You probably remember exactly why you took the job that started your career. Saying why you are still where you are, and whether that reason would hold up if someone asked, is harder. Why we stay often follows the same pattern as our childhood friendships. The pattern also warns that an employer can move on before you do.
You Didn’t Choose Your First Friends Either
Picture a nurse who took her first job twenty-two years ago because the hospital was eight minutes from her apartment and the nurse manager called back first. Today she is the system’s CNO, sitting in the strategic planning retreat, and she realizes the five-year plan on the screen describes an organization she would never have applied to.
Nobody did anything wrong. The hospital changed and so did she, and at some point the two stopped pointing in the same direction. Most of us learned how that works long before our first job, from the friends we sat next to in third grade and somehow stopped calling by senior year.
Friendship Starts With Proximity and Ends Up About Direction
Look back and the pattern is hard to miss.
- Proximity comes first. When you are eight, your friends are the kids in your class or on your bus, and you did not choose them so much as land next to them.
- Shared activity comes next. By middle school, friendship follows what you do together, and the team or the band becomes the reason you see each other every afternoon.
- Shared direction comes last. As adults, we stay close to people who want similar things from life and who behave in ways we respect.
Careers tend to move through the same stages, and each one feels permanent while you are in it.
Most Careers Start on the Bus Route
Now think about how you chose your first healthcare job. For many executives it was the hospital closest to home, or the one where they did clinical rotations as a student and already knew which hallway led to the cafeteria. That is proximity. A few years later, people stay because of what they are doing, like the unit they rebuilt or the team they hired, and those are real reasons to stay. They describe work you have already done. They say nothing about whether the organization is headed where you are.
An Employer That Grew With You Is Hard to Replace
Some childhood friendships last forty years. They survive because both people kept growing and happened to grow in the same direction. Employers can do that too. An organization that gave you a larger scope before you asked, or gave you a seat on a system-wide committee while you were still a director, has been growing alongside you. Walking away from that for a bigger title can mean trading an employer that has already invested in you for one that has not yet decided whether it will.
Ask About Events, Not Feelings
Asking yourself whether you are where you want to be rarely produces a useful answer, because it asks about a feeling you already have instead of something you can check.
Better questions point at events.
- What can you do now that you could not do three years ago? If the honest answer is the same work at a larger volume, the organization is using your strengths without adding to them.
- When did someone above you last ask what you want next? Organizations that intend to grow with a leader tend to raise that conversation unprompted, so a long silence is information.
- Which of your reasons for staying would survive the person you report to leaving? Loyalty to one person is real, but it depends on working together, the way a middle school friendship depends on the team, and it ends the day that person leaves.
- When did you last talk with a former colleague who now works somewhere else? If you have to think about it, that is the one answer on this list you can change this month.
Sometimes the Employer Moves Away First
Even an organization that passes every one of those questions can move away. Nobody outgrew anyone; a parent got transferred, and the friendship ended on someone else’s schedule. In healthcare, that looks like a merger that folds two leadership teams into one, or a system reorganization that removes an entire management layer along with everyone in it. The leader who spent years wondering whether to leave rarely considers that the organization might move on first.
Call the Old Friends Before You Need Them
The colleagues at your current employer are not the only old friends in a career. The people you worked with did not stay put either. The charge nurse you worked with at the bedside a decade ago may now be a CNO two states away, and the analyst from your first system may be running finance for someone else. Those relationships are the network most leaders forget they have. They also fade quietly.
This month, reach out to three former colleagues, whether from a previous employer or people who have left yours. Make two of them people you worked well with, and keep the message about them, whether that is a promotion you noticed or a question about how their system handles something you are working on. Do not ask for a favor or a referral.
If there is someone things ended awkwardly with, make them the third. When a hiring organization checks references beyond your list, that person may get the call, and the last impression they have of you is the one they will repeat. A short, gracious note that acknowledges their work does not settle old disagreements. It does give them a newer impression to repeat. Do not reopen the issue. If the relationship is truly broken, a note will not help, and the better move is offering a reference who worked at that organization when you did and saw your work firsthand, so anyone checking hears more than one account.
Old friends are the ones who call when they hear about a role that fits you. They can only do that if they still know who you are.