle.
If you have been avoiding a meeting or putting off a tough conversation, it’s time to rip off the band aid. Pushing yourself to tackle these things head on is great for removing the mental barriers that prevent productivity.
Find internal validation.
Consider your skill level and set clear goals to achieve the tasks at hand. You are never too senior for a checklist.
Take a few moments to think about what needs to be done, write it down to fix your objectives and ensure they are clear in your mind. This simple task of planning and ticking off a list provides the immediate feedback that we need to operate in our flow state.
Trust the goals you have set and achieved are enough to legitimise your success.
Ask yourself ‘why?’
“The best CEOs ask themselves why their company exists, then make purpose an intrinsic part of the business model, knowing that testing strategy against purpose can open up new areas of growth.” (Mckinsey & Company, 2022)
At a personal level, purpose ties into everything we do. Without it, even the smallest tasks can leave us feeling lost and unmotivated.
Ask yourself, why am I doing this?
Does this task aid my growth? Am I adding value to the business by completing it?
If you answered no, perhaps this is one to take off your list. Instead use the time to hand it over to someone who would benefit – in their own growth and development, but also in aid of the company’s.
Take the risk and trust that they will succeed.
Boston Stanley opens the door for progressive leaders, ready and driven to make real impact. We empower our clients by consistently aligning the right talent with the right role. Follow us on LinkedIn to keep stay up to date with our latest industry insights.
You have found an amazing leader. Their potential exceeds your expectations. Not only do they tick all the boxes on paper, but they have aced every interview and come with glowing recommendations.
You put out a confident offer and then it all goes quiet. They take a little too long to respond, they ask for more time to consider or perhaps they don’t respond at all.
9/10 times they have accepted another offer. So where did it all go wrong?
You could take the rejection at face value ie. the other company was offering more money or flexibility… Or you could take a hard look at the interview process that led you here.
If you launched straight into a barrage of questions about their background in your first meeting, it probably felt more like an interrogation then a job interview.
The key to the perfect start is a warm introduction to the interview panel and business. Set the scene and help them feel comfortable. Where is the company heading in the next 12 – 18 months? What part could they play in this? What will their career look like here?
Remember if someone has been headhunted, they could still be testing the waters. It’s your job to paint a picture of the culture, the business goals and what their future will look like in the role.
Never open with ‘why should we hire you?’. Start with ‘this is what we are trying to achieve, and this is how we see you helping’.
It can be hard to find a balance when it comes to selling the opportunity. You obviously want this spectacular person to join you, but if you go in too hard with only the positives, they could feel you aren’t being completely upfront.
Transparency and vulnerability create buy in. Its important to be honest about the challenges that got you and the business to where you are today. Tell the candidate what needs improving, and how they will help.
Imperfection is more appealing than a slick pitch.
We have all fallen into the trap of going through the motions. Particularly when there are multiple interviews for a role. But, if the candidate feels like you aren’t really interested in their answers – they will likely self-select out. Ask yourself, am I actively listening, acknowledging achievements and asking follow-up questions? Just repeating a small part of a person’s answer back to them can demonstrate your interest.
They were probably caught off guard by your offer.
Perhaps you told them about ‘all the other candidates’ you were meeting. Or said, ‘it will probably take a while’ to get back to them. Or worst of all, you didn’t ask for their feedback.
Quick and honest interview feedback is critical to smooth contract signing.
If a person sounds like a great fit, tell them. At interview is ideal, but if that isn’t possible tell them immediately after.
Hiring Managers often worry about providing too much praise at interview for fear of having to pay more come offer time. But allusiveness and delay don’t equate to someone joining cheaply, it just feeds a person’s doubts.
Make sure your future leader knows where you stand and ask for their take too. Ask the tough questions; the ones you don’t want to hear the answer to. This not only shows you are serious, it makes sure everyone is on the same page before an offer is on the table.
Did they meet the right people to sell the vision? Were your interviewers happy to be a part of the panel?
Make sure to choose carefully. You want to pick people that can relate and make a connection with the talent you are hiring. People who can tell your new leader about all the opportunities they have been afforded since joining.
Seniority or longevity aren’t important as much as your interview panel loving what they do.
Did you skim through those annoying behaviour and culture fit questions that HR put in your interview guide?
It’s important to know what you are looking for in a leader, outside of what you can read on their resume.
