I have had 27 jobs in my life. You read that correctly; from 1996 (when I got my first job) until 2007 (when I started my own company) at least 27 different managers thought hiring me was a good idea. More specifically, 27 managers thought hiring me would be a solid long-term investment, despite my checkered work history. Hiring me was obviously not a valuable return on investment (ROI) for those managers. I often wonder what the 27th manager thought upon seeing 26 other companies listed on my resume.
I am not the only person with a job-jumping background. In 2018, the Society for Human Resource Management published a story titled “Why Are Workers Quitting Their Jobs in Record Numbers?” to inquire about a similar, widespread phenomenon. The article detailed Bureau of Labor Statistics data indicating a steady increase in workers voluntarily separating from steady paychecks in hopes of discovering greener pastures elsewhere (Maurer, 2018). A year and a half later, CNBC ran a story titled “Workers Quit Their Jobs at the Fastest Rate on Record in 2019” (Hess, 2020), suggesting this trend was upgrading from a movement to a way of life. One conclusion drawn from this data is that companies were making commitments, but employees were not.
There are a plethora of reasons this phenomenon could be happening—a strong economy, more work than workers, or overly generous unemployment benefits, to name a few. The data analysis, however, is not the point of this article. Rather, this piece presents an argument for the value of commitment, of committing to do what you say you will do, despite what you want to do. This skill is a lost art in the world of work, but I aim to convince you that it is worth rediscovering by showing you how committing to a job can increase your freedom, build your reputation, and improve your professional repertoire.
Increase Your Freedom
Having freedom generally means you are free to do what you want. There is, however, another way to conceptualize liberty. Freedom, from a behavior science perspective, is the absence of restraint or coercion (Skinner, 1974). Simply put, you are not just free to do what you enjoy; you are also free from doing what you do not enjoy. Commitment provides the latter freedom, allowing you to avoid worrying about decisions because you already decided by committing to a particular course of action.
Accepting a job is a BIG decision. You are pledging to spend a quarter of your time doing whatever that company asks you to do (within reason). Deciding where to work therefore requires careful research and planning. Compared to endless hours spent job hunting, attending interviews, and stressing about money, committing to stay put becomes more enticing. In short, commitment frees your attention. When committing, you attend to the things that you want to, not the ones that you have to. After all, job-jumping is only exciting until rent is due. At that point, beggars can no longer be choosers, and you end up with a job you must take versus one you want to take.
Working will never be a serene experience. There will be many positives and many problems. However, not having a job represents the unknown. You do not know what will happen next. Worse yet, you face the unknown-unknowns; you must worry about not only the potholes you know about AND do not know how to deal with, but also the ones you do not know about…AND do not know how to deal with. Thus, quitting your job means freeing yourself from the benefits of knowing, from the security of a paycheck, and from the ability to predict how your work-life will turn out.
Ultimately, commitment to stay at a job provides you with freedom—the freedom to choose your own problems and where to focus your attention; if you do not commit, those decisions will be made for you.
Build Your Reputation
Commitment and sacrifice are inexorably linked. You cannot commit to some-thing until you have sacrificed every other-thing in your life. For example, when you commit to marrying one person, you sacrifice the possibility of dating everyone else. This sacrifice is attractive to people (and companies) because it says that you are willing to commit to them, and ONLY them. When you commit to one company for a long period, you are building a reputation as someone willing to sacrifice, and that sacrifice is attractive.
I ran a company with 300 employees across three states for a decade. During that time, I reviewed thousands of resumes with an eye for one thing—ROI. If I was going to invest time, effort, and money training and subsequently supervising someone, I wanted to ensure I was getting a return on that investment. We have an old adage in behavior science: “The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior.” If I review a resume with a track record of starting and then promptly leaving jobs (or holes in employment indicating subterfuge), that signals that their future behavior at my company is probably going to mirror their past behavior at other people’s companies.
In the long run, what people really want is clearly shown by what they were willing to sacrifice to get it. The extent of that sacrifice also correlates with the magnitude of the commitment: the larger the sacrifice, the larger the commitment. Unfortunately, this analysis is restricted to hindsight. When reviewing resumes with large commitments, hiring managers assume candidates have endured hardships because they made large sacrifices, which predicts a large ROI. Upon seeing small or short commitments, managers assume a small ROI.
In the end, your behaviors become your habits, your habits become your routines, and your routines become your reputation. So, build your reputation by shrinking your resume.
Improve Your Professional Repertoire
What did I learn when quitting each of those 27 jobs? I learned to give up when things became difficult. In addition, I mastered how to apply and interview for new jobs, which is not an admirable skillset; it just made job-jumping that much easier. Learning is about transitional behavior changes that maintain over time (Pierce & Cheney, 2014). Put differently, you are transitioning from not knowing to knowing something. Quitting a job not only teaches you what is not helpful to know (e.g., giving up), but also fails to teach you what you need to know to advance your career and improve as a person.
There are endless reasons for leaving a job, and most revolve around your boss, specifically their behavior and the culture they establish. The saying “people don’t quit companies, they quit bosses” is so prevalent that it is a meme. This uncomfortable situation is actually fortuitous; it provides you with opportunities to improve. When you encounter stressors (e.g., a difficult boss), you learn a few things:
How to deal with difficult situations
What behavior you like and don’t like
What you are good at and where you need to improve
Here…
So before leaving your job, think about what you could learn from staying. Think about what improvements you could make to yourself and your ability to control your own behavior. Think about what improvements to your professional repertoire you could make.
Commitment > Quitting
“Quitting smoking is easy, I’ve done it hundreds of times.” —Mark Twain
There is wisdom in that quote; everything about quitting is easy. It requires little effort, and like all things with few demands, it produces little reward. Quitting, by definition, is the antithesis of commitment. Quitting literally means inaction and carries a specter of negativity. It assumes things will get worse, no matter what you do. If you stop what you are doing, you will receive temporary relief.
Conversely, keeping a commitment is hard. It requires more than just a statement of fidelity; it requires constant action in the face of opportunity. Every time you are presented with a chance to take an easier path, you must actively choose to stay the course and sacrifice your comfort now for a lucrative ROI later. That sacrifice actually represents the advantage of commitment—it embodies an inherently positive outlook. When you commit to something, you are saying “if I keep at it, things will get better.”
At the end of the day, commitment is a deliberate choice to behave in a certain way, to exercise self-control. So the next time you think about quitting your job, consider the benefits of commitment instead. It just might turn out to be a good long-term investment for your career.
References:
Hess, J. A. (2020, January 8). Workers quit their jobs at the fastest rate on record in 2019—Here’s why. CNBC. https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/07/workers-quit-their-jobs-at-the-fastest-rate-on-record-in-2019.html
Maurer, R. (2018, December 12). Why are workers quitting their jobs in record numbers? Society for Human Resource Management. https://www.shrm.org/ResourcesAndTools/hr-topics/talent-acquisition/Pages/Workers-Are-Quitting-Jobs-Record-Numbers.aspx
Pierce, W. D., & Cheney, C. D. (2017). Behavior analysis and learning: A biobehavioral approach. Routledge.
Skinner, B. F. (1974). About behaviorism. Knopf.
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