Chapter 1: 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.
Chapter 2: 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.
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Chapter 3: What is the concept of a 'B-plus life' in career satisfaction?
And it's so efficient in a way to sort of say, here's who I am. I especially love it when you see the bosses handing it to the team saying, you want to know how to work with me? I think in many ways, it's just a bigger enterprise application because it increases the clarity of the team to have everybody speaking the same language.
One other thing when I was reading the book and I was thinking about enterprise application was how you talk about resilience. And I was particularly struck by resilience being at the intersection of grit and forgiveness. And I was wondering if we could expand on that a little bit for us here.
everybody talks about resilience, the thing that's always mystified me about resilience is that the typical definition of resilience is like, you're down on your back and you're completely defeated and go find inner strength. This is when you're absolutely... Where does the inner strength come from? That was always the philosophical question to me.
And then I really needed resilience because I was fired and it was really embarrassing and I felt like I was never going to work again. Grit has to be unlocked. And the way we unlock it is to stop using all of our psychic energy to litigate what happened. It happened. We have to accept our own role in it. And we have to let go of being mad at the people who did it to us.
And then we can start to rebuild. There's no scientific validation of what I just said. There's just life experience. And I'm telling you, I study it really closely now. Like when I see somebody who gets back up, it's almost always you hear them talk about letting go of anger and letting go of blame.
I recognize that you've said that you use a version of a 360-degree tool, so that gives some outside input. But is it more difficult for folks to self-report their values when they're in crisis and when they're questioning? what they've done and what their values in fact are, does that make the process more complex?
People cannot self-report their values because their identity gets mixed up in it.
One of the reasons we had to create the Values Bridge is before the Values Bridge was invented and developed, I used to go through seven exercises and then people would have a list of values and it would be sort of try to get you to a place where they were force-ranked and then I would literally see people erase one, like cross ones out and move it up to the top of the like, especially family when family didn't show up at the top.
They would manually put it up at the top because that's where it should be. Whereas, in fact, our data would show that only 11% of Americans have family as a top value in reality. Okay? That's amazing. That's an amazing gap. Yes. Yeah, it's fascinating. And so it is true that when people come to Becoming You, they're often very vulnerable. Right.
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Chapter 4: How can individuals identify their true values and aptitudes?
What's that really look like? We just did a consulting project at an engineering firm in Pittsburgh and they came in and they went, we don't have a culture. And I said, yes, you do. It's just not defined. So I would say culture is It begins and ends with values. I think we would probably agree on that. Let's all speak the same language.
Yeah. No, I agree. I think values is foundational and then culture being almost like the behaviors that come to life in the day-to-day, but they're rooted in those values. I agree. A lot is left unsaid or when you don't have this common language or framework to be anchored on, it becomes very confusing.
Agreed. Agreed. And the thing we need less confusion on is culture. Culture is strategy for breakfast. If you don't have a good culture, nothing gets done.
I wanted to bring us back to where we started with the current paradigm shift. And I think that the adjective used in the book was the unsettled nature of our collective future in an AI economy. The term authentic has probably always been kind of unstable, but it seems to be growing even more so as AI introduces the possibility of avatars and synthetic relationships and so forth.
As you look, say, five years out, Do you see authenticity and the definition of becoming ourselves evolving or looking different?
I can't look five years out, but I can say that at the end of the day, authenticity is everything. It's everything because without authenticity, there's no trust. And without trust, there is no business. There's no family. There's no society or a culture. And so the problem is that AI giveth and it taketh away.
And one of the things that it taketh away is authenticity because we have machines writing like letters to each other. We're going to have to sort this out. I do think that one of the powerful things about the process is that if you're losing touch with who you authentically are, it reminds you.
But it's pretty hard sometimes in the noise to remember and to keep it clear because we're just told so many things about ourselves. And so just to get that clarion call in our heads about who we truly are, not based on words that we're picking out of the sky, but on cold, hard data.
I was curious, like, are you even using your values framework to train agents and digital workers, right? Like you could imagine, because one of the things that's top of mind for me is it's If we're going to create organizations that are humans and digital workforce agents, how do we do that in such a way so that we don't produce cultural friction, right? So I think you could use.
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