Welum had the opportunity to interview the author of this book Tessa West, who is a Professor of Psychology at New York University, her academic research and writing for the media focuses on how to improve communication between employees, bosses, and hiring professionals across workplace settings. She has over 100 academic publications and is a regular contributor to the Wall Street Journal.
Dr. Tessa West, you are a Professor of Psychology at New York University, where you are a leading expert on the science of social relationships, what drove you to write the book Job Therapy, Finding Work That Works For You?
When I wrote this book, I started with the idea that most of us have a relationship with our careers. And in many ways, our relationship with our career is like our relationships with people—lovers and spouses, friends and coworkers. There are emotional ups and downs; we love our job one moment and hate it the next. We have ambivalent feelings about starting something new, especially if our career identity defines us. And we struggle with being in love with a career that we feel doesn’t love us back. Job Therapy was born out of the idea that we go to therapy to help with all kinds of relationship issues. Why not apply a therapeutic approach to your relationship with your career?
I first started seeing the parallels between our relationship with our career and our interpersonal relationships when I was teaching a course on close relationships at NYU. I’ve been teaching this course for 16 years. But for the first time, I noticed a lot of content overlap in how people were talking about their careers in my role as a consultant and career researcher, and how they were talking about the struggles of dating and relationships.
“Happiness, at least the way I talk about it in this book, is more about going into a career or job with a level of awareness of what the day-to-day will be like, including what will be expected of you”
It was very shocking to read that based on your research the general idea we all have is that we’re unhappy in our jobs because we have a bad manager, low salary, boring tasks, or stressful workloads is not true, why do you think, other experts in Human Resources have fostered those wrong beliefs?
To be clear, these can be reasons to be unhappy. Understanding how stress impacts you is a big theme of this book (and the opening chapter begins with a “daily stress test” to help you understand your true sources of stress). But I think the mistake many of us make is that we try to pinpoint our unhappiness on one single cause: one bad boss, or low compensation. These structural things often contribute to our unhappiness, and importantly, contribute to what triggers it, but there’s usually deeper stuff going on, especially if you’ve struggled for a while.
For example, a low salary might be stressful because you can’t pay your bills, but it can also reflect feeling undervalued or underappreciated at work. And if you’re a runner-up—someone who struggles to get a raise or a promotion—then your salary is a constant reminder of what other people have around you that you don’t.
And being bored at work often happens when we drift apart—we no longer love the things we used to. Perhaps the job has changed and we’re now taking on more boring stuff than usual, but perhaps we’ve changed. We often underestimate the degree to which we’ve changed laterally in our careers—we don’t get better or worse, just different.
I think HR folks and other workplace experts focus on these things because they are easy symptoms to see. My first book “Jerks at Work” had two chapters on bad bosses and how to handle them. Bad interpersonal dynamics loom large at work, and we can easily label these people as such based on unhealthy patterns of behavior. But I think for many of us, fixing one thing that is going wrong won’t solve the underlying psychological issues that we struggle with—identity crises and feeling underappreciated, for example. The bad boss might be a reason why you’re torn between places or struggling with being an underappreciated star. But simply replacing this bad boss with a new one, without understanding how the bad boss is contributing to these feelings, won’t solve your issues in the long term.
“To find this form of happiness, you need to have a level of radical honesty in the job interview process. Employers need to be on board, willing to honestly answer tough questions like, what does it looks like to fail at this job? And who wrote the job ad and has my future boss seen it? “
Through your research interviewing thousands of people who have recently switched jobs or undergone career changes, you found there are five common sources of career frustration, can you name them and elaborate on each one of them?
Crisis of identity: This person has spent months, often years, honing their skills and has a lot to show for it. They have well-developed professional networks and knowledge of the hidden curriculum. Their jobs are a core part of who they are, and their personal lives and workplace lives are often sewn together in an intricate web. Yet, they question whether this career is right for them and fantasize about the chance to do something new.
Their journey starts with the question: Do you still feel like your old career is an important part of who you are, and how bad would you feel if you could never do it again?
The drifted apart: The Drifted Apart know what it feels like to be happy at work—they know how to find purpose in their job, with whom to network for help, and what they need to do to perform well. But changes big and small have eaten away at the certainty they once felt.
Their journey starts with the question: Their journey begins by understanding how widespread the changes they’ve experienced are: Is it the whole industry, their organization, or something more local…then figuring out how much they’ve changed.
The stretched too thin: Chronically feeling like you’re forced to choose which thing you want to get done—with a never-ending pile of work. For some, this is a structural problem at work, they are juggling too many roles. For others, it’s a problem with how they work—they are chronically distracted and task-switching.
