When Did I Start to Lose Interest?

 

I suppose my motivation started to ebb this year when my function was cut from Marketing and rolled into Sales. Okay, I wasn’t a pure marketer and worked more in analytics. Functionally I could have sat in either. My peeve is that there was an inferred promise that I would work for Marketing, investigating consumer trends. Alas, not to be. The change meant an alteration to:

• career progression plans
• skill building
• circle of colleagues

For me this change was unexpected and unexplained. I had no say in the move and no reason was given. Since then, I’ve been treading water and waiting for a chance to leave. In hindsight, I should have looked for an earlier escape or sought reasons. In the end, I chickened out and opted to do the best thing for myself.

I know I should I have been the proactive one, seeking reasons for decisions that affected my motivation. I should have been the bigger one.

Knowing Why You Want to Leave

I recently went and saw a recruiter that a former colleague recommended (he was lucky enough to have left Company X). Although I felt I was prepared, it’s been five years since I’ve done a serious external interview.

My preparation consisted of this: re-read my copy of “What Color Is Your Parachute”, took note of my strengths, wrote down a list of things I was looking for in an organization, and the type of industry I’d like to be part of. It’s a sound platform and (from memory) should have been sufficient to make a good impression. Not so.

I got thrown by a speculative question, “If you were starting at this Firm, XYZ tomorrow, what could you do for them that nobody else could?” I dithered on this one and gave an answer that 99 out of 100 people would have. She said, “Don’t you think they’d do that already?”

The tip here is to have something up your sleeve that demonstrates uniqueness. I’m sure I could have used something but hadn’t done enough of the hard work. Dig deep.

Hear Ye! Hear Ye!

There used to be a regular bulletin circulating through the sales and marketing departments of my company announcing whenever someone had joined, left or if there was something worth celebrating.

These days, these announcements are only sent to those departments affected, given that they’re mostly about departures. The HR team mentioned that these had to be kept “in house”. Okay, for a large organization I can understand that the team in supply chain wouldn’t give a damn about the latest departures or arrivals in the call center. It would be junk mail to them. In my opinion, if two teams are separate but have sufficient reason to be connected (like Marketing and Sales) then I think the announcements should still be shared.

In any case, if a person from Marketing decides to leave and only his/her immediate team receive the message, it would be pointless. Everyone knows that they’re leaving anyway.

My suspicion here is that due to the number of departures, the company doesn’t want to paint a picture of a ship slowly losing its passengers. The question here is whether this is a sound strategy. Is it good to know if other departments are unhappy? If so, for whom?