You have a relationship with family, with friends, with a romantic partner. You may not have thought about it this way, but you also have a relationship with your job — a quite serious one, in fact; after all, you spend a third of your life working.
Just like the relationship you have with your significant other, there are ups and downs with your relationship with your job. It can start out with exciting honeymoon feelings, but along the way, you can end up drifting apart from your job, lose interest in it, or not feel appreciated. And there can come a time when you start wondering if you and your job should part ways.
Here to help you figure out if you should break up with your job is Tessa West, a professor of psychology and the author of Job Therapy: Finding Work That Works for You. Tessa interviewed thousands of people who have recently switched jobs or undergone career changes and found that there are five forms that job dissatisfaction typically takes. Today on the show, Tessa shares those five job dissatisfaction profiles, and how to know when you need to try to move into a new role within your company, or move on altogether and even change careers.
Resources Related to the Podcast
- Tessa‘s previous appearance on the AoM podcast: Episode #834 — The 7 Types of Work Jerks (And How to Deal With Them)
- AoM Article: 30+ Questions to Ask Yourself Before Leaving a Job
- AoM Podcast #578: Figuring Out If You Should Change Careers (And How to Do It)
Connect With Tessa West
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Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice.
Read the Transcript
Brett McKay: Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of The Art of Manliness Podcast. You have a relationship with family, with friends, with a romantic partner. You may not have thought about it this way, but you also have a relationship with your job, a quite serious one, in fact. After all, you spend a third of your life working. Just like the relationship you have with your significant other, there are ups and downs with your relationship with your job. It can start out with exciting honeymoon feelings, but along the way, you end up drifting apart from your job, lose interest in it, or not feel appreciated. And there can come a time when you start wondering if you and your job should part ways. Here to help you figure out if you should break up with your job is Tessa West, Professor of Psychology and the author of Job Therapy: Finding Work That Works for You. Tessa interviewed thousands of people who recently switched jobs or undergone career changes and found that there are five forms that job dissatisfaction typically takes. Today on the show, Tessa shares those five job dissatisfaction profiles and how to know when you need to try to move into a new role within your company or move on altogether and even change careers. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/jobtherapy.
All right, Tessa West, welcome back to the show.
Tessa West: Thank you again for having me.
Brett McKay: So we had you on last time to discuss your book, Jerks at Work, and how to deal with those jerks you sometimes encounter at the office. You had a new book out called Job Therapy, where you dig into our relationship with our job. And I think a lot of people typically don’t think about having a relationship with their work. A job is just something you do. What got you thinking about work in terms of a relationship?
Tessa West: Yeah, this is a great question. I think a bunch of different things, but just to kind of give you a little bit of background, I’ve been teaching a close relationships class at New York University now for 15 years. And so I’ve been thinking about how we go from the kind of initial attraction stage, so the first date, which is a lot like a first interview, all the way through that stage where we get a little bit itchy and we start drifting apart from our partner, the ambivalence, those feelings we have that are a little bit complicated, the emotional ups and downs, and all the way through the end of a relationship when we decide to break up.
And what I noticed in the past couple years is that there’s just been kind of this shift in how we talk about work using these relational concepts. And so every time I taught, and this was last semester, we would talk about what can go wrong on a first date. And at the same time in my consulting and in my research, studying the workplace, people were asking me the same types of questions about interviews. And when they were trying to process whether they should break up with a job that they’ve been committed to for a long time, they would ask me questions about identity loss, like this hole in my heart, how am I gonna fill it? And that’s the same language we’re using around marriages.
And so, I started to kind of see these two worlds I live in converging and these concepts starting to overlap in ways that I think most of us had never really thought of before. And that’s really when I decided to adopt a relational perspective to think about your career as just another thing that you have a relationship with, much like a person.
Brett McKay: So, a lot of people are unhappy with their current jobs, but they’re unhappy for different reasons. If you ask five different people why they don’t like their job or their career, they might give you five different reasons. And you took a deep dive to find out what are the top reasons people are unhappy at work. So, you did this massive survey. What did you discover?
Tessa West: I think most of us, if you ask someone why, they don’t truly know. And so, you kind of have to ask more indirectly about how they’re feeling. And so, what I found was that a big chunk of people, especially those who’ve been working for a really long time, they have a crisis of identity. They used to love this thing. And the thing is, tends to treat them very well. The career does. But they don’t feel as strongly identified with it as they used to. And there’s a lot of shame and guilt that goes along with that. So, that is the crisis of identity person. Kind of in a similar vein is the person who’s drifted apart from their job. And this is the person who’s pretty nostalgic about what that job used to look like. It could be that the whole industry has changed. Maybe it’s just this company. But it’s a little bit like waking up and looking at your spouse in bed and thinking, who are you? I don’t recognize this person anymore. And for those people, they really have to dig deep to understand kind of what is the source of that drifting apart. Is it really just the job or is it also them?
And then the third is the person who’s stretched too thin. And I actually wrote this chapter for everybody. I think we all know what it feels like to be juggling multiple roles or tasks or to be task switching all the time that we’re not getting anything done. And so, those individuals tend to have taken a few missteps along the way in terms of absorbing roles or taking on what I call high visibility roles that they think will get them a raise or promotion, get them on the map, so to speak. But they end up just kind of being all over the place or interrupting themselves constantly at work.
