What You Lose When You Switch Jobs...
...you can recover. But it'll take practice. Let's talk about regaining your workplace connections that, more than anything else, make you the human you so beautifully are.
Every week, this newsletter lands in your inbox with a trend, a study, a tale, and a switch focused on healing your experience of the American workplace.
(Well, almost every week. Last week, I took a Labor Day break.)
This week, I’d like to chat with you about the relational gains (and losses) that come with changing jobs and switching careers.
A Trend
Nearly half of Gen Z employees today rely more on AI than on their managers to get guidance at work, this according to an LMS Survey. I pay attention to rising professional experience, because Gen Zs are on the brink of work’s future for the rest of us. So a statistic like this catches my eye.
The fact that, as Forbes has pointed out, “the youngest workforce turns to AI over people” points to a trend of loneliness in the workplace—a topic you can expect the Mode/Switchers to talk about in this week’s podcast on Friday morning.
What do you think this trend points to for people who are switching jobs right now? What needs to change in the workplace for job-switchers and career changers, whatever generation, to be relationally present on the job? And what do you need to practice in order to recover the human connection in your new place of work?
A Study
This week, the Mode/Switch points to an academic study that hasn’t happened yet. Scholars have done a great job exploring the effects of unemployment on loneliness. See, for example, this academic review of research by N. Morrish and A. Medina-Lara on getting fired and feeling alone. They noted that losing your job makes you feel more alone and “that loneliness was predictive of unemployment.” So, yep, there’s a close interaction between the work you do and the company you keep—or don’t.
What hasn’t been studied sufficiently, so far as I can tell, is the way that changing jobs changes your relational experience.
(Geez, now I’m sitting here thinking I really need to research that.)
A Tale
A few years back, I joined the ranks of the Great Resigners and quit my job—a tenured position in a tiny, cozily communal liberal arts college in Chicago—so I could take a position in a larger university in west Michigan. It felt like an adventure. What I didn’t expect was the loss of social capital I experienced.
What was I thinking, though? Did I really imagine I could saunter into a new department and a new classroom and just soak up people’s trust and respect? That sort of capital has to be earned.
Just yesterday, I was doing a book giveaway for research participants who’d generously given their time for a book I’ve just published (as I may have told you a few too many times). Gosh, it was good to reconnect with so many good humans!
But two responses stand out.
One told me she’d just quit her job and was in between things. She’d resigned because her job was simply asking too much of her. Her boss was unapologetic about that: yep, this is a job that requires you to give your all.
Another respondent told me he, too, was switching jobs—but doing so upward. He’s taking a high-level communications position where, as he put it, “Part of my role will actually be creating and leading internal training specifically focused on communication.”
Both of these millennials face challenges, one to find a new, more sustainable line of work, and the other to deal with the loss of social capital that almost inevitably comes with changing jobs.
A Switch
This week, I’d like to propose that, when you find yourself needing to switch jobs, you also need a switch in focus from social to relational capital. Social capital tends to be about who you know and the status that knowing gives you. But relational capital is more about active, generous connection than privileged status.
The thing about relational capital is that it requires virtue, which is a fancy way of saying it takes practice. Here’s one thing you may have to practice: being fascinated by what you don’t know about your coworkers.
Maybe you’re the kind of person who’s good at playing the role of the Accomplished Professional. You know how to hint (without flexing) that you already know a lot. But isn’t it better to focus on what you don’t know? Isn’t it better to keep asking questions, withholding judgment, letting yourself be surprised by the humans around you?
Maybe your tendency, on the other hand, is to seek an immediate intimacy with the people around you. That’s one of my tendencies, for sure. When I come into a new social setting, my impulse is to identify as closely as possible with whoever’s in front of me. The subtext of every conversation: “You and I are just alike.” In actuality, we rarely are. There’s a lot of relational wisdom in simply practicing a kindly caution about quick identifying-with.
One final note that takes us back to the Gen Zs and their AI workplace besties. Large language networks differ from human colleagues in one important regard: they don’t die, and we do.
I know, I know: Good morbid to you, too! But what makes us humans uniquely and genuinely relational is not that we’re rational or that we’re strategic but that we’re mortal. We’re woundable. We’re aging. We’re dying.
When you switch jobs, I hope you feel a burst of possibility and optimism. But I also hope you remember to practice being mortally present to all the humans around you.
Listen While You Work
Needing some inspiration and courage for the good, slow work of building relational capital at work? Hannah Sherbrooke’s got you covered with this week’s LWYW playlist.
The Book Has Dropped
I hope you’ll buy Digital Overwhelm to find researched counsel and spiritual wisdom about the work of building organizational community, one mode switch at a time.
