Bob Moesta: observation

Transcript context

…So let's follow that thread of experiences, and this is a good segue to the four reasons people leave jobs and the quest as you described. So talk about what these experiences might be that you should be thinking about. What we do is we do these interviews and we basically think of it as the ultimate of exit interviews. Why did you really leave this job? And so most of the time people won't tell their companies the truth. And so these are unfiltered interviews around like tell me what was really going on and out of it, we end up getting what we call pushes and pulls and these pushes and pulls is we end up with 13 different pushes. Things like I'm bored, things like I'm pushed beyond my ability, I've been disrespected. There's these things that have to happen that cause them to do that. There's also 14 pulls which is I want to work with a team that's got my back. I want to feel like I'm doing my best work. I want to make sure that I can free up time so I can carry my weight at home. There's these other things that you pull for. But what happened is that when you start to look at all thousand interviews, they fall into one of four buckets. Two of them really are the standard thing. One is this bucket of get out. It is sucking my energy. I don't really know what to do, I can't think about what to do next. Help me get out of here so I can actually start to breathe and think. Right? Another quest is help me take the next step, which is I am where I am. The fact is I don't see a place where I can go next. And the fact is I want to take the next step to build some skills or capabilities, help me find that place where I can take my next step. Those are two standard ones, but what you start to realize is there's two others and the others are basically help me regain control. This is where you like what you're doing, but the fact is that at some point there's just too much of it and you're not doing it in a way that basically you don't like the way you're doing it. And so part of it is pulling you back to basically where you actually have control over the work and control over yourself and control to basically manage your time yourself because at some point we get sucked in and it happens a lot in startups. It gets to be so much it's like, all right, I need to get control because my home life is falling apart. There's things like that and I can speak from experience on that where I've actually sold out of a startup so I could actually go back and fix my home life. There's the fourth one though is a very interesting one, which is when you're in a position and you start to end up... You end getting stretched into other places where you're not necessarily so good, but the fact is it is part of the experience, but you need to be realigned. It's like help me realign back to the things that I'm really good at and what I like to do. And so ultimately you go into a position, you get a promotion, you end up moving to a place where you can see where it's there and all of a sudden you end up waking up one morning and going like, God, why am I doing all this stuff? I really like to do that stuff. you end up moving to a place where you can see where it's there and all of a sudden you end up waking up one morning and going like, God, why am I doing all this stuff? I really like to do that stuff. I had this one, for example, I grew my firm where I had almost 50 people and I started to realize I spent all my time on people issues and I love to work on product. And so eventually I actually reshaped the whole business to get us down to five people. I found everybody else jobs and then ultimately helped me basically get back to being able to do the work because that's the stuff I love to do. And so it's these four different quests that you realize. And what's interesting is if I look through my career, I've been in all four of those quests sometime in my life, and part of it is to assess your situation so you understand what quest you're on so you can actually start to understand what it's going to take to make the move that you need to make.…

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