And then the last two chapters are for people who are not getting the love back from their careers. So there’s the runner up. We all probably, if you’ve worked long enough, you know what it feels like to get passed up for raises and promotions. And you don’t really know why. There’s a huge kind of gap there between their understanding of what they’re doing wrong and what leaders think they should be doing instead. And then the underappreciated star, the person who gets a lot of nice Slack messages or emails, but the real rewards aren’t coming and they’re often kind of dangled in front of them in some sort of like hypothetical future, if you stick here long enough, you’ll get that president job in a year and then eventually the C-suite and once we have enough money, you’ll get that bonus. And so, they really have to figure out if they can get compensated better elsewhere and how much organizations actually even really care about hiring stars. So, those last two chapters are really about trying to get the love from that relationship with your career back that you are feeling towards it.
Brett McKay: Okay. So, these are the top five. We got the crisis of identity, the drifted apart, the stretch too thin, the runner up, the underappreciated star. We’re gonna dig into each of these here in the conversation. But you also found before we talk about these five different types of dissatisfaction profiles, you also talk about there might be a lot of job dissatisfaction that just comes up from like daily stressors that we tend to overlook with a job. It’s not even that you don’t identify with your job anymore or you feel like you’re stretched too thin. It’s just the other stuff that we overlook when it comes to having a job that might be causing us dissatisfaction. What sorts of stressors are those?
Tessa West: Yeah. I think most of us experience a lot of low-level stress at work, but we don’t actually see how it kind of builds up and affects our happiness at work or our engagement or these kind of like bigger picture things. And I think what I did for this chapter was I ran a simple study where I asked people in the morning, what do you think is gonna stress you out today? What your biggest stressor is gonna be? And then I asked them again to do it in the evening, what actually stress you out? And there’s not a ton of overlap. And I think it’s because anticipated stressors tend to be big things. They tend to be things like a presentation I have to give, a meeting I’m really nervous about.
What people reported are what I would call like certainty-based stressors, thing that they can anticipate and then plan for. And because you can plan for those things, you actually don’t end up experiencing that much stress. You put some steps in place to make sure you can handle the thing. We call this a challenge response in health psychology. But what ends up actually stressing people out are pretty small things. And many of them, we tell ourselves we can’t anticipate, but we actually can if we’re a little bit more strategic. A commute that ran too long. Your parking space has been taken up. Your boss putting a last minute deadline on your calendar. Someone interrupting you at work. Those things that we don’t really see coming in the morning, but they end up being additive and really stressing us out.
But kind of ironically, what I found is that even for those things, if you ask someone if they’ve experienced it before, they’ll tell you, oh yeah, I experienced this all the time. They just don’t encode it as a stressful thing. And so they don’t think about it again and they don’t plan for it. But most of the time, we’ve had that last minute meeting put on our calendar. We’ve had that commute go long. We’ve had our parking space stolen and so forth. So if we just kind of keep track of these things, we can actually do a much better job of mitigating their effects on us.
Brett McKay: And what that can do, I think a lot of people, they might experience those sort of daily stressors, mundane stressors. They think, well, I just hate my career. I hate my job. Well, it might not… Maybe your career and job’s fine. You just got to take care of those things like the job or career you have right now. It’ll be great.
Tessa West: Yeah. I think we tend to catastrophize a little bit when we’ve had an accumulation of small stressors. It’s a little like anyone who’s been a parent and they have a kid who misses a nap and they just lose it completely and cry over everything. I think there’s an adult version of that, which is an accumulation of small daily stressors. They affect our health. They affect our sleep. And that in turn affects our ability to cognitively function, to regulate our emotions at work, to handle difficulties that come flying at us. And I think that we do dramatically underestimate the effects of those low-level things. And then we catastrophize and tell ourselves, oh my gosh, this job just isn’t a good fit for me. I feel really miserable right now. But because we haven’t identified the source, we attribute it to something big and existential. And that’s where I think your first step is just to keep track of those low-level things to try to correct for those before you get into the deep kind of psychological issues you might be experiencing.
Brett McKay: Okay. So let’s dig into those deep psychological issues. Let’s say you took care of all those stressors and you’re still not feeling happy with your job. Your book is designed to help you figure out why you might not be unhappy, why you might be unhappy with your job or career. And that first one you said is the crisis of identity. And this is someone who starts a job or career. It’s a good fit initially. They enjoy it at the beginning. They actually get really good at their career job, but then they start having second thoughts. So what are some signs that the crisis of identity is the reason you’re unhappy with your job?
Tessa West: So I think there’s two things that you need to do. I give you kind of this checklist of, is your career identity a central part of who you are? And a lot of people who are having a crisis of identity still say yes to that question. Things like when I think about, for me, when I think about being a professor, that’s really important to how I see myself. It’s central to my self-esteem. So you wanna measure that and you wanna measure it over time because I think we have days in which we feel highly identified with our work and days when we feel less identified. You wanna measure how stable that so-called identity centrality is over time.
