Messaging and Positioning Template for Social Impact Leaders
Craft compelling messaging with our template for social impact leaders.
When to Quit Your Job: Questions to Ask Yourself First
Struggling with your leadership role? Learn when to quit your job and align with professional development goals.
This article is part of a series on professional development goals:
When to Quit Your Job and Start Pursuing Your Passion
You’re a social impact executive at a major foundation, someone who has spent years driving transformative initiatives and aligning your work with your deepest values.
Yet, lately, you’ve found yourself questioning whether your are truly appreciated.
Meetings pass, yet your voice feels increasingly silenced. Leadership's responses to your urgent concerns seem distant or dismissive. Despite your efforts to advocate for change, progress remains slow. You invest energy into mission-aligned projects, only to feel your contributions overlooked while senior leadership focuses elsewhere.
The tension is palpable: the growing misalignment between your values and the organization's leadership and communication methods is hard to ignore. This lack of engagement leaves you feeling isolated, especially when excluded from key decisions and clarity on priorities is elusive.
This disconnect impacts not only your work but also your personal life, leaving you drained, unmotivated, and uncertain about whether staying is the right choice.
At Joyful Ventures, our innovation advisors specialize in helping social impact leaders like you create people-first innovation that maximize your and your organization’s impact.
The Challenge of Knowing When to Quit Your Job
Many executives in your position take one of five common approaches:
- Seeking Clarity Through Leadership Conversations. While this approach can sometimes yield temporary improvements, it often falls short in environments where systemic issues persist.
- Trying to “fix” the system—only to find that systemic challenges are often beyond an individual’s control or would deplete your energy to fix.
- Leaving prematurely without a clear plan—potentially missing opportunities for growth and development.
- Focusing on small wins. While this can provide short-term motivation, it simply delays your inevitable burnout.
- Pushing Through Discomfort or Quiet Quitting. But doing so can exacerbate burnout and mental health issues, leaving individuals worse off than before.
While these common solutions provide temporary relief or clarity, they often fail to address the deeper question of alignment between personal values and organizational priorities.
Instead, we propose a more strategic path forward: three actionable strategies designed to help you decide when to quit your job while maximizing growth and networking opportunities with your dream employers before you leave. These include assessing if your current organization uniquely supports you to:
- Prioritize Key Professional Development Goals for Dream Roles and Employers (focus of this article).
- Launch High-Impact Projects with Dream Employers to Reach Your Goals
- Access Resources with Dream Mentors to Address Key Gaps and Share Learnings
Important Caveat
While the strategies below emphasize assessing whether you can achieve your professional development goals by staying, prioritize quitting if you: experience emotional or physical harm (e.g., abuse or harassment); are forced to engage in unethical practices; and/or cannot meet your basic needs when better financial opportunities exist
When to Quit Your Job: Can You Reach Professional Development Goals?
One of the clearest indicators that it might be time to leave your job is when your role no longer offers opportunities for growth or skill development.
Many professionals respond by seeking external validation through networking events or side projects that reignite their passion momentarily but fail to address the underlying issue: stagnation within their current role.
Instead, focus on identifying whether there are any skills or experiences you can uniquely gain in your current position before making the decision to leave.
Unlike common solutions like “waiting it out” or taking on unrelated tasks for temporary relief, this approach ensures that any decision you make is grounded in intentionality and aligned with your broader aspirations.
Steps for Success:
- Brainstorm Core Skills: Identify 2–3 key skills that will enhance your career in social impact leadership while aligning with your interests and passions. Reflect on how these skills support your long-term goals, such as pursuing specific roles like CEO or Managing Director. Additionally, consider your dream employers and whether their leadership positions require specific experiences you currently lack.
- Set Measurable Targets: Define success metrics like increasing funding by 20% or piloting a scalable initiative within six months.
- Assess Organizational Fit: Determine whether your current position offers an outsized opportunity to develop these skills further. If it does, consider staying long enough to achieve those targets.
Challenge
As an ambitious leader, you know it’s easy for you to take on too many goals. To prevent stretching yourself thin, commit to focusing on just three top goals. Impact requires sustained focus. If certain skills aren’t a priority now, consider placing them in a backlog for future development. It’s not giving up; it’s sequencing your success.
