When coffee tastes bitter, it’s time for change

Few years back, I was enjoying a cup of hot coffee with my friends in office pantry during late evening break. One friend said, "This Coffee tastes bitter", I replied "When coffee from office vending machine tastes bitter, it’s time for change". Topic ended after some discussion. Last week I received a mail from the same friend "Coffee tastes bitter, as you said I should start looking out". I was surprised that he remembered my comment for so long.

Though I didn’t give so much thought to what I said then but when I pondered again it made sense instantly, I could immediately think of some metaphoric indicators for need of change from bitter coffee.
The change may not be necessarily employer change, it can be project or team or any other change suitable to individual circumstances.

So why coffee starts tasting bitter, first simple reason, you are drinking too much lately, which might link to too many breaks during office hours or too stretched work hours. Both the scenarios require some kind of change to keep things in order in long run professionally as well as personally.

Another reason I can think of is, vending machine coffee was always bitter but you started realizing it now, probably because previously you were content with your work and team environment, your efforts were well acknowledged and appreciated, many more things like that so you never really cared for coffee taste but enjoyed every bit of time spent at work but now things are getting little different.

Well managed and executed project promotes team taking break together sharing ideas and cracking jokes to keep motivation high and ball rolling. It also serves as platform for developing non formal relationship with co workers thus time spent in break mattered while coffee just served as ice breaker.
On the other hand, fractured teams also take coffee breaks probably even more frequent than above ones but mostly in groups of hierarchy , venting out concerns and issues in wrong forums, results in bad vibes among team members and doomed project.

Ok one more, you have been in same project/team/location for too long, project is good, team is good but stagnation is creeping in. This is one common problem with key resources in project, they work well and sometimes it proves to be negative for their learning curves. Technology or non technology, any job require people to re-skill themselves continuously. But business continuity and criticality being ground reality does not allow frequent resource movement.
It’s not something which can't be managed, we always handle such problems when people decides to part way with organization so why not before. Any team or manager too dependent on a particular resource(s) should always evaluate "what if" scenarios. At the same time, proactive initiative from management to provide growth opportunities to critical resources in timely manner will not only bring more productivity, enriched skill pool but also employee satisfaction and loyalty towards team/unit/organization. Irrespective of hierarchy, employee feels valued when organization care about their career and personal growth.

Though it’s unrelated to above context but I will still add “number matters but only collectively”, what it implies you don’t want to kill your best “Hen” to get all golden egg at one shot’ . Enrich your hens and golden egg will continue to come for long time.

Last but not the least sometimes personal problems are carried over to work. It’s not unnatural to have influence from home on work and vice versa but when it happens very frequently and you are unable to segregate the environments and your responses then it’s time to change and change for good.
Finally we all have different lives and thought process to handle our own problems/issues/concerns and there is nothing which fits all hence don’t be afraid of change when your coffee tastes bitter because change is not that bad after all.