But the second core piece is what we call identity satisfaction. And so you can be really identified with your career. It can be a core piece of who you see yourself as a person and hate it at the same time. Hate the fact that your self-esteem is yoked to this thing, that this thing doesn’t bring you happiness. And I think a lot of people having a crisis of identity kind of fall into that dangerous quadrant of high centrality and low satisfaction. We see this a lot in healthcare with burnout and things like that. And that can create a lot of ambivalence in people where you sort of love and hate your job at the same exact time. And that to me is the big warning sign. Not that you hate your job consistently, but that you feel like it’s a core piece of you and you’re not happy with it. And you kind of love and hate it on and off, often within the same day. In relationship science, this kind of heightened sense of ambivalence tends to be what predicts when people break up. Not so much just consistently being negative, but feeling really kind of angsty inside when you think about your career.
Brett McKay: Yeah. Your crisis of identity, that high centrality, low satisfaction. It’s like your job’s your frenemy. You love it and hate it. We’ve had podcast guests talking about that. That’s like the worst type of relationship you wanna have with somebody.
Tessa West: Yeah. It is the biggest predictor of getting into an on-again, off-again relationship. If you don’t actually sort of resolve that identity centrality and you start kind of exploring new identities before you leave, that’s really key. Otherwise, it’s just like breaking up with your ex and getting back together because you have nothing to kind of fill the void. The same thing can happen at work.
Brett McKay: Give us some more concrete examples of what it would look like if you had high career identity centrality. You think of yourself as ex-profession, but low satisfaction. What contributes to that low satisfaction?
Tessa West: It’s a lot of intermittent reinforcement at work, I think, that really does that, that puts you in that unique quadrant. It is your boss reinforcing you in a way that is difficult to predict. You don’t know when you’re going to get a pat on the back or told you’re great. You don’t know when you’re gonna get ignored or told you’re doing poorly. It’s a very unpredictable reinforcement schedule. We know from behavioral science that that’s the best way to keep people yoked to something that they don’t actually love. And so if you are getting reinforced, but if you keep track of that reinforcement, and by reinforcement, I just mean anything from a bonus or raise, those are big forms of reinforcement, to small ones like people recognizing your contributions at work. If you can’t predict when you’re gonna be positively reinforced for what you’re doing at work, then you’re gonna get really strongly pulled into that pattern where you have a hard time letting go.
In fact, reinforcement, it works on monkeys, it works on rats, it works on humans in relationships. I think it actually makes you more identified with something than even just getting positively reinforced consistently does. There’s something about the uncertainty, the lack of predictability that really keeps people tethered to these things that they don’t love. I think that’s where it gets a little bit scary.
Brett McKay: Okay. So if your identity centrality is high and your identity satisfaction is low, that might be an instance where your career is fine. Your chosen career is great. You just need to find maybe another place to do that career.
Tessa West: Yes. I think the biggest mistake people make is they act on that identity satisfaction and think they should just completely pivot to something new. And then they realize a little bit into that journey that, oh, wait, I actually missed my old thing. Well, you need to measure your centrality around that old career before you make that pivot. So if you have that low satisfaction, before you pivot, you wanna make sure that that identity centrality is consistently low for a period of time. And so you’re absolutely right. If you find high centrality, identity centrality consistently for a while, a couple of weeks, a couple of months or whatever, then you probably are just more in a place where you wanna stick with your career, but you need to find it elsewhere.
Brett McKay: Okay. What happens if you have low identity centrality with your career? Let’s say you’re a professor and at the beginning of your career, you think or you feel like this is what I was meant to do. I enjoy doing this. I enjoy being professor. But then 10 years later, you’re just not feeling it anymore. It doesn’t seem like that’s what you’re supposed to be doing. How do you go about trying to figure out what your next career is? How do you go about making that big change from professor to something else?
Tessa West: Yeah. I think the first step you wanna do, and this scares people, but I think before you quit your job, is you actually need to start dating new identities. And I probably take this metaphor too far. But you need to actually try on new identities, develop a clear sense of what your future identity is going to look like before you make any moves. And the only real way to do that, it isn’t by reading company websites or taking extra courses. It’s by networking and having 15, 20-minute conversations with people in new careers where you can do things like tell the difference between two things that sound similar but are actually super different or learn the hidden curriculum around what it really takes to succeed or learn jargon, which I know gets a bad reputation, but we use it anyway.
So really kind of exploring these new careers to develop just a clear sense of what your future identity looks like or could potentially be before you ever take that next step. I think too many of us are attempted to quit, take some time off, take some extra courses, apply for jobs before we do that whole developing the new identity thing. We think we can’t develop an identity around a career we haven’t jumped into or haven’t tried yet, but I actually don’t think that’s true at all. I think you can actually start to understand what that identity would look like should you be in it by doing this networking. I think that’s a really important kind of in-between step people need to do.
Brett McKay: Yeah, so before you quit, talk to a bunch of people who are in that career you’re thinking about. I think another thing you could do too is do some moonlighting. Maybe you wanna be a writer. Well, try moonlighting as a writer while you still have your job or you’re like, oh, I hate my corporate job. I wanna become a pool cleaning guy. Start cleaning pools and see what it’s like. Do it on the weekends, for example.
Tessa West: Yeah, you have to try it out. I meet all kinds of people who think a career would be a good fit for them because they think really big picture in terms of it. Someone wants to be a nurse who I talk to because she cares about helping people and she really wanted to just do that. But when she got trained as a nurse during COVID, so very, very little hands-on training, but then she kind of realized she hated the sight of blood and cleaning up poop, which turns out to be like 80% of your job as a nurse. And those just kind of like what is the day in the life actually look like is something that you can’t know unless you actually kind of try the job on a little bit and try it. And I think the moonlighting piece is really important. I think people are afraid to do that or they feel like they don’t have the time or the mental resources to do it, but you’re not gonna know how that new job feels, whether it fits you, unless you actually sample it a little bit first.
