Have you started getting sick more often, even though you never used to get colds? Have you begun making foolish mistakes, such as rear-ending someone at a stoplight or forgetting to turn off the iron? Do you attribute everything to fatigue, when in fact it could be a signal that a toxic manager has appeared, subtly undermining your self-confidence? Business consultant Alexander Vysotsky identifies eight signs that it's time to change jobs. Many of them are not obvious, and most people simply ignore them. Let's examine each one, from a greedy boss to a company that hasn't fired anyone in years.

Alexander Vysotsky is an entrepreneur with 30 years of experience, an expert in systematization, and the founder of Business Booster, an accelerator and IT platform for digitizing business with branches in Europe, the US, and Taiwan. He is the author of four bestselling books on business management and a venture investor with a portfolio of over 100 startups, including Perplexity, Etched, and Kick.co. Vysotsky is also a frequent speaker at business conferences with audiences of up to 5,000 people, speaking in both Russian and English in the US, Europe, Asia, and South America.

In business management, controversial situations often arise, and we don't always understand whether an employee's behavior is a problem or just an individual quirk. Over the years of building a systematic business, I have developed a simple scale: either it's a problem or it's normal. If a situation interferes with the result, it's a problem that needs to be addressed. If the result is there, and our complaints are just a matter of habit, then it's normal. Let's consider specific cases.

This may be the most controversial topic I've ever discussed. Some things will likely surprise you, you'll strongly disagree with others, and you might agree with some. But I need to talk about this. This article is primarily for employees, as it will help them understand when it's time to change jobs and why they should do so. However, I advise business owners to read it as well, as it will provide ideas on how to improve their company's work and not harm their own employees. I will discuss eight signs, many of which are not obvious, and most people simply overlook them.

1. A greedy manager

There are managers whose system of values does not include caring for employees and their salary growth. They genuinely do not care. I have met business owners who try to hire people for a "trial period" without making any specific promises. The person works, they are paid pennies or not paid at all, and the trial period is extended for months. When hiring, no one mentions this, and over time, managers just smile and justify themselves with general phrases.

You can recognize such a manager by the fact that they do not provide specific financial information: "Work, buddy, show results, and then we'll talk about salary, bonuses, and prospects." When you ask about numbers and deadlines (how long your conditional "trial period" will last, what the pay will be during and after it, how your responsibilities will change), they evade the answer.

It happens that the result of a project is not yet clear, and the manager themselves do not know how much can be earned from it. But even in this case, they can put forward at least a hypothesis: "We'll do this, get such-and-such sales volume, and I'll pay you that much. If we earn three times less, I'll pay you that much." There should be numbers. If there are none, most likely, you will work and not get paid for it.

There is another sign: a greedy manager often lives a luxurious life and comes to work in an expensive car. At the same time, the company does not have money for a decent office, necessary tools for employees, or a decent market salary. This is another reason to leave.

It may seem to the owner that greedy managers are useful: they fight for the budget and squeeze out the maximum. This is short-sighted.

The strength of a company lies in its people, their motivation, desire to work, and creativity, and greed kills all this.

On paper, the numbers may add up better in the moment, but you are killing the team's future, and in the end, there will be no one to work with.

This sign is missed by 99% of people. You get hired for a project, and strange things start happening to you. You have not been sick with the flu for years, but now you catch it every season without any apparent reason. Long-forgotten ailments return. Often, silly mistakes are added to this: you rear-end a car at a traffic light, forget to turn off the iron, which never happened before, accidentally delete a budget or report you worked on for a long time.

Many people do not pay attention to this, considering it a part of life. But if it was not present in your life before, and then appeared, this is a clear sign that a toxic person has appeared nearby, who is imperceptibly poisoning your life. Probably, this is a toxic project or department manager.

They secretly undermine your faith in yourself, in your abilities, and devalue your goals and aspirations.

In the midst of working weekdays, this happens very imperceptibly. You come to the manager with an idea, your conversation is quite constructive, but after such a conversation, you feel like you've been beaten up due to ambiguous or caustic comments.

You can get rid of this in only two ways. The first is to stand up for yourself. But if you are in a subordinate position, this almost never works. The second is to leave the team or company. If you've done everything right, you'll find that seasonal flu has disappeared somewhere, and you no longer make silly mistakes. I personally have seen such cases multiple times.

One of the vivid examples occurred in my company. I accidentally ended up at a mid-level coordination meeting, where there were managers of several departments. One of the managers looked quite decent: good education, good background. But from time to time, she made caustic jokes, behind which was actually mockery of the others. When we started to figure it out, it turned out that this was a toxic manager.

The people under her supervision suffered: their productivity fell, and silly mistakes appeared.

We were able to fix this only when we got rid of this manager once and for all. But if I worked under her and did not see a way to influence the situation, I would have preferred to move to another company, to a more positive environment.

There is no clear path for career development

It happens that the work is interesting and the pay is not bad, but there is no clear route for how to move forward. Sooner or later, you will want to earn more, take on more interesting projects, grow. This is a natural human aspiration: very few people want to do the same thing at the same level all their life. If no one knows the answer to the questions "What are my prospects?" and "How can I become a manager?", you have come to the wrong company.

The problem may not be acute yet, but it will inevitably become so over time. And the more talented and faster you develop, the sooner it will catch up with you.

There is nothing super modern about this, it has always been the case. Let's take McDonald's as an example: according to statistics I once saw, every eighth American has worked there at some point. This place often becomes a powerful career springboard, where people without experience learn discipline and grow into top managers or owners of their own businesses.