Behavioural based questions provide great insight into how people react to different situations. Including how they perform under pressure. Understanding their personality and what motivates them will help you navigate the offer process – and ensure you avoid hiring someone who isn’t the right fit for the role.
It is no secret that the onboarding process plays an important role in any new appointment’s success. But when the new employee is a senior manager, the stakes of getting it wrong are even higher.
A HBR article written in 2016 suggested almost half of new leadership appointments would fail within their first 18 months. The failure was often linked to the new incumbent’s inability to drive change.
And this was before the global pandemic. By August 2021 a survey by the ABS showed over 40% of Australian employees were working from home. Many starting new jobs remotely.
Apart from the obvious benefits of your new leader being productive sooner, an efficient and culture first onboarding experience ensures your hard fought for talent, stays to deliver.
A culture driven, positive, engaging, and aligned onboarding process makes a huge difference to a new leader’s experience.
When a new leader understands and feels aligned with a company’s beliefs and priorities, they are more engaged. In turn they are more likely to inspire others, meet role outcomes and influence change.
So what does a culture first onboarding process incorporate?
Transparency and access to company processes, operations, and decisions will help cultivate an open and honest work environment from the get-go. A transparent onboarding process incorporates clarity around the outcomes and expectations of not only the new incumbent’s role, but the key people around them.
A great starting point could be your ‘welcome handbook’ or online induction. These as a minimum should include a high-level overview of the business, its origins and who you are. An introduction to the office setting and nearby services are also helpful to new starters.
But in our opinion, the most helpful inclusion in this introduction should be a first day/week/month overview of the role and what they can expect. Make sure they know where to go to find important information, even things that may feel small or trivial to you, like the dress code.
Once onboard, make sure your new starter is introduced to the right people. Connect them with the key stakeholders they’ll interact with and the ones that best promote your company values. A team activity like a lunch can be a great way to make these introductions in an unintimidating setting.
Make sure that any necessary training is scheduled. Having this arranged in advance is imperative to a smoot transition period.
To be effective quickly a senior leader needs to know where to voice their concerns, ask for and provide feedback. As a fresh set of eyes, they have a unique perspective – one that should not be missed because they weren’t comfortable sharing their thoughts.
This open communication needs to start before the first day. The time between contract signing and commencement can feel like no man's land for soon to be employees. Regular contact can fast-track a lot of the administrative burden many companies leave until someone starts, with the added bonus of making your new starter feel valued early on.
If you are time poor, building an automated email sequence to provide regular updates during the pre-start phase can be a game changer. These could include collecting important payroll details, sending inductions or welcome handbooks. Whatever you decide, make sure they are relevant, authentic and specific to the leader joining.
Successful culture-first companies demonstrate accountability from day one. This is a huge, but often unconscious gauge for many leaders entering a new organisation whether a business can meet its goals; and whether they should stick around to see their own outcomes through.
A company’s values shouldn’t just be words on paper – they are guidelines to how an organization makes decisions. Your onboarding process should include examples of managers and executives living up to the company’s stated values.
Seeing people take accountability for their actions, celebrate the success of others, and recognise when there is room for improvement will give your new manager confidence.
Culture-first companies prove to their employees on an ongoing basis that company values genuinely guide all decisions. Onboarding surveys are a great way to show your new employee that you live and breath these values.
Many senior leaders feel their onboarding experience didn’t live up to their expectations or provide the resources they needed most. They felt that figuring things out could have been easier and a lot faster.
In many cases it’s the organisational culture and politics, not lack of competence or managerial skill, that are the primary reasons for failure in a leadership role.
A well planned, culture first onboarding process will ensure your new leader feels confident in their new role; helping them find success sooner.
The metaverse is a new reality of an avatar-populated existence that will exist alongside the physical world where travel between the two realms can be seamless.
In a working context, the metaverse will allow for an immersive, collaborative and engaged experience with limited loss of human connection and perhaps an even increased sense of being present. Work teams will be able to expand beyond the constraints of physical space, mobility and time zones to merge in a productive, creative and innovative manner.
Unlike the flat paradigm of laptop Zoom calls, the metaverse with go beyond the screen, allowing for remote workers to be virtually out of their chairs, making eye contact with each other in a more conducive and organic environment. Leadership teams will be able to spontaneously draw and write, the results captured by their Zoom Whiteboard. Space, tools and ability become more flexible and malleable to suit the tasks and goals at hand.