Brett McKay: Yeah. People can have this problem even at the start of their careers. I went to law school. I thought I wanted to be a lawyer since I was in high school because my idea of being a lawyer was like watching Matlock and law and order. And then I went to law school and I had to do my internship and I did my first internship at a big firm. I hated it. I absolutely, like I just did not suit my personality. So yeah, that can happen at the beginning. So I think I would have been better served before going to law school. Like I didn’t know any attorneys too. I just thought, I had no clue what it meant to be a lawyer. I think it would have been better served to maybe talk to a bunch of lawyers, maybe like in high school or college work there for the summer to see what it was like. That would have been helpful.
Tessa West: I think, yeah, I would add another piece of advice, which is like when you’re doing this, the temptation is to find a bunch of people who kind of know each other and network that way. So, you find a lawyer and then you ask that lawyer for another lawyer you can talk to and we call that snowball sampling. It’s a great way to network. But when you do that, you get a lot of overlapping information about a career ’cause those people have things in common with each other that might not actually reflect what it’s gonna look like for you. So you wanna actually network with people who don’t know each other, who don’t have completely shared histories or even work in the same organization. ‘Cause you wanna look for that kind of signal in the noise across all these diverse people to understand what that career could really look like. I think one big misstep people do is they talk to 10 people, all of whom have the same boss or work for the same organization and then they overgeneralize those 10 people’s experiences to what that career would look like for them. And then there’s just nothing in common. And I think you really have to really broaden your network in that early stage, talk to a litigator for you but also maybe someone who works for the county. All kinds of law just to get a little bit of sense of the heterogeneity of that career.
Brett McKay: And then when you’re talking to people you have this great question to ask to really get information you otherwise wouldn’t get to really figure out what it’s like to have this career. And the question is, before I started this job nobody told me that… And then have the person finish because then you might learn some things that you probably didn’t know and wouldn’t have even known to ask.
Tessa West: Yeah, I think I love this question. It’s based on this NPR really funny thing they did of, I must have missed that day where people talk about late knowledge that they accumulated. And I gave this survey to a bunch of people and I got like really wild answers. All kinds of things from like weird hidden norms. Like I didn’t know that I had to bring chocolate once a week to the boss to, I didn’t realize that as part of my job running this art gallery, I had to lift heavy boxes and most of the things people reported were extra roles and responsibilities that they were assumed to do that was normative to do but they were not hired to do. And I think that’s one of the main reasons why we actually drift apart from our job or have an identity crisis is because of this sort of like lack of role clarity, being asked to do random stuff that has nothing to do with the job. So you wanna get a sense of what weird randomness you might encounter should you take on this career. And I think the answers will surprise you and people are always a little bit surprised when they get asked that question, but they come up with like pretty interesting and creative answers. So that was kind of one of the more fun things I did for this book.
Brett McKay: Okay. So with crisis of identity, you wanna look at your identity centrality, identity satisfaction. So if you are still, you still have a high identity centrality with your career, but low satisfaction, maybe you don’t jump careers completely, you just find another place where you can get that satisfaction again, then if your identity centrality is low. So maybe you started your career thinking yourself as a lawyer, professor, teacher, et cetera, and you’re not feeling that anymore, that’s when you might think about jumping ships to different career. But before you do that network, ask around, figure out what it’s like with these new careers, you’re dating other careers and maybe even moonlight. We’re gonna take a quick break for a word from sponsors.
And now back to the show. Let’s talk about that second reason you’ve found that people are dissatisfied with the work and that’s when they’ve drifted apart from their job. What does that look like and how do you know that’s your dissatisfaction profile?
Tessa West: So the drifted apart person tends to think about what their career used to look like. So their happiness is anchored on the past and they’ll use very nostalgic language. I really loved it when we all worked under the same roof and now we’re hybrid. They will often… I gave people a checklist of a bunch of items. They’ll often check off a whole bunch of things that have changed at work. And the most common are the people you work with. So relationships, who your boss is who’s on your team, whether that best friend from work is still there and they recognize that a whole bunch of little things have changed but they often have a very difficult time seeing how all of these things have led to them just feeling on we at work, feeling bored and not interested and no longer motivated.
I think what’s fascinating is a lot of us tend to think that some big picture change like a restructure or a round of layoffs is what led to these things. But even the leaders I surveyed said that it’s very hard to draw those associations. So we’re left with a million kind of death by a thousand paper cuts at work, a million little things that have changed but no sense of how they all kind of work together to lead us to feel this way. And then coupled with that is a bit of an underestimation of how much we’ve changed at work, how much maybe our preferences have also changed that have contributed to this feeling. So we know we’re unhappy, we think we still like this career but we’re not quite sure why. And that’s where a lot of the soul searching goes.
Brett McKay: So what are some questions you can ask yourself to figure out whether you need to jump ship to a different career? Maybe you just gotta change things with your current career?