Their journey starts with the question: Am I taking on too many roles at work, like running a team while volunteering for a new committee? Am I switching between tasks so often that I never finish what I start?
The runner up: The Runner-Up chronically lives in a world where they come in second. They are doing some things right, because they are considered for that raise or promotion, but they aren’t quite able to seal the deal. This person knows who they are and where they want to go, but they struggle with a big piece of the puzzle: What have I been doing wrong?
Their journey starts by laying out what feedback they’ve been missing along the way: You will learn how to figure out how much status you have at work, and whether structural changes, like “jolts” to the workplace (big changes that shake things up), are to blame for your position.
“My book is about resetting your thinking about your career so you can get into the deep, psychological reasons underlying your unhappiness”
The underappreciated star: This person struggles with the chronic feeling that they put more into their relationship with their job than they get out of it. The Underappreciated Star feels a tension between what they give to their organization and what that organization gives back. Because they are arguably quite good at their jobs (an assumption that Underappreciated Stars should test), most are getting rewarded at work, but not in the ways they want.
Their journey begins by learning their value in the marketplace, and critically, figuring out who their real competition is. Part of this journey is figuring out how much the market values stars—because often “just below star status” is good enough, and organizations aren’t that interested in getting someone in the 95 percentiles when the 80th will do just fine.
The Interest in the topic of employee well-being and happiness grew during the pandemic, after observing employees with anxiety and depression, yet many CEOs are not convinced of the importance of creating a culture of happiness at work. What arguments would you give them to change their minds?
I think “happiness” often gets interpreted (through a CEO lens) as a call to “work less in the name of work-life balance,” or “expect this job to solve all of your life problems for you.” I’ve seen this theme a lot lately: People who worked very hard to get to the top often feel like they’re surrounded by whiners who want to work half as hard but get paid twice as much.
Happiness, at least the way I talk about it in this book, isn’t about that. It’s more about going into a career or job with a level of awareness of what the day-to-day will be like, including what will be expected of you. It’s about not feeling catfished during a job interview into taking a job that no one stays in for more than 5 months. To achieve this form of “happiness,” you really to do your homework before you apply for jobs. You need to network to learn the hidden curriculum. You need to learn what skills you need to really do well at this job that aren’t advertised on company websites and job ads.
And to find this form of happiness, you need to have a level of radical honesty in the job interview process. Employers need to be on board, willing to honestly answer tough questions like, what does it look like to fail at this job? And who wrote the job ad and has my future boss seen it?
If you want to reduce your revolving door of talent, and if you want to find people who are a genuinely good fit for a job, then both parties—the perspective employee and the employer—need to be on board with this form of honesty. Happiness is found at work when we can predict what will be asked of us, and when there’s a clear set of procedures for determining who gets promoted. And when there’s clear communication following a failure. For CEOs and other leaders, it's not about giving employees more nice things or cutting down the number of hours they work in a week, it’s about being honest, clear communicators who can say things like, “You didn’t get promoted, and here’s the real reason why. And by the way, it takes about 5 attempts at promotion before the average person lands one. Sorry if no one told you that before.” I hope that the CEOs and leaders reading this can get on board with that idea.
There are a lot of books that address the issue of happiness at work directly or indirectly, what added value does your book bring in this field?
My book is about resetting your thinking about your career so you can get into the deep, psychological reasons underlying your unhappiness. And I believe that once you think of your career as a “relationship partner,” your thinking will change quite a bit. You will go from feeling like someone that things “happen to” at work (e.g., “I have a boss who was mean, I was denied a promotion”) to someone who has agency.
And this frame of mind will help you process your complex emotions around your career. Many of the ways we are trained to think about what unhappiness at work “looks like,” and how that unhappiness at work manifests behaviorally, simply don’t resonate with people. Not everyone wakes up one day and quietly quits. Most of us feel ambivalent about our jobs, just as we feel about our relationship partners. I also think many of us experience feelings of commitment and satisfaction with our careers that wax and wane.
Who is the book for? Where can people get it?
This book is for anyone looking to better understand their relationship with their career, or who wants to train others to do the same. There are many quizzes in here to help with self-discovery, so if you like a science-based approach to understanding yourself, this book is for you. It’s found in major and local bookstores, and on Amazon.
Anything else you want to add?
The one theme that I didn’t talk about in this interview is the importance of forming new interpersonal connections. If you want to learn about what a career is really like, you must talk to people. Short, 15-minute chats with a set of questions you send ahead of time will do the trick. The book is full of instructions for how to reach out to strangers, what to say, and who you should connect with to learn new things. When it comes to Job Therapy, other people are your best resource.
