The biggest sign you need to leave
Jobs and companies, like families, are sometimes healthy, but a lot of times not.
I’ve worked in a lot of industries, from teaching to sales, ministry to military. Looking back across all of them, there is one characteristic from my years of experience from all sectors of life. It’s the one characteristic that defines if a corporation, a small business, even a family get together, is a good place for you to be, or one you will have wished later on was an experience you had never had anything to do with.
It’s the characteristic that defines a good leader. It won’t always create a successful business as there are tons of factors that go into something like that, a lot of which are not in the individual or business’ control. But when I see a leader exhibit this one trait, I get behind them, I trust them, I stick with that company. I keep that friend.
I didn’t know how to write something like this for years because for most of my adult life I didn’t work for anyone that exhibited this trait. I had no idea what it looked like. Coming from a family life that I never felt understood in as the youngest sibling, I just knew what it felt like to be ignored. Coming from a career in the military straight out of that, I was used to being ignored already so it was an easy transition into that life, just becoming a part of the machine.
In my time in the service, I remember a particular experience where a guy in my division was nominated for Sailor of the Quarter. Our senior chief nominated him because, as Senior said, he was always on the go with his tool bag. I was very happy for him, and we all congratulated him, but he took the nomination with a wide eyed smile. We asked him if something was up, and he took us junior sailors into the back room of one of our lower spaces and showed us what was in his toolbag.
A pack of playing cards, a cigarette lighter, a pack of cigarettes, and his sunglasses. He told us he was using his tool bag (we all had one) as a man-purse, and took it to the smoke deck where, lo and behold, Senior Chief would always be. We all laughed, and he got freaking sailor of the quarter because he faked busy-ness and made sure he was seen the most doing it. No one could blame him though, he didn’t do it intentionally; he just liked the bags and shared a bad habit with our division leader that the rest of us didn’t so he ended up in the same place his boss always was. We actually were working, and that was why Senior never saw us.
So the second laziest person in our division got the most recognition from the most lazy person.
What an organization.
But what I’ve learned is that’s what every organization has. At least the ones I found myself always wanting to leave.
Sure, if I had the chance to talk to my Senior Chief about it, he would probably have said something like, “You’re responsible for your own actions. If you wanted more recognition you would have worked harder.”
But I found as time went on in the service, particularly in that division, I worked hard less and less, saving my energy more for things I enjoyed and for parts of the job I knew I’d have to. And as a matter of fact, it was something a lot of people experienced around the ship. All the chiefs smoked like trains because they had all been in since that era, and the e-6 and belows began to say when someone was out on a smokebreak that they were getting their “S.O.Q. qual.” The chiefs didn’t really care about recognizing or investing in the sailors who cared, much less even identifying them. They just saw the SOQ ceremony as one more thing to get out of the way, so they gave it to whomever first came to mind, and that was always someone who was in the same place they always were.
And if morale on the ship was low, they just strung up the MWR (Morale, welfare, and recreation) officer and went on with life.
That kind of thing was an experience I would find myself in even after I got out of the service and went to college.
I worked sales jobs, and when I was stacking and stocking, other people were just hitting up the boss to go out for drinks. They got the recognition and the promotion. They weren’t doing anything different, I was the one who was different. They didn’t understand why I acted like I didn’t want to have anything to do with them. I really was just going by my training in the military and didn’t fraternize with coworkers. That would create an unfair advantage within the perfect meritocracy. Well, I also didn’t ever get promoted. No matter how hard or how little I worked or how successful or unsuccessful I was, the result was always the same.
So fast forward, now I work as a teacher. I experience the same thing. There is a teacher at my work that irritates everyone and whose competence is solidly questionable, yet they always stand up and have something to say into the microphone on professional development day. Even and most especially when there is no one asking them to. They act overwhelmingly positive when admin is around, but when they’re not, you have to leave the room because they will start talking about other teachers. They’re not the only one, and like the others they’re constantly in the principal’s ear. They’ll take the mic and say at PDs, “Oh, I just get so passionate I just had one thing I wanted to say,” literally take the mic from the speaker at times. It was hilarious at times and we all laughed it off, but then something changed.
And I bet you can guess what it is.
That selfsame teacher got promoted to a position that there were quite a few other people more qualified for than them, and now they’re a part of administration, acting the same way. Why? Because when everyone else was working, they were busy strategizing ways of getting seen working. And everyone else just went, oh well, ho hum, same old same. They went back to their classrooms a little more demoralized and disappointed that the admin simply, and clearly, did not see the difference when a teacher is doing their best and when they’re just keeping up impressions.