Tessa West: I think for the drifted apart, the main mystery here is if one type of change will happen in the workplace, is it gonna trickle down to affect a type of change that they really don’t enjoy? And whether that’s industry-wide or not. And I think for them is this a new career issue or is it just my job really comes down to has the whole industry changed? And a lot of people who feel drifted apart at work who are nostalgic for their old job really think it’s just their workplace. They think very locally about the changes, but often once they start networking and exploring things they actually realize there’s been kind of this just massive evolution of the whole entire industry and often in ways that they don’t totally anticipate.
So, one person I talked to was a school psychologist and that used to involve a lot of therapy and now it’s just testing. And why has that happened? Well there’s been some state regulations around what a school psychologist can and can’t do that has just fundamentally altered the nature of that career. It doesn’t matter what school district you’re in, you’re just gonna be doing testing all day long. People who feel it and just kind of a very much in the moment way have had AI introduced into the workplace or things like new software programs that they have to use. And so they don’t actually understand how widespread these changes are and that’s really what they have to first decide is, are there so many changes to this whole industry that I no longer recognize it and I need something completely different or is it just my place has gotten weird and different and I could actually kind of find what I used to have somewhere else.
Brett McKay: Gotcha. Yeah, I think that’s interesting. The idea of industry-wide changes causing you to drift apart. You’ve been seeing a lot of this, going back to education, a lot of teachers are quitting teaching and you ask them why and they just say, Well it’s just the profession of teaching, particularly in public schools has changed dramatically. We had to do different things like this is not the thing I signed up for when I became a teacher.
Tessa West: Yeah, there’s a huge emphasis on state testing performance and so now they all have to just spend so much time doing test prep, very little flexibility in curriculum. There’s a lot of kind of like top down direction giving of what you can and can’t teach. So teachers who really value creativity feel stifled in the classrooms. So they’re looking for jobs in which they can like kind of do that piece of it elsewhere. But I think for them the struggle is often, well where can I actually do that? Who does value that piece of me? That kind of creative curriculum building piece and then how kind of fungible is that skill into a new career and how can I talk that new career into believing me that this skill has utility in that job? And so learning kind of how to transfer skills is super important for people like that, for people like those teachers.
Brett McKay: Okay. So if you feel like you drifted apart, you need to figure out whether this is just happening at your particular job or if this is a larger thing and if it’s a larger thing that may suggest you need to jump ship to a different career pivot.
Tessa West: Yeah, absolutely. And I think you also wanna document your own changes. I talk about in the book about framing this not in terms of what you used to love and now hate but in terms of your preferences for specific types of work to kind of pull the emotions out of it a little bit. I used to prefer X and now I prefer Y. So that when you network you can kind of anchor those conversations around whether that type of task you’re interested in that preference is reflected in what people are doing in that other job.
Brett McKay: Gotcha. Alright, so the third reason people might feel unhappy about their work is the stretched too thin. And you said earlier you think a lot of people, even if they’re pretty happy with their career job, a lot of people might be experiencing this. So what are some signs that you are the stretch too thin dissatisfaction profile?
Tessa West: One of the main things is you have a really hard time rank ordering the importance of your roles at work. So, I kind of talked a little bit about like there’s two issues, there’s the role stuff, what you’re doing, what your actual job is and then how you work. The role thing I think is a real problem. I think we have our assigned roles, the roles that we’re paid to do. And then we have most of us spend like 8-10 hours a week on roles that we weren’t assigned to do, many of which we’re not even paid to do. And you need to ask yourself the question, write out all your roles at work rank order them in terms of most to least important and importance in terms of what you care about, but also importance in terms of what matters for promotion and raises and so forth.
And if you have a hard time with that rank ordering list, you probably actually have no idea what roles you should be focusing on. I think, a lot of us work in places where it’s normative to take on the role of somebody else when they’re out or if they’ve been laid off, there’s a lot of role absorption going on. But one thing that people also do is they volunteer for roles that they think will make them visible. Things like running an employee resource group or a conference committee, these kind of community building roles that are helpful but your performance on those roles are rarely discussed by leaders during promotion decisions.
And so you feel good and you get a lot of pats on the back and everyone loves you for taking these things on, but they don’t actually matter as much as you think you do. So I think you really wanna sort of critically evaluate your own roles. And then the second piece is how you actually work. Are you switching tasks so often you’re getting nothing done. And I think most of us are used to task switching. Most of us are also not very good at preventing ourselves from interrupting ourselves. And so most of those interruptions are so called self interruptions.
And so kind of figuring out what your pattern is there of like how you can actually just be more productive at work by interrupting yourself or having others interrupt you more strategically so that when you jump back into something you can actually kind of have a much more systematic workflow. I talked to neuroscientists for this chapter because a lot of why we feel stretched too thin actually comes down to the memories we form at work and our ability to kind of start where we left off has to do with how good we were at encoding what we did in the first place. And when we interrupt ourselves a lot, we don’t encode those memories of what we are working on and that makes it very hard for us to pick up. So I think there’s some little things you can do, some strategic things you can do to kind of reduce that mental load of task switching.
Brett McKay: So if this is your dissatisfaction profile, there’s actually a lot of things you can do with your current job to maybe remedy. You can talk to your boss about the distractions or the multiple roles and maybe you can reduce some of that but it might reach a point where it’s just expected that you do these multiple roles and you realize you’re not gonna be able to do the work that you want to do, well. That might nudge you to look for another job.