Example
You’re feeling undervalued and unsure whether it’s time to leave. Instead of making an impulsive decision, you take a step back and brainstorm your core skills—those that not only advance your career in social impact leadership but also align with your passions and long-term career aspirations.
Strategic planning and financial management emerge as areas of focus to achieve career growth. To make this actionable, you define metrics for success: leading two cross-departmental initiatives that address systemic financial challenges in the organization.
With these targets in mind, you identify opportunities uniquely accessible within your current role—for example, spearheading a new initiative on equitable grantmaking or piloting a collaborative project with external partners to strengthen stakeholder engagement. These projects not only contribute to your organization’s mission but also build the leadership experience needed for desired roles at dream employers in the future.
By focusing on measurable growth opportunities that tap into both your current role’s potential and your long-term vision, you regain clarity and purpose—even if only temporarily—and lay the groundwork for a more confident and strategic exit.
Professional Goals Worksheet: Assess When to Quit Your Job
Now it’s your turn to apply these principles to your own career journey.
First, brainstorm potential skills.
- Reflect on dream roles. What are the top five skills needed to succeed in them?
- Reflect on dream employers. What are the top five skills or experiences needed to succeed at them?
- Honestly asses yourself against the top 5-10 growth areas. Prioritize the top 3 growth areas that deserve sustained focus.
Second, assess your skills and their organization fit using the table below.
Question | You Fill In | Examples (completely hypothetical; do not copy unless accurate) |
#1 Goal (i) Skill (ii) Metric (iii) Why this is your #1 (iv) Org Fit | ㅤ | (i) Fundraising with mission-aligned partners* (ii) $X dollars raised within 12 months (iii) Fundraising is my top priority, as it develops essential leadership skills for future executive roles and allows me to engage with dream organizations, ensuring alignment with my core values and enhancing my candidacy for future opportunities. (iv) Fit: High. I’ve been formally empowered to fundraise and will have support from our development team. |
#2 Goal (i) Skill (ii) Metric (iii) Why this is your #2 (iv) Org Fit | ㅤ | (i) Compelling vision (ii) Average “net promoter score” or “cosponsors” from key internal and external stakeholders (iii) This is my second priority as it lays the groundwork for fundraising and aligns with my strengths and excitement. My vision aims to address limitations at my org and in my field at large. (iv) Fit: Moderate. I’ve been asked to contribute to vision-setting initiatives but will need additional support from leadership to formalize this responsibility. |
#3 Goal (i) Skill (ii) Metric (iii) Why this is your #3 (iv) Org Fit | ㅤ | (i) Unconditional self acceptance (ii) Number of negative thoughts a week I write down, label, dispute, and reframe. (iii) Despite my significant career achievements, I still doubt my abilities. Developing unconditional self-acceptance will be crucial for preventing burnout and ensuring long-term job satisfaction. (iv) Fit: High. I will be taking on larger leadership roles and bigger risks, giving me opportunities to practice unconditional self acceptance. |
Backlog Share goals that were not included in this initial selection. | ㅤ | These outcomes, while highly important to me, do not make it to my top three at this moment in time. • Professional network. Even though expanding my network is important, this will be a byproduct of my process for fundraising and visioning. • Organizational policy-making: While it's tempting to address past issues directly, the emotional labor involved could hinder my ability to achieve my top three outcomes, so I may prefer to delegate this responsibility to another leader while remaining a consulting or informed party. |
Finally, create a hypothesis and an action plan.
Based on this assessment, I want to give my job another couple of quarters to pursue these goals with renewed vigor.
The next article in the series will discuss ways to create an impactful plan, clarifying what you need to do at your current organization. Brainstorm high-Impact projects and partner with your dream employers.
What’s been your biggest challenge in deciding when to quit? Share your thoughts in the comments below—we’d love to hear from you!
This article is part of a series on professional development goals:
Three Opportunities with Joyful Ventures
• Want a Template? Request one here
• Looking for guidance? Get your free innovation audit
• Want updates? Subscribe below 👇
• Looking for guidance? Get your free innovation audit
• Want updates? Subscribe below 👇
Related Posts
5 Great Questions for Nonprofit Storytelling and Donor Retention
Discover 5 great questions to create impact stories for successful donor retention
Messaging and Positioning Template: Learning From Data
Learn from your data using our lead scoring template, empowering you to refine your messaging and positioning with evidence
Made with Bullet