Why do organizations and their leaders get this way? Why do they PROMOTE people for acting like that? Because it’s easier. It’s easier to reward the people who are simply more visible, and not ask whether they’re the ones actually doing the heavy lifting in your organization. Leaders like to think there’s little reason to assume there’s a difference. What they see is what they think they get. My experience in life however is there’s almost ALWAYS a difference between who is really doing the work and who is simply spending all their time putting on a show in front of the boss.
Ever see Undercover Boss? It’s almost always a shock for the CEO to find out what is actually going on in their companies. Most of the time, that’s because no one in leadership, and thus no one surrounding the leader, is interested in what’s really going on, much less in telling the boss the truth. They’re interested in getting theirs, and so if their department isn’t going so well, they’re going to spend all their time spinning the performance of their demoralized crew to make it look better than it is, rather than solving the problem. It’s easier.
So many principals think it’s just easier to just worry about what comes in the office door than to create a real relationship with their teachers and students. It’s easier to just “trust” your teachers than show up for them. Listen to them. It’s easier to just coddle the kids and placate the parents, because if you spent all your time in the classrooms and in the hallways creating real relationships, how could you get all the discipline paperwork taken care of???
But we all see the logic that if everyone in the school was participating in school culture, kids would be 100 percent better, literate even. Discipline would be scant, and students would be invested because they’d know the school is invested in them.
Most teachers, military servicemembers, hell insurance writers always start out super hardworking, and you really have to hustle for a while. But slowly we all learn how to just be a cog in the wheel of the machine that never changes. And it’s because we all know really, that no one really cares. No one sees us when we struggle. No one sees what you’re fighting. Certainly not your boss. And he doesn’t care. And he shows he doesn’t care, because he treats you like a necessary expense on the path to their own agendas. He is only around when there is a problem, and most of the time not even then, relies on other people’s opinions of you, thus showing he’s more interested in them.
Thus the character trait for a good leader is not necessarily knowing how to get everything done, or being really positive, or motivated, or anything like what we normally think.
If however, an organization cared about you, what would be different? Think about it. Your manager would be around, because they’d care about the environment you work in being emotionally and professionally safe. Not because they feel they need to control output.
Managers and leaders that care don’t equate absence with trust. It doesn’t create a sense of trust at all. Teachers and workers don’t just want to be left alone in their spaces, they want to be supported in their spaces. You can’t do that if you’re never there.
So good managers and leaders are present. If you never see your boss, chances are it’s because someone else is telling them what to think about your work, and they’re listening because it’s easier than knowing about you and what your struggles are for themselves.
But this doesn’t just relate to work, does it? No, this conversation of visibility comes through in our personal lives as well. Nothing good is ever assumed when people judge or opine about another family member from a distance. The people that would rather you agree with them about that person than know for yourself, and therefore spend all their time controlling your opinion of them when that person is not around, that person is only interested in themselves. We all know it. We recognize that toxic behavior in our personal lives but not as much in our work because we just are so used to it. We think, well, I’ll just keep my head down and be professional, and the toxic people win everytime. They go on and become managers, leaders, CEOs, brands. They write books about how other people should take their advice because they’re so successful, writing chapter after chapter of advice they never took because the hard work was for those who were less interested as them in being seen. So they give you the advice that keeps them on top, not you. The advice that gets them a higher paycheck, not what does good for a company, because they don’t know how to write about how they saw the forest through the trees in any particular situation. They just talk about their “hard work” as an academic theory and a little personal branding.
I think if we all could really see who was doing the heavy lifting, emotionally, physically, in our work, in our extended families, we would fire our CEOs for the most part, and start asking ourselves how to make life better for the people on the bottom.
Because the one trait I’ve found that makes the difference between being in a situation where I want to leave, and where I want to stay is knowing I’m somewhere I’m viewed as an investment opportunity, rather than a necessary expense.
When I know I’m viewed as a cost, I don’t trust anyone, and I do as little as possible to get all the boxes checked so whoever I have to hear from leaves me alone the most. That’s the logical thing to do. Why would I invest my time, money, and energy where I know I will be replaced as soon as someone can convince my absentee boss to do it?
