Job Aid – Should I Stay or Should I Go

Perhaps your company’s culture has shifted, you’re no longer feeling valued, or you’re simply wondering what’s next for your career.

“Do I stay, or do I go?” is one of the most significant professional questions you can ask when you reach a crossroads in your career. This job aid is designed to help you answer that question.

We offer a simple but powerful free tool that provides a structured approach to evaluate your job. By guiding you through a series of questions and a scoring system, it will help you quantify your feelings and gain a clear, objective view of your current professional situation.

Unleadable?

Stephen the Anti-Hero

Steven was the “go-to guy.” He knew everything. He knew everyone. He had been at the company longer than most people had been in their careers. If you had a question, Steven had the answer. If he didn’t, he’d figure it out. He was that essential—the kind of person leadership believed the company couldn’t survive without.

But Steven worked alone. Not in the “quietly focused” kind of way, but in the “shut everyone out” kind of way. He was on the engineering team, yet one by one, engineers stopped wanting to work with him. His way of doing things left no room for collaboration, no space for others to grow. When leadership saw the breakdown, they shifted him to the analyst team, hoping for a fresh start. It didn’t matter. The same walls went up.

And then it got worse. Steven didn’t just isolate himself—he started spreading lies. Whispered fabrications about his coworkers and their leaders began to make their way to executive ears. And because Steven had been the hero who helped secure major contracts—the lifeblood of the company—leadership weighed every complaint from others against Steven’s perceived value and decided his intellect outweighed the damage.

Meanwhile, the damage was devastating. Entire teams were demoralized. Good employees dreaded walking in the door. Some were ready to quit, not because of the work, but because leadership’s frustration — fueled by Steven’s false reports — landed squarely on them. Team leaders tried to speak up. They laid out the risk of losing top talent. They pointed to the growing fracture in the culture.

And leadership’s answer? Steven wins again. His “critical knowledge” was deemed more important than trust, teamwork, or truth. The message was loud and clear to every employee: you can poison the culture, tear teams apart, and erode morale — as long as you win contracts.

If this sounds familiar, you are not alone. Every organization has a Steven.  Your Steven may be the naysayer. He may be arrogant and talk down to others. He may be critical of everyone’s ideas except his own.  Nonetheless, much like Steven in this story, your Steven is one of the unleadable, and if left unmanaged, Steven can destroy the fabric of your organization, like he ultimately did in this story.

Too many organizations have experienced the loss of talent and knowledge because of the bad behaviors exhibited by Steven, and others like him. The good news is that mavericks like this can be turned around – they can actually become forces for good.