Choosing your next job
👋Hi! I'm Molly. This is where I share the lessons I’ve learned from building fast-moving, messy, ambitious companies. For more from me, you can also find me on the WorkLife Podcast, on LinkedIn, and in Glue Club, a community for leaders who care about building great companies.
There are three connected posts in this series. This one, How you know when it’s time to leave, and Taking time off. I hope they’re helpful to you!
Someone asked me to share how I think about choosing jobs and roles particularly once you’re at a point in your career when you have choice (or maybe in a job market where there’s a lot of choice).
This is an area where I’m still learning and growing (always, I think) but after many years of making my own choices and helping friends make theirs, I’ve got a set of tools that may be helpful to you.
Before I dive in, let me say two things:
1) My basic belief is that happiness at work is fundamental to high performance. Yes, I have wonderful friends who perform incredibly well in misery and anxiety, but I don’t believe it is healthy or sustainable for anyone to do that over a lifetime. In fact, I believe it takes years off of your life. I don’t know that I’m right, but it’s what I believe and it’s certainly how I manage my choices and what I optimize for.
2) It is really important to understand that making money has not been a primary motivator for me in my career (mostly because I am very lucky). That absolutely changes the equation for how you decide what to do with your time and, I think, what work means.
Tool 1: Lists and venn diagrams
I’m a huge believer that happiness AND exceptionalism (being great at what you do) in work comes from the intersection of what you love doing and what you are uniquely good at. I don’t believe that well-roundedness should be a goal. This is not a unique view nor is it something I came up with. Marcus Buckingham is one of the main pioneers of strengths-based management and he consulted with Facebook early on as we were building our talent philosophy. Spending so much time inside those philosophies early on in my career certainly left a strong impression, but at this point, I’ve coached and managed enough high performers to have seen it in action.