When I met my wife, we hit it off not because I’m this overwhelmingly attractive guy. We talked about the Bible, something we were both interested in, and when we had a disagreement, we saw it as an opportunity to learn from each other. We have two kids together and have been married now for ten years. Her in-laws, however, see me as someone they have to put up with. I’ve never volunteered to spend a minute with them and I likely never will. They probably think that’s okay, because they’re getting out of dealing with me, but what they, like most bad bosses, don’t realize is the loss they accrue of my withering trust, the one person that now knows their daughter through the increasing time we’ve spent together, even more than they do. They actually think they know her better than me, because they talk to her and not to me. That’s about as awful as a personal relationship can get, and all I want to do on the holidays is leave.
When I found out that my principal was thinking of designing a course that would both serve the interests of the school and students, as well as use the new certifications I was getting, I jumped at the opportunity. My presence was seen as an opportunity for investment. I found myself finally in a teaching job I didn’t want to run away from screaming at the end of the year despite my love for teaching.
I wouldn’t dare talk to one of my kids like they were bothering me, no matter what I was doing. I did it once with my oldest daughter. As a new parent I felt terrible, and I never will again after seeing her self-esteem get so crushed, I just watched all her love for life go out of her eyes. It was the most awful feeling, and I hate that we so often have no problem making everyone else in our lives feel like they are just a necessary cost with the things we do around them. When businesses treat employees like they are a necessary expense, employees know it, no matter how many mandatory fun get-togethers they force us to go to. We know. And we just want to get away.
And, you know what?
Maybe we should.
If the people in your business or church, or family, or what have you, don’t view us as anything more than something to expend as efficiently as possible and then replace, maybe we should just shorten the whole process. If they don’t view me as a real part of the company, but rather a part of the list of obstacles to deal with as quickly as possible on the way to getting profits to shareholders who never do anything but demand more money, then why bother with that company? They would rather see us die on the line than know what we could really give them, so maybe we should just find somewhere else to be. Let them wonder why they can’t satisfy their shareholders. Their shareholders never produced a penny for them, but companies somehow think they’re valuable and their decisions are worth noting, but the knowledge and experiences of their actual employees are an inconvenience to even hear about.
I even take my dog on walks. It’s not hard. My dog produces nothing, well, except poop. I don’t view that as a problem though, in fact I happily pick that up too because my dog offers a wonderful experience and gives my daughters so much joy, therefore it is not an inconvenience to pay attention to when my dog is hungry or wants a snack. But if I did simply view my dog as an inconvenience I would probably just rehome him. I wouldn’t put up with all the door-scratching, all the peespots, all the shedding. It’s worth it because of how I choose to view my pet. suddenly it’s a joy to have around because I view my dog who does nothing for what I am able to invest in him, as source for giving petsies, for hugs, for playing catch, for comfort when my kids are crying, for the mutual benefit of a live-in automatic vaccuum cleaner for my infant at dinner time. Nothing has changed but my view of my dog in this scenario, and my own quality of life goes up, and my dogs does as well because he doesn’t have to deal with a jerk.
Life isn’t just about getting to the next thing we want. As we always say to each other, it’s about surrounding ourselves with the things we value, and only toxic people would choose to keep people around them that they just see as an object for their exploitation and expenditure. We would never stay married to, or spend our precious spare time with, someone like that in our family, Yet we’ve accepted in our culture that that should be the norm for the overwhelming majority of the people and time we spend with on earth with, our co-workers and managers.
Maybe we should just work a little less hard for the same pay. You know? Not make life so hard on ourselves for someone else that doesn’t care about us. Right? Just put up with it, one day they’ll see. Maybe if enough toxic workplaces wind up failing the quarter they’ll start to view us for what we were bringing to them. Maybe they’ll rethink their attitude.
Nah. They’ll just always be toxic and nothing we do will ever change that until they have absolutely no other choice. Trust me, I’ve shown up for years for people like that and it never changes, and they always just blame me for their behavior when confronted, and they think they’re the victim when you do leave, so just leave. They don’t change, why would they? Just from life experience, no one changes their bias until they’ve had all the evil out of it they can get. People that view you as a necessary expense will never change that view until they lose everything, so I say let them. Just leave.
If someone in your life, any part of it, only views you as a cost rather than an investment, then just get out of there.
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M. G. Claybrook is the author of the critically acclaimed Young Adult fantasy series The Elderwood Chronicles, and an award winning, internationally recognized artist, and a teacher.
