“Far and away the best prize that life has to offer is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.” Theodore Roosevelt, 28th American President
Article by Scott McKinley
When Ezra Hodge and I recently launched the McKinley Hodge Group to focus on executive recruiting for cloud computing roles, the quote above provided inspiration for my efforts. I was asked pointblank this week by a client why I chose to leave Amazon and strike out on my own. I replied that the work I led at AWS to scale a program from less than 1k college students in 2017 to 100,000 globally in 2020 was innovative, rewarding, and impacted students and their future employers in the world of cloud computing.
During my time at Amazon, I was fortunate to be the right person in the right seat on the bus (per Jim Collins in Good to Great). It was invigorating work with great teammates who shared a compelling vision. My decision to leave was motivated by my desire to identify the next big challenge and sometimes those challenges aren’t on the current bus we are all sitting on.
In some ways, my timing is interesting because we are now in the midst of one of the greatest upheavals the workforce has ever seen. Articles about the “Great Resignation” appear daily. But for you and me, I would ask us to seriously consider the “right person, right seat, right bus” thinking. There are thousands of outstanding people, highly skilled with both technical and leadership capabilities. They have proven experience in high demand fields. These are “right person” people.
Clearly, with 10 million job openings in the U.S. at last count, there are a lot of seats available on a lot of buses! But for so many of us, it’s a “right person, wrong seat” situation. We are simply not a great fit for either the seat or the bus, or both. Using our resumes or personal charisma to sell ourselves into a job role that isn’t going to be rewarding for us is inevitably a mistake. We are investing years of our lives into roles, which frankly, is often causing us misery. To me, much of the Great Resignation is about people figuring out what matters most to them. It’s about reprioritizing and then moving forward to find a right person / right seat / right bus opportunity.
That’s why Ezra and I founded McKinley Hodge Group. We know so many technology professionals who have high demand cloud skills but are underutilized, unhappy, and with a newfound post-Covid perspective, are wondering what else is out there that may be a better fit – with purpose and fulfillment.
The fit might be about more than compensation. It might be about work/life balance. It might be about the social impact you want to deliver. It might be about being an individual contributor versus building and leading a large team. Or, it might be about being customer facing versus being in a more operational role. For a hundred reasons, you might be in a right person / wrong seat scenario.
At McKinley Hodge Group, Ezra and I want to change that for our colleagues to make sure that the right people are in the right seats and even better, on the right buses. Ideally, find a bus with a seat that utilizes who you really are: your education, skills, capacity, leadership qualities, to be your best self. Find the intersection of your passion, skills, and an opportunity that leverages all three.
In short, I’d challenge all of us to follow Teddy Roosevelt’s career guidance to “work hard at work worth doing.”
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Scott McKinley is a founding partner of McKinley Hodge Group. Read Scott’s bio here, or connect with him on LinkedIn.