Should you stay or should you go? (review of Quitting: A Life Strategy by Julia Keller)

Good things come to those who wait. Quitters also get their share of good things. I’m proof of that.   

I’ve quit four jobs in my career. Started with a nonprofit and then moved on to a hospital, steelmaker, college and university. Worked with hundreds of colleagues and dozens of senior leaders. And got immersed in different workplace cultures although the similarities were always greater than the differences, despite how unique some employers billed themselves.   

As an added bonus, I work in PR which comes with an all-access backstage pass and ringside seat. I’ve seen a lot, learned a lot and done a lot of cool things. I haven’t regretted a single quit.   

I always knew when it was time to move on. My curiosity went from piqued to peaked. The learning curve flattened. Instead of taking the job and running with it, I started sauntering and standing still. My employer wasn’t getting me at my best. I was denying someone else the opportunity to have a go. I was cheating myself and testing my family’s patience.    

“Quitting is an act of love,” says Quitting: A Life Strategy author Julia Keller.    

It’s also “an escape hatch, a long shot, a shortcut, a leap of imagination, a fist raised in resistance, a saving grace, and a potential disaster – because it may backfire in spectacular ways, sabotaging careers and blowing up relationships. It can ruin your life. And it can save it too. All in all, though, it’s a gesture of generosity toward yourself and your future, a roundabout why of saying ‘not this. Not now. But later…something else.” 

Keller says we’re conditioned to persevere. We value grit over quit. Winners never quit and quitters never win. “Quitting is presented as an extremity. A last resort. A point of no return. The disconnect between quitting’s benefits and its bad reputation can be jarring. Quitting may feel right, but it looks wrong.    “It some ways, we overthink the issue of giving up, searching for complex reasons for what can, after all, be boiled down to a simple binary choice: Quit or keep going?    “In other ways, we seriously underthink it. Because quitting is something we do, yes, but it’s also an idea – an idea about the world and what shapes it, and about our responsibilities to ourselves and to others. And about how to be happy.” 

If you’re wrestling with whether to stay or go, Keller recommends asking yourself three questions. “Are you making your choice based on what you believe will work for you or on the fear of being labelled a quitter? Are you choosing what you truly want or what somebody else thinks is best for you? And if were labelled a quitter, what’s the harm?” 

Quitting doesn’t have to be a sudden and dramatic clean break. “It can be thoughtful and deliberate and meditative,” says Keller. “It can be subtle, a thing of nuance and delicacy. It can be the result of a slow-dawning realization and a gradual shift, a graceful accommodation and a canny pivot. 

“If we begin to see quitting in a different light and stop automatically equating it with failure, its potential may emerge – its promise as a life strategy. It might even sound like a compliment.”    So if you’re wondering whether to quit, you already know the answer. Take the leap or at least a subtle and thoughtful first step to something else. Life is short. 

Five lessons in leadership communications

Here are the five things I've learned about leadership communications after working with dozens of great, good and not-so-good senior leaders over the past 30 years (one of the places I worked went through three presidents and two interim presidents in less than a decade):

1. Communicate, communicate, communicate is lousy advice (although it keeps PR people like me busy). A leader should only communicate when they have something important to say and it's something only they can say. Offload operational comms to other senior execs. Remember, every communciation is an interruption for employees.
2. The leader as chief storyteller is a good idea but only if the leader's telling the right stories. Don't let your leader tell stories we've all heard many, many times before. The 3 bricklayers working on a cathedral and talking about their jobs. The father and son walking along a beach and tossing starfish back into the ocean. Taylor Swift lyrics or plot summaries for Star Wars, Spiderman (with great powers...). Instead, have your leader tell real stories about frontline employees living the organization's values and making a difference for the people you serve or your colleagues. Finding those stories is your job.
3. Every communication from a leader is a vote of confidence won or lost. A leader who can't read the room and who communicates in unclear, uncertain and pompous ways loses votes. A leader who's banked votes of confidence will have an easier time navigating through inevitable tough times.
4. To borrow from the world of branding, employees will only trust a leader that they know and like. A leader who stops to talk with housekeeping, security and cafeteria staff, and knows their names, is likeable. A leader who holds the door open for others is likeable. A leader who heads out of the executive suite minus an entourage, who buys a coffee for the person waiting behind them in line, who's fiercely protective and proud of their EA, who knows how to engage in small talk with anyone at any time, who doesn't look at their phone while making the rounds at events or sitting through meetings, who's quick to congratulate an employee publicly and reach out privately in a time of need, is a likeable leader. And employees will talk amongst themselves about these likeable moments.
5. Employees ultimately want to know 3 things about their leader. Does she know what she's doing? Does she know, and appreciate, what I'm doing? And is she proud to be a part of our organization? It's demoralizing to work for a leader who treats the organization like a consolation prize or stepping stone. You'll lose the support of proud and loyal employees - the ones who tend to do all the heavy lifting and are your best ambassadors. A leader shows, rather than tells, these 3 things to employees. Photo by Zan on Unsplash.

Jay Robb serves as communications manager for McMaster University’s Faculty of Science, lives in Hamilton and has reviewed business books for the Hamilton Spectator since 1999.