This is a post that I wrote quite some time ago. I’ve got several posts like this that could be considered inflammatory or controversial. Generally, rather than posting them as soon as I’ve written them, I let them sit in draft from–generally for years.
Only after significant time and distance has passed from the incident or situation that caused them to be written, do I go ahead and publish them.
I have things that I’ve been learning lately that are more technical in nature, but the most pressing thing that I can think to share relates to something that read recently from Suzy Welch. She quoted Warren Buffet as saying: “You cannot make a good deal with a bad person.”
She then went on to indicate that the same principle is true when it comes to your career, that “You cannot build a good career with bad people.”
This echos something that I heard so many years ago that I can’t be 100% sure where I heard it, but which I believe came from the lawyer who runs “The Passive Voice” blog. In essence, the takeaway from the quote as I remember it was that “no contract, however well written will be good enough to protect you from doing business with someone who is untrustworthy. That when you think that you’re entering into a contract with someone who will try to cheat you, rather than trying to beef up the language in the contract, you’d be better served by simply walking away from the deal.”
Suzy Welch’s article (which you can find here: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/18/warren-buffetts-career-advice-could-change-how-you-approach-your-job.html) crystalized some things for me.
It’s very easy to rationalize staying in a job where you’re dealing with bad people. Oftentimes, there are good people in even the worst company. You may think that you just need to accomplish X or Y before you can change jobs, or that it’s too soon to move on once you realize that you’re working in a ‘bad’ company, but my advice is to begin looking for another position immediately and to move on as soon as you can.
There is a lot more that I could say about all of this–a lot more that I want to say about it, but that risks straying into dangerous territory. If you find that there are bad people at the top of your company, or your department, get out as quickly as you can, and don’t let yourself forget that anyone who stays working for a bad person for long enough will naturally begin to adopt their values, justifications and behaviors.
If you find a company that has good people at the top, that should weigh in your decisions to leave or stay much more than I realized 20 years ago when I first started my career.