How Loyal An Employee Should You Be?

Loyalty, a photo by geopungo on Flickr.

Most workers these days are content to just be employed. The idea of looking for a better job, within your own company or at outside organizations, seems like a guilt-induced act of blasphemy.

This saddens me because I believe it’s always important to stretch yourself—to learn new skills with the goal of keeping your career fresh, interesting and expanding. And sometimes that means opportunistically changing jobs.

So how loyal should you be to your boss and your company?

First, don’t confuse accountability with loyalty.  Never lose sight of the fact that you must take full responsibility for the job you’re paid to do. That is the definition of accountability. You need to own the good, the bad and the ugly parts of your job—including long hours and backing up your boss. On the other hand, loyalty is about commitment. When you pledge loyalty to your boss, you are differentiating yourself from the fifty other people who have the technical skills to do your job, but may not be as committed as you are.

Loyalty to your boss is great for the boss, but it could kill your career.  As a corporate recruiter, I look for integrity and strength of character in a job candidate. I look specifically for evidence of how you took the opportunity to learn everything you could from each of your roles to grow, develop leadership skills and achieve great results. And believe it or not, whether you have five jobs or fifteen listed on your resume, if the reasons for changing jobs are justified, I won’t hold it against you.

The thing I hate the most is a resume that reveals a candidate whose career was driven by outside forces more than his own.  Your livelihood should be mostly driven by your own choices. When your resume starts to look more like a timeline of the failures of your past companies, you are not steering your own career. Perhaps you’ve been loyal to the wrong people.

Don’t get me wrong—layoffs and mergers have made the employment landscape smaller for all of us. But when I see a twelve-year veteran of a company survive three rounds of layoffs but is now living off the last of the severance her company gave her a year ago, when they finally folded, I believe that her loyalty was a bad personal choice. The signs of the ship going down were there—what was she thinking?

It’s important to treat your career like a small business—the business of you. Dust the cobwebs off your resume and make it current. Keep on doing a fabulous job in your current role, but remember that steadfast allegiance and ridiculous overtime will be forgotten. Instead, doing great work for the right people will be remembered and will take you to your next great role.

Stay accountable on your job but be loyal to yourself. It’s crucial for you to constantly establish new contacts, add new skills and yes—keep your eyes and ears open for bigger, better job opportunities, within your on company and beyond.