Losing (and Maintaining) Trust in Your Company

At any given time most people have a laundry-list of frustrations with their job. Yet even in the face of major disappointments like getting passed over for a promotion, they will often still feel positive about their work overall. Maybe they still really like their coworkers, or believe in the mission, or just enjoy the day-to-day mundanity enough that they’re ok with some frustration in the bigger picture.

But this can also quickly flip into a negative spiral, where every interaction suddenly becomes a major issue and sends them into the red. Some signs you might be experiencing this spiral include:

• Your blood pressure spikes every time a certain person slacks you.
• You feeling like every decision getting made is wrong.
• You get irritated every time a specific initiative is raised.

Often in tech this behavior is referenced to as “burnout”, where you detach from work due to feeling exhausted from a prolonged period of stress. But I don’t think that’s quite the right metaphor. Burnout leads to a passive detachment, not an active irritation like a spiral. Instead I’d liken this feeling to something closer to a negative sentiment override. The subtleties here matter because if you misdiagnose your feeling as burnout, your instinct may be to step away and rest. But getting out of a negative spiral requires active effort, not just time off.

Instead, I find the trust battery a much more helpful metaphor to think about this, as a battery that exists between you and your company. Positive actions like a raise or liking your team can raise the battery level to such a point that even large negatives like disagreeing with the company strategy or being overworked for months can still leave you generally positive about the experience. But if you deplete the battery for too long without any corresponding boosts, you’ll end up in the negative spiral and either be miserable or leave your job.

Successfully completing a few large projects each year or getting a regular raise will often leave you at a high enough stasis point. But just like gamblers going broke after hours at a table, if you stay long enough at one job, probability alone means that at some point the negatives will outweigh the positives. This is especially true if you’re at a job for a long (4+ year) stint like I was at AngelList.

I also found that these “easy” positive events weren’t always fully in my control. Getting a raise might depend on the company’s financials, how my manager viewed compensation, etc. In an ideal world my company would also do their part to keep me engaged, and I certainly view it as one of my primary duties as a manager. But even great managers are going to fuck up, and I don’t want to be relying on any outside force. At the end of the day it’s my life, and I need to take 100% responsibility for it.

So I developed a few habits to more actively keep myself engaged:

• Regularly interviewing candidates. Any interviewer knows that one of the most frequent questions you’re asked is “what do you like best about the company?” I found that coming up with an authentic answer and regularly repeating it to yourself and others almost indoctrinates you to believe it, just like smiling can make you happier.
• Carving out time for energy boosting activities. Especially as a manager, often times your wins come from long term efforts like coaching your report and seeing them take over and lead a meeting flawlessly or shipping a quarter long roadmap. But if I’m having a bad day, I know that taking on a small ticket in the backlog and seeing all the tests go green will give me an energy boost right when I need it. I really like the term “snacking” for this work. Like junk-food, I have to be careful not to over-indulge this impulse since it’s very rarely the most valuable work I could be doing. But I do think it’s valuable work when it lets me manage my mental health.
• Fixing things yourself. Often decisions may seem out of your control, especially as you go farther down the org chart. But a reasonable percentage of the time you actually will be able to drive change simply by being the person in the company who cares the most about it. Even if you ultimately aren’t successful or things truly are out of your control, you will certainly be remembered by leadership as someone who cares. Whereas if you don’t even try, you never had a chance.
• Actively building relationships outside my organization who are above me in the org chart. These diagonal relationships helped me trust the intent behind every decision, because I knew that the people making the call had good reasons— even if I didn’t agree.
• As a final test, taking a recruiter call or first interview externally can be very revealing. After the call, do you feel excited or nervous? Are there initiatives you’ll miss seeing to fruition? People you want to see grow a bit more? Taking that first step towards leaving can remind you what you value about your current company, or confirm it’s time to move on. Either way, you get some much needed clarity.