In other words, any employee who comes there can see a clear path ahead. First, they master simple work at their station and at the same time take courses and certifications. If they work for several months without any mistakes, are not late, and do not leave their colleagues on shift, they become instructors and help new employees. Their pay and status increase. Further, they can become shift leaders, and there too, the requirements and criteria for moving to the next level are clear in advance. And so on, all the way up to director.

If you are an ambitious person and want to make a career, but there is no prescribed path in the company, you already have a problem: starting from the position of a regular employee, it is impossible to build such a path on your own. It must be predetermined. Moreover, its presence says a lot about the attitude of management towards people. If you care about employees, you not only pay them a salary but also think about how they can develop themselves.

This is not a question of the company's size. Even in a small company, a decent owner who is not indifferent to the development of the business will say: "Now you are a salesperson. If you prove yourself, you will become the head of the sales department, and if you reach good sales volumes, you will become a deputy director." If they do not have any plan in their head, it means they simply do not care. They are not going to help you make a career, and they do not value it.

You are doing something that does not suit you

This sign can be called the road to an inevitable deferred crisis. We are all very different. One person enjoys communicating with people a lot, another likes tinkering with hardware or solving complex problems. Some people like routine, doing familiar tasks without errors, while others like to blaze new trails and experiment. When your work corresponds to your personal qualities, talents, and temperament, you feel good. There are challenges and problems in any job, but you have much more energy and motivation.

If, however, you are doing something that contradicts your nature, you are heading for a crisis. It will inevitably come, the only question is when.

This does not mean that you cannot succeed in another field. My wife was an excellent chief accountant in a very large European holding company, she was loved, and she always had everything under control. But I knew her personal qualities and understood that this was not her field. As soon as she had the opportunity to stop being a chief accountant, she took it without any regrets. Her true element is art and taking care of people, she has a good sense of other people's emotions. When she engages in embroidery, art, or compositions, she does a great job.

If a person works in a field that is not their own for a long time, they will eventually face a crisis. There is a concept that to achieve success, one needs to work on their weaknesses. My experience suggests the opposite: to achieve success, one needs to work with their strong qualities. Working on weaknesses is a painful path of a stoic, and it is ineffective.

A monkey can also be taught to smoke, but nothing good will come out of it. Think about what you do easily and better than others, and see how much your daily work corresponds to this.

5. Burnout

It sounds trivial: when burnout sets in, it cannot be ignored. However, it is not at all obvious when it is approaching. It is like with a frog that is boiled alive: the temperature is increased gradually, and it does not jump out of the pot. An early sign of burnout, in my observations, is that you do your job, but you do not have a sense of completing an important task. You do not even have time to understand whether you did a good or bad job, because you switch to something else, and then something else distracts you. There are many tasks, but there is no satisfaction from most of them. This is a clear sign of future burnout.

Everyone has such periods, and it is not necessary to quit your job because of this. First, you need to ask yourself: "Can I change this in my current position?" There are many ways to do this. Start with ordinary time management and prioritization practices: plan your workday, analyze which tasks are really needed, learn to say "no" and do not take on tasks that only distract you from the work you love.

Many people are hyper-optimistic when planning.

If you realistically assess the time required for each task in their plan, it will turn out to be 80 hours a week, which is impossible for anyone to fulfill, no matter how smart and productive they are.

If you have applied all of this and the work in your group, project, or company is organized in such a chaotic manner that it is impossible to plan and prioritize, and you constantly conflict with your manager due to their demands, you need to honestly admit that you will not be able to organize your work in a way that brings you enjoyment. In this case, it makes sense to change your workplace and find a company where you can fulfill yourself.

For owners, this is a reason to think about the organization of work in the company. Intelligent and motivated people who like your business can easily be lost simply due to the incorrect organization of work and planning. The most offensive thing is that they do not leave immediately, but only after they have settled in, gained experience, and developed skills. As a result, companies become training grounds for other companies.

6. Alien environment and alien values

All teams and departments are slightly different. Sometimes, in the internal culture, infidelity to wives, other forms of cheating, or base things are considered the norm and even a subject of pride, and the entire department drinks on Fridays.

A recent example from Florida, where I live, is a police station that came under investigation and trial for tax fraud. In America, taxes are taken very seriously. The police usually attract law-abiding people, and the level of corruption is almost zero, because a person caught in this loses their pension and social status. Nevertheless, an entire police station was cheating on their tax returns. It is obvious that at some point, people undergo a shift in consciousness: what was previously unacceptable to them becomes acceptable.

This is a phenomenon called the Overton window. A person is surrounded by incorrect things that others consider correct, and over time, this begins to take effect.

At first, you are surprised and consider it unacceptable. Then you think: not for me, but it's their life. Then: what, is this also possible? A degradation of values occurs.

I am often asked if I will be attending Burning Man. Many of my acquaintances go there, it's a beautiful event with a lot of aesthetics and creativity. But I say that my feet will not be there. I have been living in the USA for about 10 years, and when asked about drugs, friends usually respond: "There are those who use them, but we don't." However, over the years, I have observed that people who regularly attend eventually start trying. They see cool investors, entrepreneurs, athletes, and opinion leaders around them and think it's normal.

There is also a second reason: if I were to attend, I would become one of those who say it's a great event worth visiting. I don't want to create such an illusion for people who trust me, watch my channel, and read my books.

The conclusion is simple. If you find yourself in a group whose moral values are not close to yours, and you see that this is an accepted norm, run away from there. Sooner or later, it will change your attitude towards life and your values.

Advice for business owners: if you have discovered such an atmosphere in your company and