Title, Promotion, and Pay Is Not The Answer to Your Happiness

How corporate greed is destroying top talent

It’s amazing how often I find myself surrounded by people in my professional life who genuinely believe they will be happier and feel more successful if they get promoted.

In a year of record layoffs driven by corporate greed, companies are putting pressure on their employees to do more with less.

Low performers are being managed out, positions aren’t being backfilled, headcount is remaining flat, and the work all piles up on the high performers.

On top of it all, the high performers aren’t being promoted or compensated fairly for their additional work due to the financial cutbacks.

This puts the high performers in two categories:

• The ones that work harder to keep up, hoping for a promotion
• The ones that leave (The smart ones)

There’s nothing wrong with shooting for a promotion for those who want it, but far too often employees think about the money or title more than the work they will perform daily in that new position.

I’ve seen this firsthand over the past two years, and the outcome is not pretty.

I work for a tech company that employs some of the country’s highest-performing software engineers.

The company has been anything but immune to the corporate greed layoffs this past year.

Our team’s work has more than doubled in the past 9 months, more than half the team has been laid off, the headcount has remained flat, and only a select few have been promoted.

Of those promoted this year, 85% quit in the past 3 weeks.

On top of that, our entire leadership team resigned with less than a week’s notice.

Note: We’re not a startup, most of the folks who quit have been with the company over 10 years.

So what happened?

In my opinion, the executives turned up the pressure cooker too high and it finally burst.

Worst of all, they’ve lost an incredible amount of talent and historical knowledge.

Talented employees are like a set of fine knives, treat them with care and keep them sharp and they’ll work wonders for you, slam them into a cutting board and overuse them and they’ll be ground down to uselessness.

Try not to immediately assume that a raise or promotion will solve all your problems.

Think about what matters most to you and your happiness then decide whether or not the title and pay is worth the sacrifice.