How smart people end up in the wrong careers
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What insights does Suzy Welch provide about career fulfillment?
Welcome to McKinsey Talks Talent, featuring McKinsey leaders and talent experts, Brian Hancock and Brooke Weddle. I'm Lucia Rahilly.
Are you a generalist or a specialist? And where you are on that continuum makes you better or worse at certain kind of work. That's hardwired. Are you a brainstormer, kind of a font of ideas, or are you an idea processor? So there's pillars of cognitive wiring. And you can certainly have work that you are not cognitively wired to do. But man, it's harder. I mean, if you're a specialist by wiring, you should be doing specialist work.
That's Susie Welch, NYU professor and author of the recently published book, Becoming You. Ever wonder why your job feels harder than you think it should? It might be because your cognitive wiring is a bad match for your role.
How does cognitive wiring influence career choices?
Susie joins us to share how to better understand ourselves and our teams so we can have less friction and more flow. Susie Welch, welcome to McKeezy Talks Talent. Thank you for having me. I am so excited to meet you and to talk about your book, Becoming You, which I would urge folks to read, stat, and genuinely wish I had encountered when I was starting my career, lo, these many years passed. Me too. That's why I wrote it, because I needed it. And Rick and Brian, happy new year. Happy new year. Great to see you as always. Susie, let's start with some context. Your book is about the work of identifying individual purpose and developing what you describe as relentless candor with ourselves about who we are and how we want to spend our time.
Before we get into it, I want to ask, we are arguably in the throes of a fundamental paradigm shift, given the advent of AI and its potential to upend the workplace as we know it. And what is more, I just read that the latest consumer sentiment report in the U.S. showed that Americans are experiencing high levels of insecurity about the potential for job loss over the next five years. And of course, we also read about terms like job hugging and difficulty among college grads in finding jobs, etc. Why this book and why now?
Well, the book is about understanding your values, your aptitudes, what you're good at, and what the world needs right now, and figuring out what's at the intersection of three data sets. I think the reason to read it is if you need a little guidance and tough love in a time where there's kind of a terrible perfect storm. One is that the typical job paths for people are evaporating. Any typical career path is changing as the work changes dramatically. And the second thing that's happening is that there's just this gigantic values disconnect between what many people entering the job workforce at any age, what their values are given different cultural and societal things that are going on and the values that hiring managers are looking for.
So, Susie, building on that, there was a story in the book where you framed it as my B plus life and that an OK life is not OK. How would you encourage people to think about those passages that take away in light of kind of the current broader environment?
Let's talk about what a B-plus life is. So it's a job that we're in, and it sort of meets some of our needs, and it sort of gives us some chance for doing well. And we can just hover there for a long, long time. It's very easy to get used to B-plus. And so the book says, let's just figure out exactly what your true values are. I have data which suggested only 7% of Americans are sure what their values are. They just mix them up with virtues. And then almost no one knows what their actual cognitive and emotional aptitudes are. And then the problem with interest, which is the third part of the third data set we need to excavate, is that the world is really noisy and complicated, and it's very hard to drink from the fire hose that's telling us what's out there and what's available.
We have to open our aperture and find out what's coming. And so this is a discipline. to know what our values, our aptitudes, and our economically viable interests are.
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