Tessa West: Yeah, I think one thing that happens a lot is organizations talk out of both sides of their mouth. They say that they’re really good at promoting people internally into leadership positions, but at the same time they ask everyone to do all the things at once and they’re not very strategic about how they get you to prioritize roles and then they kind of like shift the narrative on you like, well the reason why you weren’t promoted is because you weren’t good at prioritizing your work. What they don’t realize is that maybe the middle manager is asking 15 people to do all of these different jobs at once. And so if your own leader manager can’t help you with that task of just prioritizing your roles most important to least important and they keep telling you that there’s a tie between one and two and five and six, then that’s probably a red flag that they don’t even know, what this should look like. And they’re not even sure about people who’ve been successfully promoted and how they prioritize their own roles. So, you can make that list and go out into the world and talk to hiring managers with your role prioritization and during interviews ask them point blank how are you gonna help me stick to kind of this rank ordering of roles when people start nudging me to do additional work. Like what process do you have in place to sort of protect me to insulate me from that role creepage that a lot of us are feeling at work. And I think that’s a fair question to ask.
Brett McKay: And as you were talking it reminded me it might be useful too if you’re feeling stretched too thin to do a broader view of the, your career landscape. ‘Cause you might find, Okay, I’m feeling stretched too thin at this particular company or organization. Maybe if I just go somewhere else and keep the same career, you might find the same problem because industry-wide, they’re asking these people who have this career to do multiple roles no matter where you go. So you might have to do some more investigation like talk to your friend who lives in Nebraska or different states. Are you seeing the same sort of thing in your career? Like if you’re a teacher, are they having you do this, this, this, this? And if it’s like, Yes, and it’s like well maybe this is all over the place, maybe I have to go to a different career.
Tessa West: Yeah, absolutely. And I think, some people can handle that sort of milling things at once. Some people are really good at boundaries. Others are yes people and they’re people pleasers and if you are a people pleaser and you have a hard time saying no or you care a lot about your team liking you, then you know your achilles heel at work is gonna be taking on the extra work of people taking on those extra roles. And another kind of interesting thing I learned when writing this book is that a lot of times when we are taking on extra work of people, it’s not because there’s a free writer problem in our teams where people are just sort of offloading. Often this happens in well structured teams that don’t have a free writer problem where people are actually getting credit for their work. What they don’t realize is when you get credit for doing something someone else is paid to do, even if people verbally recognize it, it’s very hard to kind of integrate that information into a promotion decision. Rarely will a boss say, Yeah, this person was amazing, they took on the work of everybody else on the team. I think we should promote them because it makes them look like a bad boss. It makes them look disorganized. And so doing work that someone else is technically paid for, even if you get credit for it in the moment, rarely translates to an actual promotion opportunity. And I think people don’t understand that disconnect. That is pretty common.
Brett McKay: Okay. So the next reason, the fourth reason that people might be unhappy with their job is they feel like they can’t get ahead in their career because they never get promoted or get a raise. They’re just overlooked all the time. I mean you call this the runner-up. Why are some people consistently runner-ups in their career?
Tessa West: There’s a couple sort of really difficult answers to that question. The first one is that they have less status than they think they do. And this is a hard pill to swallow, this idea that maybe people don’t respect you, admire you, they don’t care about your contributions as much as they need to in order for you to get promoted. And I asked people, were you given an explicit reason why you weren’t promoted and most weren’t, but they had some kind of sense that low status might be at play. I asked people who make promotion decisions why people weren’t get promoted. They kind of said the same thing, no one was really told they don’t have status, but that’s kind of the reason that’s… It’s implied but never actually said. And then among those who successfully get promoted, they’re like, Oh yeah, absolutely. It’s because I was told that I have status. So the only people who are actually sure that status matters are those who are successfully promoted. ‘Cause it’s easy to tell someone when they have status. It’s very hard to tell them when they don’t. And I talk a lot about in my book of like how to read status, which is this kind of complex topic around things like if you write an email to the boss, how quickly does the boss reply versus if someone else does, is it quicker or slower? Status is often conveyed very indirectly through these subtle ways. When you contribute to a meeting, does your contribution stick?
Do people build on it or do they always switch topics? And this kind of like soft nebulous construct is one of the main reasons why people keep going up for promotions and not succeeding because they don’t have as much status as they think they have and they don’t, they’re never told that and they have a really hard time correcting for that. So I think, that’s kind of one of the trickier things that you have to learn about yourself. One of the more kind of threatening, stressful ones, some of the kind of more obvious ones are things like you’ve missed a couple key roles along the way. So you’ve got maybe a battlefield promotion. You were hired into a position of leadership that you really didn’t have the experience for, but you missed one or two things in the past. And whoever’s making decisions now really cares about those one or two things. And they can even feel a little bit arbitrary, but they’re gonna die on this hill of we’re not promoting someone without those things. I think those are a couple things. And then there’s the like scary not within your own hands problem. Like, my boss actually doesn’t have enough status to promote me. My boss loves me, but when that person walks into the room, no one listens to who they think should get promoted because they’re not a big enough deal. They don’t have enough tenure at this company. So those are the three main categories of reasons I found that people really struggle.
Brett McKay: Okay. So you have to become more status savvy if this is your problem and you talk about again like status, you said it’s very subtle. You have to pay attention to how people respond to you, how quickly they respond to you, to emails, et cetera. Because you don’t want to ask, Hey, do I have status? Do you guys think I have high status? ‘Cause everyone’s like, what the heck, you weirdo? You don’t ask that question.
