Hey everyone. I'm Varun Rajan, and this is the Push Pull Podcast where we talk about career transitions and the motivations behind them. I willingly left my most recent job, they paid me well. There was a lot of great stuff I loved about the people and the work that I was doing, but if I were to look back on my time there, I think it's fair to say that the value that I saw in my job was more about the bullet points on my resume than it actually was about the day-to-day or sense of fulfillment that I was getting at my job. I also think that there was a sense of feeling like I shouldn't necessarily be getting my day-to-day fulfillment outta my job. as a passionate person who has spent his career in education, talent, healthcare. I care a lot about what I do and I want to find a larger purpose that gets me up in the morning. And it matters to me that my work matters. And so when it does feel like I'm trying to work towards. Things to just buttress my resume. That can be incredibly draining. obviously this is not to say that ambition doesn't matter. Of course it does. You wanna be seeing growth, you wanna be compensated well, you wanna be moving up and onwards in your career. my point is simply that in my circumstance, I stayed as long as I did. Because I was hoping that there would be some incremental progress around my title or, the scope of responsibilities in a way that would angle me for what was next and not necessarily actually being excited about what I was present to do on a day-to-day basis. I was in a growth in commerce product management role for the first time in my career. There were real numbers, millions of dollars attached to the work that I was doing and that I was shipping, and that felt good, but a lot of it was really just ego. And not necessarily the impact that gave me energy. I'm, coming back to, to this book, um, job Moves by Bob Moesta of, Jobs to Be Done Fame, Ethan Bernstein and Michael B. Horn. Um, and there is so much in here about kind of the right and wrong reasons for why people leave jobs and How you can really investigate that within yourself to make sure that you're making the right decisions. these guys also talk very candidly about push and pull factors. One of the things that they bring up that I think is incredibly valuable is that most job descriptions, uh, are about features, uh, rather than experiences. this is kind of a great way to think about products that you're building as a product manager as well, but. people see most jobs or job opportunities as their job descriptions, which are more about features than they are about experiences. What's the difference between a feature and an experience? A feature might be the bullet points on your resume that you're going to get out of having this job. the compensation, the benefits, the title, the scope of, impact and management. But people really stay, not for the features of a job, but the experiences, the sense of growth. What gives you energy, what keeps you present, what gives you a sense of fulfillment. pushes and pulls. might come down to something as. Simple as they were not paying me enough. But What they found in the research is that something like compensation, obviously it matters. There are real life impacts to things like that. But what they have found in the research is that oftentimes compensation is a proxy for a level of respect for the quality of work that somebody is doing. same thing with a promotion. the promotion isn't necessarily just for the compensation and the title and the future opportunity. It is also a proxy for the acknowledgement of the contribution and the good work that somebody's doing, so. Um, some of the common pushes that, that they come up with that are not necessarily, Hey, I'm not getting paid enough, or I'm not working on what I want to. Um, you know, when I don't respect or trust the people that I work with, when I feel like the work that I'm doing has little impact on the company or my life. Um, when the company is struggling and the end feels near, obviously that's a rough one. Uh, when I feel disrespected and when I don't feel trusted. Common pulls, uh, to. To the, to the next job, right? It's, uh, I wanna be acknowledged, respected, and trusted to do great work. my values align with the company and the people that I work with. Those are common pull factors that are really aspirational and speak to something that is kind of core and fundamental about values, belief systems, and sense of fulfillment beyond just. The features of the job. Do I get to do more data analysis or more design? Do I get to work on this technology or that? Do I get to be in X, y, or Z industry? those kinds of surface level things, they're important, but sometimes maybe they're not as important as what brings you to be truly present in your job on a day-to-day basis. What gets you to show up? I like being a product manager. I've been a product manager for the bulk of my career. It lets me interact with a whole ton of people and the day-to-day of what I'm working on, the tools that I'm using, leaning into user research, one day data analysis the next. I love the diversity of activities. I love it. I really do, but I also know. And I've known this kind of for a long time, that the people around me and investing in them and helping them connect the dots as to maybe what they should be working on or how they could benefit the business and their career at the same time. Um, those are the things that really light me up at the end of the day. earlier on in my career. I was technically a product manager, but I found myself coaching, tech support, customer service, and engineering teammates I remember this moment so clearly It was during my time as a pm, but honestly, I was moonlighting as an unofficial coach. The tech support team, customer service leads, engineers, even. I would sit with them, talk about their goals, suggest. Conferences, public speaking gigs. but I would also suggest advocating for being promoted into team leads or