The metaverse, a literal alternative reality, is the future of how you will shop, test drive and research purchases. It’s also a world of social connecting, like a 3D version of Facebook or Twitter, where you travel to mix and mingle with other virtual reality players.
Ok, great but what exactly does that all mean?
Much in the same way that it had been confounding in the mid-1990s to wrap one’s brain around what exactly “an information highway” was back when the internet was born, it can be initially difficult to grasp 2022’s burgeoning virtual realm, this brave, new and interactive world of metaverse. The metaverse is, simply put is a virtual reality to partner with our physical realm. Via a headset, you create your own animated playground reflective of the real world around you which you can then visit, explore and investigate as your alternative virtual self, an avatar designed by you, which acts as your digital twin.
Within this fluid space also exists plenty of room for business development and tapping into consumer activity; by mimicking the real world, companies can create infinite prospects for consumer interaction and, hopefully, consumer purchasing.
As an example, your digital twin acts on your behalf in this digital playground so instead of physically traveling to a car dealership to test drive a vehicle, your digital self could instead give you the practice of a virtual reality test drive from the comfort of your own home; you could run numerous test drives from numerous vendors in one day, in one hour even.
With $54 billion spent annually on virtual goods, the metaverse, as its own unique and self-contained orbit, will be a globally shared and universal virtual space, much in the same way the internet defined a universal, collective arena for information gathering and social connecting over a quarter century ago.
Even former Disney CEO Bob Iger is using his animation experience to get into the metaverse landscape as he invests in and joins the board of Genies, a company which seeks to corner the market of avatar creation.
The downsides of the metaverse are aligned with longstanding concerns around internet and social media use with the addictive time suck of hours spent away from the actual real world. But striking the right balance between the virtual and physical realities can broaden one’s experience in both realms, enhancing not only social interaction but also the process of research and decision making.
The metaverse will be a space for your customer’s imagination to stretch beyond the confinements of the physical world, a place for consumers to try out, to experiment and to share as creatively and ingeniously as their mind fancies: the virtual sky is the limit.
How very meta.
While workplace burnout and stress have never been more prolific, science clearly demonstrates that happy employees are undeniably more productive.
Happy employees are also more invested in their employer, more likely to collaborate and think longer term regarding their career growth internally. Further, a happy employee is less likely to leave and more inclined to inspire also similar satisfaction in new hires, compounding already positive outcomes for the business.
Harvard Business Review’s pivotal 2015 article “Proof That Positive Work Cultures Are More Productive” outlined four particular workplace cultural guidelines for employers: encouraging social connections; expressing empathy; mentoring in a conscious and deliberate manner; and promoting open discussion, including criticism, so to build trust and strong relationships.
Comparable research from that same time also theorized that happiness [in the workplace] led to a 12% spike in productivity, “we work better when we’re happy” and why positive work cultures are more productive, ideology which remains as freshly relevant today as HBR’s research persists in its circulation: almost seven years after its original publication, the article’s argument for worker satisfaction and fulfilment should in fact become a logical corporate strategy, more than ever now as the world’s workforce readjusts to an endemic covid reality and with “workers' daily stress reach[ing] a record high, increasing from 38% in 2019 to 43% in 2020.”
More recent commentary echoes that happy employees are more expressive, more committed and more energetic: “Employee happiness is one of the most important factors in running a successful, profitable company. Happy and engaged employees tend to miss less work, perform better, and support company innovation. When employees are happy, loyal, and engaged, company profits are higher as staff turnover is much lower; replacing an employee can cost up to 33% of their annual salary. Unhappy employees cost U.S. companies up to $550 billion annually.”
Worker contentment, the presence of delight in the process of effort and collaboration, fosters a sense of pride, camaraderie and feeling of belonging which should never be dismissed as gratuitous because worker joy literally translates into lower turnover, higher retention and less incidents of sickness and absence. Worker happiness is cost effective and, most important to the bottom line, profit inducing.
Happy teams are never happy accidents when they are thoughtfully built by giving the same priority to the human experience as to organisational development
Key leadership resignations often catch us off guard, even with the most careful succession planning.
When the role is critical to your business it’s easy to have a knee jerk reaction. You reach out to a few search firms, negotiating based on price and shortlist speed.