Tessa West: Yeah, I know it’s a totally weird question. Yeah.
Brett McKay: But you can ask a question to your boss or maybe your coworkers like, do you think my contributions have an impact? And if the answer’s no, hopefully they’ll give you that honest feedback.
Tessa West: You’re even smaller than that. Say you bring three ideas to a meeting and none of the ideas stick, and they don’t end up being any of the ideas written on the whiteboard. You can talk to your boss or your team members and say, can you maybe give me some insight into why you think those ideas weren’t the ones we went with, or in what ways it was presenting these ideas maybe not ideal. So the smaller, the more specific and behavioral you can get and the kind of the more immediate after the thing, the better. And I think a lot of people in client-facing jobs have this problem where they don’t know why clients don’t prefer them. They prefer someone else over them. And they walk out of that client meeting and think, I thought that went really well. And then they find out, okay, well we got the job but the client doesn’t ever wanna talk to you again. And they don’t… No one really explains to them why that was the case. And it could be something like they interrupted too often or they talked for too long or they were too loud. It could be little things like that that accumulate over time that if you don’t get corrected, you just end up kind of hitting your head against a wall constantly ’cause you can’t move forward.
Brett McKay: So what are some solutions, you mentioned just asking for feedback, figuring out like what you need to do to advance in your job. Let’s say you do those things. How do you make sure your contributions get recognized?
Tessa West: I think that you need to do a lot of work ahead of time to figure out whose voices get heard and why. Kind of one of the more fascinating findings from my work on status is that, it’s not always the person who makes the most persuasive argument. It’s the person who organizes the team ahead of time and says things like, let’s all go around the room and share one idea. And so people have some instincts of what gives them status, and those instincts are talk a lot, come with the most persuasive arguments and interrupt people, those are dominance things. Those aren’t actual prestige things. And so you kind of need to learn how to figure out where your expertise lies, stay in your lane with that expertise and minimize the amount of jocking you do for status in groups.
Nothing loses status quicker than trying to take it from another person in the actual meeting by verbally dominating that person. That is a losing strategy that I see people try over and over again. It’s a very heavy hand in strategy. You gotta kind of do your work behind the scenes, and that includes kind of networking with other high status people who aren’t in your role, so you know who you need to actually impress, who actually matters in this meeting. And so subtle things, subtle leadership behaviors that actually show you care more about the team than the individual is a huge way to gain status. I did a lot of work, a lot of research looking at what’s called a status jolt in the workplace. So this happens when all of a sudden we have our team, we know who has status, we know who doesn’t, and then something happens to the organization to kind of throw a wrench in it, a merger, or we’re now all on Zoom or whatever the thing is.
The people who try to cling to their old status with selfish behavior, by trying to outperform others, not sharing information, not being helpful, they lose their status the quickest. And so clinging to old status is also a way you can lose status in a new team. You need to actually be pretty helpful and not so Machiavellian if you want to actually gain status after jolt like that. So focus more kind of on helping behavior and on transparency around process and around kind of soft leadership. Those are the best ways to actually gain status at work, not by being heavy-handed and loud and interrupting people or even being the most persuasive in the room.
Brett McKay: Let’s say you do all this stuff, you try to do a better job of managing your status at your current job, but you do it and nothing’s coming from, you’re still getting overlooked. So I think it can happen ’cause you’re kind of, people kind of put you in a box. It’s like, well this is Bill. Bill is just this way, even though…
Tessa West: Yep. We know Bill.
Brett McKay: We know Bill, but like even though Bill’s been doing some great stuff, some great moves to make contributions, it’s like well, it’s Bill, he’s just not gonna get a promotion. When do you realize like I’ve reached my limit here. Like people aren’t gonna give me a promotion. Like how do you decide I gotta jump ship?
Tessa West: I love that question. It’s like, at what point is your status, your old status so stuck to you that impression formation change is impossible. Like everyone’s just decided who you are. It’s a bit of like manifest destiny problem. Like you cannot override that impression that people have of you. It’s too difficult. I do think if you’re stuck in that position, and it doesn’t matter what you do, then a learned helplessness is gonna set in and you’re gonna figure out it doesn’t matter if I actually improve here, nobody cares because they are anchoring their judgments on my past behavior. I really do think that’s when you have to consider leaving. If you are getting pretty hard evidence that no matter what you do here, you can never correct for your mistakes of the past. It’s a little like I have cheated on my husband five times, he’s never gonna believe me ever again. Then I think you are kind of stuck.
And we know from the impression formation literature that it’s really hard to override those impressions once we have them of someone. And so I don’t wanna be Pollyannish about this and say you cannot fix your status. You can override those impressions, especially if you’ve been at a place for a while and it becomes kind of impossible, then you might need to actually make a career change. And when you do that, you might have to take a step down before you can take a step up again. You might have to eat a little slice of humble pie to kind of make a move up. You might have to downgrade a bit in order to do that somewhere else.
Brett McKay: All right, so the final one is the underappreciated star. This is someone who’s underpaid and undervalued, compared to what they bring to the workplace. How do you know if you’re an underappreciated star?
