What Managers Need To Do Before They Quit

What should a manager do if they don’t like their job?
What should a manager do if they don’t like their job?
Image Credit: Aran Burton

So what’s the worst thing that could happen to you as a manager? The list of things could be quite long, but I think that we could all agree that finding yourself trapped in a job that you don’t like would have to be close to the top of the list. We can probably make this just a little bit worse if we made it so that you had just accepted a new job only to discover that despite your manager skills, you didn’t like it. What’s a manager to do if you find yourself in this unfortunate situation?

Why Managers Leave Jobs

So why would a manager want to quit a new job that they just started? Perhaps when they first showed up they made some discoveries that they now think that this job is not for them. Discoveries can include such things as people that you don’t like working with, a stifling atmosphere, or a boss who is overbearing. If you find yourself in this situation, is it a good idea to just quit? Before you do that, you are going to want to pause. What you are going to want to do is to try to distinguish between things that you should be able to overcome and fundamental issues that you are never going to be able to solve.

As tough of a decision as it is to leave a job that you’ve just started, it turns out that more and more people are doing exactly this. Surveys have revealed that two thirds of the people who take a new job have later on realized that it was really a bad fit for them. Half of these people end up quitting their job within six months of starting them. A lot of managers are starting to have two or three of these types of jobs on their resume. More often than not, they’ll end up leaving off the jobs that ended up lasting only a few weeks. Let’s face it: starting any new job can be an overwhelming experience. You are going to find yourself in situations that, despite your manager training, are both uncertain and ambiguous. What this means is that any decision that you make at this time is going to be potentially risky or even unwise.

Managers need to spend some time thinking about what quitting a job that they’ve just started is going to do to their career. If you quit a job shortly after starting it, you are going to run the risk of getting a bad reference from the boss at that job. Something else that you need to understand is that you may end up going without a paycheck for a period of time. Before you leave a job, you should first ask yourself if you have given the job a fair chance to prove itself. One thing that we need to realize is that how committed we are to a new job can determine how much support we get from the people who are working there and if they do any team building. If we are committed and if we take the time to ask people questions, then we’ll get more support and the job will probably become more attractive to us.

How To Not Leave A Job You Don’t Like

One thing that managers need to realize when they are considering leaving a job that they just started is that if they leave, it’s going to end up costing the company that hired them. If you leave, the company is going to be forced to restart the process that they go through in order to hire someone. This could also damage the morale of the people working there – why did the new hire quit so quickly?

The thinking is that it is probably not a wise idea to quit a job that you just started for foolish reasons. These include not liking the person who is sitting next to you, being asked to do what you consider to be mindless grunt work, or having a boss that you don’t get along with. If you find that you are not getting along with your boss, then go ahead and let them know. Early on in the relationship is the best time to find out if its going to be possible for the two of you to work together.

There are some situations where deciding to leave a job that you have just started may be a good idea. One of the classic situations that you might find yourself in would be if your new employer has fooled you using a bait-and-switch tactic where they promised you one job but really ended up giving you a different job. Additionally, an employer may have agreed to a number of terms with you before you started the job and once you’ve started they end up violating those agreed-upon terms. You also might have taken the job because it was your only offer. Later, after having started, you might get a better offer that requires you to start right away. In this case you might end up leaving a job that you had just started. No matter what, you are always going to want to leave a job on as positive a note as possible. The best case is that you can give two week’s notice. Keep in mind that people are going to remember their first and last impressions of you.

What All Of This Means For You

When a manager takes a new job, they are excited and hopeful about what they are going to be able to accomplish. However, in some cases the new job turns out to be less than they had hoped for. In cases like this, the manager is going to have to make a tough decision. Should they stay or should they go?

When we start a new job and decide that we don’t like it, the reasons that we don’t like it can be many and varied. What you need to do at this point in time is try to figure out if the reasons that you don’t like your job are fixable or not fixable. These days a lot of workers are starting and then leaving jobs that they don’t like. You need to be careful because all too often we make poor decisions when we are under stress. If we quickly leave a job that we have just started, then we may damage our career. We need to ask ourselves if we’ve given this job enough time to prove itself to us. If you leave a job after having just started it, it is going to end up costing that company money to replace you and it may end up damaging morale at that company. Make sure that you don’t leave a new job because of foolish reasons. However, if the employer promised you something and didn’t deliver or didn’t keep their part of an agreement, then you may want to go ahead and leave the job that you have just started.

Starting any new job comes with its own set of risks. As managers when we start a new job we have a lot of hope about what we’ll get out of that job. However, if we quickly start to believe that this job is not going to deliver what we wanted, we may consider leaving it. Before we do this, we need to take the time to determine if what is wrong with this job is fixable. If it is not, then we’ll need to find a way to leave the job in the most graceful way possible. It is possible to leave a job shortly after having started it; however, you just have to know how to do it the right way.

– Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Management Skills™

Question For You: If you leave a job shortly after having started it, do you think that you should include that job on your resume?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

When we start a new manager job, things can be quite frustrating. Where we were previously had probably allowed us to occupy leadership roles. When we now find ourselves in a powerless position at the bottom of the organization ladder no matter what manager skills we have, it can be all too easy to start to think about switching jobs. The question that managers need to be able to answer is how can we gain power when we are starting out with none?