Sometimes you get lucky. The stars align and you find an ‘available’ executive. But, more often than not, you spend weeks (perhaps even months) scrolling through CVs, meeting lack lustre leaders, wasting money and diluting your employer brand.
If you are tired of fruitless and costly executive search campaigns, the next tips are for you.
Uncovering top leadership talent isn’t something that happens overnight. Any recruiter worth their salt, knows a data base is only as good as their last candidate conversation.
While it provides a starting point, great search professionals leave no stone unturned – particularly at this level.
Recruiters need to exercise tact and finesse headhunting in a hot market. Particularly at a time when high performing leaders are regularly bombarded with unsolicited contact.
The last thing you need is a ‘quick shortlist’ of outdated CVs; or worse candidates who aren’t interested or screened properly for success in your role.
Many executives make the mistake of engaging multiple recruiters for their leadership searches.
The truth is, the more people you have out there marketing your opportunity, the more diluted the appeal becomes.
At the top level, the talent pool is small. These leaders do not appreciate having their time wasted with numerous points of contact about the same role. At best it makes your business look unorganised, at worst you lose great talent because they think you can’t fill the role.
Working exclusively with a specialist recruiter, ensures clear and consistent messaging; and a smoother process. It provides your new leader with the best possible brand experience – which is guaranteed to play into their decision process when it is time to sign the contract.
Timing is everything at this level.
Old school contingent or competitive recruitment models (usually where you pay at the end) will promise a quick shortlist turnaround. In reality, most just increase the volume of applications you need to wade through, not the quality.
In a retained search you pay a portion of the total search fee in advance. This gives your executive recruiter the breathing room to complete a deep analysis of the market.
At Boston Stanley, we provide retained clients a reliable timeline, so you can plan your side of the process well in advance. Less process delays mean your new leader can start sooner.
As a specialist executive search firm our goal is to find the best leader for your role, not just the best available.
An exclusive and retained executive search ensures you are only meeting leaders who are invested in the opportunity and capable of achieving the outcomes at hand. The proof is in our success rate with 99% of these mandates filled in the first campaign.
If you aren’t seeing daily updates that read ‘After many wonderful years, the time has come to leave…’ you haven’t been on LinkedIn this year.
For better or worse, Covid-19 forced us to adapt. The fall out rewired our perspective of what is possible and important when it comes to work. Now, in the throes of the ‘great resignation’ we are learning that employers who don’t embrace the shift, are quickly left behind.
The influx of ‘farewells’ has the most innovative, influential, and loyal employees considering their own greener pastures.
So how can you position your business to the be their first choice?
Before the pandemic, most of us thought work-life balance meant knocking off early on a Friday. We struggled to fit the smallest life commitments around our busy work schedules.
Then, overnight ‘working from home’ was inserted into our corporate vocabulary.
For some, it was the first time we had been afforded this level of trust and flexibility. While it came with plenty of challenges, it also proved that productivity isn’t exclusive to the traditional office setting.
A survey in November last year showed 61% of ‘working professionals’ believed a hybrid working from model was the most productive (Hays 2021).
Employees who know their worth, are looking for businesses that offer a value proposition aligned with this desire for flexibility.
Equal opportunity plays heavily into this narrative. People want to see diversity reaching the highest levels of a business. This does more than just reinforce the perception of safety and respect within an organisation. It shows candidates that opportunities for career advancement exist for all, regardless of race, gender, or sexual orientation.
From experience, companies that are seen as a positive force in society have an easier time attracting talent. A strong environmental and social responsibility strategy shows potential employees how a company treats people.
85% of employees feel it’s important to give back to the community through the workplace (ACF 2013). And apart from the obvious social impacts, ‘giving back’ cultivates brand loyalty, employee engagement and importantly happiness.
When you have the luxury of choice (as top talent often does) why risk your reputation for a company that only cares about its bottom line?
In a candidate driven market, you need to be very strategic about how you communicate with potential talent. Unless they are actively looking, it is unlikely a unicorn will stumble across your advert.
Boasting about your financial position online won’t get you very far. People want to know what it is like to work for you.
Keep your messaging steady and consistent. Share the things you are doing in the community, your focus on wellbeing and flexibility for your workforce. Hire a reputable recruiter capable of marketing your business effectively.
But more important than any other strategy, is ensuring your current employees feel valued. There is arguably nothing more powerful in the battle for talent, than a happy team member sharing a career highlight with their network.