Tessa West: I think the kind of first thing that you need to question is, are you actually a star? And I give people a few things you can do to figure out if you have a skill that you are both the best at and is rare at work and both need to be true. If you’re really good at something that everybody can do, then you’re probably not a star. And then the under-appreciation part also takes a little bit of interrogating. So I think most underappreciated stars are told they’re great, but they’re not shown that they’re great in any kind of compensation way that they care about. And it doesn’t have to be money, it can be other perks, whatever the thing is. It’s a lot of promising future compensation. And we see this in small organizations and new startups that don’t have a lot of money or resources to give out. They will bring in a star and they will promise them the world if they just stick around long enough. So if you’re getting a lot of these kind of hypothetical future promises, I’ve worked for organizations that weren’t publicly traded but they promised me stock once they were in which they made up a number to estimate what that number would look like. Those kinds of things tend to be the forms of under-appreciation that people who are at the top of their game experience.
Brett McKay: One factor that contributes to people becoming under-appreciated stars I thought was really incisive is that many companies and organizations are just looking for good enough when hiring. Tell us about this finding.
Tessa West: Yeah, I’m a little cynical about the whole star business, partly because I think most companies don’t actually want a whole bunch of stars. They might not even be able to afford one star. I think a lot of people who are really, really good are in the 99th percentile. They get compensated exponentially more than someone who say the 90th percentile. And so if salaries don’t go up in a linear way, starhood increases. They go up exponentially and it’s often not worth it to pay these stars. And a lot of places who have hired people like this, who have hired so-called geniuses or kind of the more dark version of that as a super chicken that will kind of peck the eyes out of all the other stars to be number one, they find that this is a mistake and that it’s actually better to hire people who are pretty good, who have decent skills, but they don’t have the price tag, they don’t have the expectations of being treated like they’re fancy that come with the true stars, that come with the person who is the CEO at the fortune 100 company or whatever. And I think you need to figure out whether there’s even a market for your starhood. And most places, they can’t afford you and they’re not actually that interested in bringing someone in who is so, so much more powerful than everybody else. There’s a psychological distance that you’ll create should you come to that place.
Brett McKay: Yeah, I imagine this good enough problem is gonna become even worse with the introduction of AI into companies, ’cause like AI can do a lot of the stuff at… It’s starting to be able to do a lot of stuff at white collar jobs. It’s not great, but it’s good enough.
Tessa West: Totally.
Brett McKay: And so companies are like, well instead of paying a human being with all these advanced degrees $100,000 a year to do this job, we’ll just use AI that costs us $20,000 a year.
Tessa West: Oh, absolutely. And I’m seeing this… Any kind of job in psychology where you’re hired as like a consultant to kind of import and export knowledge from science and make it palatable to the masses. So go summarize these 15 academic articles and make a PowerPoint presentation, explaining what growth mindset is. Those people used to make like one 150K, coming out with a PhD in psychology. Now, they make 0K because AI chatbot GPT can do that in five seconds. It’s a little janky. Sure. But someone can take five minutes to kind of make it pretty, add the human touch to it. And so there are just these whole white collar careers that are just being rapidly shrunk, and anyone who used to kind of be good at summarizing things, no longer has a job. And I do think we’re seeing kind of more and more of this good enough problem. Even cropping up a pretty sophisticated levels like coding and things like that, which we used to just really rely on well-trained computer scientists to do, AI does that just as well, if not better.
Brett McKay: Yeah. The thing you have to start thinking about is, well, how can I take that skill that can now be done by AI? How can I take that to the next level, like higher level? What can AI not do and maybe AI can’t make those bigger connections? I don’t know, I’m just kind of shooting off the hip here.
Tessa West: Yeah, I could tell you the jobs AI can’t do that people are really desperate for is anything in hospitality, in healthcare, any human interfacing jobs where you have to actually talk to people. So not like back office jobs where you can chat with your Bank of America app or whatever, but anything that involves like a complex human interaction of any form. And whether that means making a salad or talking to a client or giving someone a shot in the arm, those are the jobs that people are really distrustful of AI. Even like ironically, things that AI could be better at, like radiology and reading scans, there’s a complete distrust. I have a paper on like the trust of this kind of machine stuff. There’s a distrust when there’s no human eyes on it. And so ironically, even some of these things that AI is getting better at, people still wanna hire people for as kind of the last stop. And I think anything like that, if you’re a new career person listening to this, human interfacing stuff where people wanna talk to another human being, those are the jobs you need to start looking into.
Brett McKay: Well, Tessa, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?
Tessa West: So you can go to tessawestauthor.com to take the quizzes from Job Therapy and from Jerks at Work as well. If you wanna read about my research, you can go to tessawestlab.com.
Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, Tessa West, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.
Tessa West: Thank you so much.
Brett McKay: My guest today was Dr. Tessa West. She’s the author of the book, Job Therapy. It’s available on amazon.com and at bookstores everywhere. You find more information about her work at her website, tessawestauthor.com. Also, check out our show notes at aom.is/jobtherapy, where you can find links to resources, where we delve deeper into this topic.
Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com, where you can find our podcast archives, as well as thousands of articles that we’ve written over the years about pretty much anything you can think of. And if you’ve done so already, I’d appreciate you to take one minute to give us a review on apple podcast or Spotify, it helps out a lot. And if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or a family member you think will get something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, it’s Brett McKay reminding you to listen to the AOM podcast, and put what you’ve heard into action.
