Thinking of quitting your job? Here’s why you shouldn’t

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The following edited excerpt is republished from Catalyst, authored by Chandramouli Venkatesan, a corporate veteran with over twenty-six years of experience in the industry. The excerpt is published courtesy of Penguin Random House.

How long should one work in one company, one organization? The answer to that question lies in what it is doing to your real individual growth, your experience algorithm. Is the long stint helping you solidify your experience algorithm or has it started to stagnate at some stage? In my own judgment, long stints in one company are highly beneficial to the experience algorithm. Let me explain why.

What’s your experience algorithm?

At any given point in time, when you are in a job, you are learning from that job and your experience algorithm is being built based on the job/role you are doing. What happens when you have a long stint in one organization is that after a point of time, you are learning not just from the role/job that you are currently doing but from all the previous roles that you did in that organization. Let me explain with my own experience.

In my stint with Mondelez, which was over eleven years long, I was closely associated with two brands—Cadbury Silk and Oreo. The first time I worked on these brands was when I was heading the chocolate and biscuit categories between 2010 and 2013.

Thereafter, I moved out of this role into another one that was in the Asia-Pacific region, and my direct line of sight of these brands was limited. After a few years, I came back as managing director, India.

When I returned, I again had direct line of sight to these two brands, and I could assess the performance of both the brands and, more importantly, analyze the current performance with the lens of actions I had taken in my previous stint. With the discipline of Technology Maturation & Risk Reduction (TMRR), I asked myself, “What did I do in the formative stages of these brands that still have an impact on their performance even after a few years?” And most importantly, “What could I have done better at the formative stage?” The answers to these questions helped me in further building my experience algorithm on new product launches.

To put it simply, as managing director, I was learning and building my algorithm not just from my job as MD, but also from a role I had done in the same company as category director, chocolates, and biscuits, 3–4 years ago.

It meant that my experience algorithm was being built at a rapid scale; it was not just being built on what I was doing at that time, but on what all I had done in the same company for over a decade.

Once you cross the critical mass of years, you are not just learning from the job you do but also from all the previous roles you have done in that company

That, in a way, is the simple benefit of a long stint in one company—once you cross the critical mass of years, say, five years, you are not just learning from the role/job you do but also from all the previous roles you have done in that company.

Normally, when you are in a job, your experience algorithm is being built based on that role—one can call it the linear curve of building experience. But when the learning is not just limited to what you are doing at that point of time, when you are learning and building the experience algorithm from all that you have done in the past in that company, the algorithm-building becomes a non-linear, exponential curve.

What are some credible reasons to quit?

I believe there are only two credible reasons that can allow you to take the ‘quit’ decision—learning and fit. If at some stage, you feel you are no longer learning and your algorithm is not building up, and you are sure that it is because of the organization and not because of you, then you can consider quitting your current organization.

The second aspect is ‘fit’. When you feel your values and culture no longer match those of the organization and you are fundamentally a misfit in your current organization, that is the time to quit. These are the only two reasons that should drive your reason to quit. It should not be pay, designation, and other emotional aspects.