management roles, or making the cross-functional change from operations to product management like I had in the past. I remember talking to people on the educator side 'cause I've been in ed tech for so long on how they can move into management roles and within the company itself and help them form their own successful pitches for their own advancement within the company. I was really driven by helping people connect their own growth to their impact, and advocating for themselves, helping the business along by essentially helping the people that I worked with advocate for themselves and pursue the things that mattered both to themselves as well as the business. I wasn't trying to be anybody's manager. I just couldn't help seeing what they were capable of becoming but here's the kicker. No one asked me what I was trying to do. I knew I wanted to go deeper into people development, to design roles or paths that lit people up, And I started to make that clear. there was one point in my career working at a startup where I tried to ask around about how I might be able to craft a role that was spanning product, operations, and people. I was talking to the head of product. I was talking to the head of HR and the head of engineering at that company to really try and figure out how I can move myself forward in the kind of role that I really wanted and they were willing to hear me out but the options that I were offered were either, solely tech operations starting at the very beginning, uh, in HR or doing something else completely in product management. Each was in a little silo each, a step down, and it's not that I didn't wanna do the work to earn my chops in a new vertical or a new function. I just didn't wanna shrink. None of these roles, let me blend my people instincts. With the strategic business focused work, every role that was being offered felt like a compromise, a demotion, a box, or a split identity. I was finding the connective tissue for all of these things in ways that I thought were incredibly valuable, to the business and really inspiring people to do their best work and grow alongside the company, and not just grow with the company but grow. in benefit to the company as well. And this is where I want to ask you, is this something that you've maybe felt before, that maybe you had strengths and talents that lit you up and were also objectively valuable, but there wasn't a box that you could fit in that your company or organization was asking you and has that. Led to you leaving a job because you felt there was a misfit or a lack of respect or appreciation for what you actually did best. And if that is the case, what would it have been like if someone had just asked you, what's actually exciting you lately? What does progress look like for you? What would a role look like that let you do more of that? Which brings me to chapter 12 of Job Moves, which is titled Build A Team. Your employees want to rehire each day. The whole idea is that you are hiring your next job. You are not just getting hired. You are absolutely in the process of doing your own interviewing yourself. so their advice to employers is basically to take all of the stuff, the stuff that I'm doing right now, the stuff that they recommend that job seekers do get very, very clear about their pushes and pulls the things that light them up They get real deep, like really map out the times in your day that you get a lot of energy. how do you put the activities that lit you up on a scale from like highly leveraged to like highly engaged? When do you feel more pres most present? I'm not gonna get into all of that right now, but there is a lot that they suggest that job seekers do for themselves, including having a mentor or a trusted colleague actually go through and interview them and ask them about their pushes and pulls, all that kind of stuff. What they recommend for employers is to do the exact same thing. Help your own employees understand what their push and pull factors are. Help them understand what they like and they don't like about their current job. And apparently they get a lot of pushback from some HR folks, uh, who say, well, we want to try this, but management is reticent to do it because not only is it hard to carve out the time and the energy to, pull efforts away from the actual work in order to do a bunch of self-reflection. But at the end of the day, if you help people really identify their strengths and weaknesses and what they don't like about their current job, they might end up moving on, but like. They're gonna end up moving on anyway. The likelihood of you training your employees to the point where they stick around for 20 years is not gonna be there, but it's likelier that they'll stay for another year or two to see through a five year strategy. And also, it's entirely likely that if there is not a role for them to play in your company right now, given their interests and core competencies, that they may come back. I've successfully boomerang to the same company multiple times because they treated me incredibly well and were thoughtful about what I wanted to work on, and worked with me to try and make sure that I was doing something that was going to benefit the business as well as myself in terms of my career. So I hold a lot of goodwill for everyone that I've worked with in the past. And I think that employers who go through this process that's outlined in job moves have a much better chance of building that goodwill with their employees, even if the employees choose to leave. There's also the possibility of your employees moving on to other employers that could end up being clients of your company or partners of your company in the future. there is an ecosystem of people that find ways to work together after they stopped being colleagues at the same company. So I think. Anyone that isn't pursuing some way to invest in their workforce, to understand the emotional landscape of how their team interacts with one another, and how individuals