Make Career Decisions Before Exhaustion Makes Them for You

Natasha Williams Author

Think Like the CEO of Your Career: Make Better Career Decisions

The first three articles in this series have focused on understanding your environment, protecting your resources and strengthening your professional position.

Those steps create the foundation for one of the most difficult parts of career management, which is deciding what to do when your current situation no longer works.

The Cost of Black Excellence research makes the scale of this question difficult to ignore.

Within the Black-heritage responses in the dataset, 91.7% had considered leaving a role or had already left a role to protect their mental or emotional wellbeing.

More than one quarter had already left a role for this reason.

When thoughts about leaving become this widespread, career decision-making deserves more attention than advice to become more resilient or find another job.

Do not wait until you are exhausted to examine your options

People often begin serious career planning at the point when remaining where they are feels unbearable.

This creates a difficult decision-making environment because exhaustion narrows attention.

The question quickly becomes whether to stay or resign, despite there being several possible responses between those two positions.

A strategic career review might lead you to stay under different conditions, challenge a decision, request a clearer progression route, move to another team, reposition internally, search externally or prepare to leave over a defined period.

Within COBE, I describe this as considering whether you need to stay, challenge, reposition or leave.

The purpose of the framework is not to prescribe the answer. Its purpose is to prevent exhaustion from reducing a complex career decision to a single escape route.

Separate responsibility from authority

One participant in the research described reaching director level while carrying responsibility for significant results without receiving equivalent authority or resources.

She described having “all the responsibility but no authority”.

This is an important career signal.

A senior title without the authority, budget, resources, sponsorship or decision-making power required to perform the role creates a structural problem which personal effort will struggle to solve.

Before responding by working even harder, ask whether the conditions required for success exist.

If leadership expects an outcome, do you have the authority to make the decisions required to deliver it? If you are accountable for a team, do you control enough of the resources affecting that team's performance?

If you are expected to lead change, do senior leaders support you when that change becomes uncomfortable?

These questions help distinguish a development challenge from a structural constraint.

Separate what you know from what you fear

Difficult workplace experiences often create a mixture of evidence, interpretation and fear.

You might know that you have been unsuccessful in three promotion processes, believe senior leaders do not see you as leadership material and fear that no other employer will value your experience.

Those three statements require different responses.

The first is evidence. The second requires further investigation. The third requires testing against the external market.

When all three become emotionally fused, leaving feels dangerous and staying feels intolerable.

Separating them gives you clearer actions.

You might request detailed feedback, speak to senior sponsors, test your CV with recruiters, apply for comparable external roles or benchmark your salary and experience against the market.

Information changes the quality of the decision.

Create career decision criteria

Your next career move should reflect what matters to you now rather than a definition of success you inherited earlier in your career.

You might place greater value on health, flexibility, intellectual freedom, salary, purpose, progression, leadership responsibility or time with family than you did ten years ago.

Write your criteria before evaluating your options.

Then assess your existing role and realistic alternatives against the same criteria.

This approach is particularly important for experienced Black professionals who have spent years achieving goals without regularly asking whether the goals still represent the life they want.

Build readiness before you need an exit

Even when you intend to stay, you should understand your external options.

Your CV should reflect your current achievements. Your LinkedIn profile should tell an accurate professional story. Your network should exist beyond your employer, and you should understand your financial position well enough to know what career flexibility you possess.

You should also know which organisations interest you, which skills the market values and what type of working environment you would seek next.

This preparation does not mean you lack commitment to your employer.

It means your entire livelihood is not dependent on one organisation continuing to provide the conditions you need.

The purpose of becoming the CEO of your career is to increase agency before crisis takes it away.

Once you have more choices, the final question becomes larger than whether you should stay or leave your current role.

You need to decide what you are building towards.

Continue with Part Five: Think Like the CEO of Your Career — Build a Career Bigger Than Your Current Job.