Leverage Maps: Realign Or Leave When Misaligned
On the quiet courage it takes to leave when you've outgrown the role, not the people.
Sometimes the hardest decision in your career isn't walking away from a bad job. It's walking away from a good one: a job with a team you love, a mission you believe in, and the slow realization that you don't belong there anymore.
It's not because you've given up. It's because you've given everything to make it work, and you're still misaligned.
Getting Caught In The River
Every company has its own culture and structure. To successfully orchestrate each person working towards the same direction, a company must define a scoped box for each role. If you don't operate inside the box, you'll feel yourself fighting the weight of the organization. If you try to do too much, you'll find yourself confused, tired, and fighting in the river swimming upstream.
It can be very confusing. From personal experience, leadership has the habit of saying, "It's easy. Just do your job." The problem is that it's not that easy when communication lines are strained.
Often, you aren't working in the same capacity as what your job description said. Often, management struggles to communicate and formulate what success means for your role. Often, managers that don't want to be people managers put people coaching on the back burner for months and sometimes years.
Suppose that you don't understand the function of your role after having negotiated a raise. Maybe you're advancing in your career and there's no formal position change from one level to the next. You find yourself seeing opportunities to help in areas that aren't quite perfect. You feel responsibility and try to fill those gaps, but you get exhausted.
You did things that were objectively helpful, weren't your job and got punished for it.
This Is Classic Misalignment
This is classic misalignment.
- You saw the cracks and tried to seal them.
- You tried to stay in your lane and still got sideswiped.
- You adapted, stretched, even over-functioned and somehow it still didn’t work.
Misalignment doesn’t mean failure. It means the system you're in doesn’t match the way you think, work, or grow. You have two options when that becomes clear: realign or leave.
Option 1: Realign
Ask yourself:
* Can I have an honest conversation about the structure of my role?
* Is leadership open to redesigning expectations or making space for how I operate best?
* Are there signals that this team is willing to grow with me and not just tolerate me?
* Do I see a pathway for growth and advancement here?
If yes, it’s worth the effort to realign.
If not, don’t stay in a loop of silent frustration.
Option 2: Leave (With Clarity, Not Bitterness)
Leaving isn't giving up. It's recognizing that staying out of guilt, habit, or hope can slowly erode your self-respect.
- Go when you’re still proud of your work.
- Go when you can walk away without resentment.
- Go when you know you’ve done your part.
Misalignment isn’t personal. It’s structural. And sometimes the most strategic move isn’t to fight the current. It’s to step out of the river and build elsewhere.
Let That Be a Clean Exit
You don't need to justify your decision with anger. You don't need to carry the weight of fixing a system you didn’t design. You just need to tell the truth: that you saw what was misaligned and chose to act on it.
That’s not quitting. That’s clarity.
Thanks for reading Leverage Maps. This series explores how systems shape us and how to shape them back. I also write essays for Workplace Jiujitsu (on navigating corporate dynamics) and Hard Guarantees (on Bitcoin, architecture, and long-term thinking). These three series will make up a part of my upcoming books of the same titles.
If any of that resonates, subscribe to follow along. I share weekly essays at the intersection of engineering, strategy, and enduring principles.
And if you’ve ever had to learn this lesson the hard way, I’d love to hear how you handled it.
Cheers,
Gilberto Guadiana
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