Tessa West is a social psychology professor at New York University and an expert on interpersonal communication. She has over 100 academic publications and is a regular contributor to the Wall Street Journal. Her work has been covered by Scientific American, the New York Times, Financial Times, The Guardian, CNN, CNBC, ABC, TIME, Bloomberg, Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, and the US Supreme Court.
Below, Tessa shares five key insights from her new book, Job Therapy: Finding Work That Works for You. Listen to the audio version—read by Tessa herself—in the Next Big Idea App.
1. Transitioning out of a career is a lot like falling out of love.
When most of us think about making a career change, our first step is working through the structural changes we would face, like moving to a big city, changing to a hybrid work schedule, or taking a pay cut. We try our best to rationally navigate through the decision, focusing on big-picture issues. These decisions are important, especially as we get close to sealing the deal with a new job. But this perspective misses the messy, often emotional experience of breaking up with a career.
I’ve been teaching a class on close relationships at NYU for 15 years, and I’ve been studying the form and function of relationship break-ups for decades. I’ve been struck by how similar people’s experiences are between falling out of love with a person and falling out of love with their career. By missing this connection, we often go about leaving a career in the wrong way.
For example, as you near the end of your relationship with a career, you might expect your commitment to the job and your engagement to slowly peter off. Until one day, the love is completely gone, and you’re ready to take the leap. But in reality, most of us don’t slowly fall out of love; rather, we go through a stage of heightened ambivalence near the end.
Simultaneously loving and hating the relationship you’re thinking of leaving is one of the key stages of relationship dissolution in romantic relationships. At work, you can love your boss one moment and hate them the next. You can feel excited by your work and bored with it, often within the same hour. It’s important to embrace conflicting feelings and understand that they are a key part of the breakup process. And the good news is, there are concrete steps you can take to fall out of love properly with your career, so you don’t wind up in an on-again-off-again relationship with it.
2. Huge communication gaps in hiring.
I collected a lot of data from both sides of the hiring process: those looking to hire and place people into jobs, and those looking to find new jobs. Almost every hiring expert I spoke with told me that miscommunications start small and early, beginning with when the job ad is posted. If left unresolved, this can lead to big misconceptions about the expectations for a job.
One recruiter I spoke with gave a simple illustration. Rarely do candidates ask during an interview, Who wrote the job ad? But the answer can be illuminating. You will get all kinds of answers from, honestly, I don’t know (which implies that the hiring manager isn’t looped in with who will manage you one day) to honestly, the person who held this job before me did, and there are a host of qualifications we need that aren’t listed in it.
“A large percentage of people who fail to get promoted do so because their boss didn’t have the tenure required to put forward their direct reports for consideration.”
As another example, most of us don’t understand how raise and promotion decisions are made at the company we’re interviewing for. We rarely ask questions like, Does every boss here get to put someone forward for promotion, or is that determined by some standard that I don’t know about? I was shocked to learn that a large percentage of people who fail to get promoted do so because their boss didn’t have the tenure required to put forward their direct reports for consideration.
The answers to simple questions like these can give a wealth of information about how a company selects candidates and how well people who work at that company communicate with each other. Remember: you want total transparency at this stage. Mixed messages or conflicting answers from different interviewers are usually red flags.
3. Understand your daily stressors.
I’ve been studying the influence of stress on how people work together for decades, including the physiologic markers of stress, along with how stress can be contagious. Daily, low level stressors are huge triggers of workplace unhappiness, but chances are you don’t have great insight into what your own stressors are.
For Job Therapy, I ran a small study where I had people write down in the morning what their biggest anticipated stressor was for that day, and then in the evening, they wrote what their biggest stressor ended up being. About 50 percent of the time, the thing people were worried about most in the morning turned out to be their biggest stressor. Why only half of the time?
It turns out, when we anticipate a stressor, we are pretty good at putting steps in place to prevent it from stressing us out when the moment comes. People who were worried about a big speech, for example, practiced it one more time, just to make sure they went into the room feeling ready.
But the other 50 percent of the time, people reported a host of different unanticipated stressors. The most common ones were overly long commutes, a surprise meeting on their calendar, or an expedited work deadline. But here’s where it gets weird. When I asked people if they encountered that unanticipated stressor before, 72 percent said they had at least a few times, and among those, 34 percent said regularly!
“When you network with people in different careers or companies, ask them how often they encounter your stress triggers.”
Most of us don’t encode something as stressful if we’ve encountered it before, and only upon reflection do we realize, yeah, that thing really stressed me out. We might encounter it regularly, but because we don’t encode it as stressful unless told to reflect on it, we forget about it. Once that overly long commute is over, we forget about it and move on. The same goes for that last-minute meeting and so on.
As you investigate new jobs, you will need to bring your knowledge of your daily stressors with you. The best way to get this knowledge is by running your own daily stress test, where you collect the same data on yourself as I did in my study. When you network with people in different careers or companies, ask them how often they encounter your stress triggers. And remember that everyone has different ones. Focus on the event that stressed you out, not the experience of stress itself. Not everyone is bothered by last-minute meetings or tough-to-predict commutes. But if you are, it’s good to know how often you will encounter them.
4. Leaders can prevent people from falling out of love with their jobs.
People will often give leaders clues to their unhappiness—or clues that a job isn’t a great fit, even as early as the first interview. Leaders just need to learn where to look.
Don’t wait for those quarterly engagement surveys to get answers. Leaders can be anthropologists at work. Small things, like the layout of an office, can influence the degree to which people task switch and are interrupted at work, leading them to be stretched too thin. And big things, like misconceptions about the importance of certain roles, can lead people to wind up in the runner-up category over and over. In fact, one of the biggest knowledge gaps I discovered is the importance of taking on highly visible roles for promotions, such as becoming the chair of an employee resource group. But leaders who promote for a living cite this assumption as one of the biggest mistakes people make in their careers: Sure, these roles make you visible, but they don’t showcase the skillset you need to land the promotion.
If leaders can learn what leads people to need job therapy—from office layouts that kill their efficiency to taking on the wrong roles—they can put steps in place to improve the hiring process and stop the revolving door of talent. Critically, they can course correct when they see people going astray.
5. Honest interviews are critical for finding a good fit. But most of us are afraid to go there.
Interviews are like first dates. We want to be honest about our strengths, weaknesses, and pasts. But the desire to impression-manage usually wins out over total honesty. Most of us are so concerned that we will offend our interaction partners by asking questions that feel contentious that we choose to smile and nod instead. These concerns generally lead us astray.
“You want to know not only what it looks like to succeed at this job but also what it looks like to fail.”
One of the most consistent pieces of advice I got from interviewers was this: If you’re on a job interview, ask the tough questions. Ask them in a way that makes it clear you did your research about the organization. You know what their shortcomings are and where they’ve potentially misstepped in the past. You want to know not only what it looks like to succeed at this job but also what it looks like to fail.
If you’re a career transitioner, ask specific questions about how the company will make sure you can learn the hidden curriculum. If you’re looking for a job with an upward trajectory, ask questions about whether the next step-up job involves the same set of skills and the same type of social network as the ones you will gain in this role. If the promotion opportunity seems too good to be true, make sure you’re not on the receiving end of a battlefield promotion, meaning there is no one else to take the job, so the company is willing to take a chance on someone who isn’t quite prepared for it.
Tough questions like these aren’t offensive and won’t come across as entitled. Keeping it real—down to expressing your own shortcomings and your concerns about the potential pitfalls of the job—is the strategy preferred by people in power and by people who care about long-term fit.
To listen to the audio version read by author Tessa West, download the Next Big Idea App today:
