Can your company mitigate the upcoming talent drain? Possibly. And you might have the best chance yet in 2019. Research from Gallup finds that one in two people has left their job to get away from a manager.
We arrived in the in-between hours, the quiet gray of night fading into morning.
We were all exhausted. I was nervous. We hadn’t even seen where we’d be living for some untold number of months, our short-term house. We found it online.
Turned out to be lovely. We could see the ocean from the balcony. There was a pool. We could walk to the beach.
We settled into our new life, hundreds of miles away from family and friends and community. Our kids had never lived anywhere but a few minutes from their grandparents.
We’d lived in the same ten-mile radius our entire dozen years of life together.
You don’t know for sure when things start to change.
Sometimes you can point to a moment, a word, a conversation or experience when you made a decision.
Took a step.
Revealed a truth, or became aware of one.
Awareness is the point of change, but you don’t always know when the awareness comes. It can grow slowly inside of you for years, decades. Then one day, you take the giant leap.
To everyone else, it seems sudden. Unexpected, unforeseen.
But it’s been growing inside of you for so long. It is the natural next step. It is your only possible move.
It is the blooming of a seed that was planted long ago.
It is growth.
We were in a long-imagined world, all of a sudden: working together, a dream we’d had for a long time. And working for one of those snazzy tech start-ups. Living on a fucking tropical island.
And we were having an amazing experience.
There was loneliness. There was confusion. There was uncertainty. There were a lot of emotions, in other words. I won’t list them all individually.
There was a lot of work.
Start-ups are hard. So hard. Did you guys know this? Were you aware?
I wasn’t.
Not really. I’d been a freelance writer in my previous, boring, Midwestern life. Now I was working full-time for a start-up. Handling content and marketing and human resources. Feeling important. Feeling completely overwhelmed.
Another thing about start-ups is that they’re filled with uncertainty. (This is not just start-ups, as it turns out. This is life.)
You don’t know when things start to shift, internally, in a way that gets you to that point of revelation, understanding, and change.
By the time you know you’re changing, you’ve already been doing so for some time. You might not notice until things have shifted (past tense, see?) enough that you start to get uncomfortable.
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Can your company mitigate the upcoming talent drain? Possibly. And you might have the best chance yet in 2019. Research from Gallup finds that one in two people has left their job to get away from a manager.