feel about the things that they're working on, if they're avoiding doing that kind of thing for some sense of scarcity when it comes to time, money, resources, from one thing I think. Your talent at the end of the day and their happiness and willingness to go the extra mile for you depends a lot on your investment in them. And on the flip side, the idea that you might be training them to leave you, I mean, that's just a risk that you're gonna have to take. And one that I think you're going to have faith that your good faith efforts build enough goodwill that it will redound to your and your company's benefit at the end of the day. The book gives an example of the online shoe retailer, Zappos, doing something incredibly innovative. Zappos about 10 years ago, 2013, so 12 years ago, they ended up basically. Leaning into extremely flexible role designs. And so what ended up happening is that the average Zappos employee went from having one role into having seven and a half roles afterwards, which is kind of wild. At first, it was a huge mess and incredibly difficult to track who was working on what and who to go to for what. But at the end of the day, what they ended up doing is building a bunch of internal resources of Who had what skills and who to go to for what, and it ended up being incredibly effective for them to flatten out their entire hierarchy and make sure that Everybody was able to contribute in a way that was most beneficial to the business because it was, I. Uh, tied very closely to their core competencies as employees and as workers. I totally understand that that is a super, super extreme example, but here's how Job moves in this chapter talks about this. They say, technology has made it far easier today than it was back then to support individual job enrichment. We have social enterprise tools now, virtual learning tools, more robust ways of measuring employee engagement, productivity, learning, and even happiness. And now we have ai. the future of work is looking a lot more. Like gigs fractional work, um, a lot of people wearing a lot of different hats and maybe working for a lot of different companies, but maybe that doesn't necessarily have to be the case, especially if you are building a business and a company that can leverage people that can wear multiple hats. You might hire them in for one specific thing that you need or a set of job responsibilities and find that maybe the individuals that you hire might be better off doing one thing or another. And obviously it's a constant investment in understanding what skills and resources you have at your disposal, how much flexibility can you actually have, and making sure that the dollars are coming in and the lights are staying on and you're able to meet your growth targets and all that kind of stuff. I'm not saying that this is easy by any stretch of the imagination, but my hope is that we can start to really quantify. This kind of shift by employers, the shift towards more flexible working arrangements, not necessarily with, you know, remote hybrid schedule, that kind of thing. But in terms of core competencies, what lights people up and finding the ways to match that with the actual needs of the business. So I call on leaders, on managers on. Founders and executives, if there's somebody on your team that is doing something meaningful that's not on their job description, what would it look like for you to design around that work? And if you are that person, how long do you wait before building what you need elsewhere? I have often left. Jobs because I felt like I cared too much about things that did not matter to the company and to company leadership and to the silos of different functions that were working at that company. And nobody knew how to make room for the things that I specifically cared about, and I didn't know how to effectively advocate for myself. But this book, job Moves and this chapter in particular that encourages employers to dig one step deeper to really understand. What people care about when it comes to the work that they do and use that to their advantage in order to serve the business as well as the employee's growth. It's not only validating because I feel like I was that employee, it's validating because this is the kind of stuff that I feel like I was advocating for when I was in that position. So my mind is being blown sometimes. I don't know if I'm reading this book or if this book is reading me. It's a pretty good one-liner, so I'm pretty proud of that. Um, but um, yeah. What do you guys think? Am I asking for too much? Is this a, is this too much of a Kumbaya? Everybody get along. Employers need to get on board with being better to their employees. I don't know. I feel like there's something salient here. I think that if the future is moving towards more gig economy type work, chopping up our skills, If our work is getting more and more segmented, fractioned and atomized, why can't companies leverage that? By essentially hiring the same person for multiple jobs themselves, instead of trying to put it out to the gig economy in order to get something staffed, let me know what you think. as always, if you like this, please like the video. If you're watching it on YouTube, give me a review on whatever podcast platform that you're watching this on. Tell your friends about this podcast. I am definitely going to be continuing to do interviews. I am rethinking exactly what that format is gonna be, but I'm also really enjoying doing some deeper dives into reading articles and content and sharing my thoughts. about these because I think the team training, the workplace wellness and longevity angle of what I've been investigating is really speaking to me both from my own personal experience and also from where I'm seeing gaps in the job market, or the employment market more broadly. So that's what I think. Uh, also, again, you can always email me, Varun V-A-R-U-N, at push pull podcast.com. Thanks again for listening and uh, all the best.