The Success Trap

Why Good People Stay in Jobs They Don't Like and How to Break Free

Amina Aitsi-Selmi

• Publisher: Kogan Page
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781789665659
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Careers

WINNER: Business Book Awards 2021 - Personal Development & Wellbeing Do you feel trapped in a toxic work culture? Or stuck in a job you're great at... but that you don't actually like? Why do good people stay in bad jobs for so long? The Success Trap answers all these questions - and shows you what to do about it. An estimated 80% of individuals in the western workforce want to change job - if you're one of them, then this book will enable you to understand why, help you reconnect with what's really important to you, and provide practical tips and tools to empower you to take control of your own career. Written by specialist coach and consultant Dr Amina Aitsi-Selmi, this book builds on her years of experience as a physician, in healthcare policy, and coaching and consulting with hundreds of individuals and organizations. Combining her personal expertise with scientific research - including Google's Project Aristotle and the Global Happiness Council's Workplace Wellbeing report - it provides insights and useful takeaways you can use in your own work life. Don't stay stuck in a job you hate - let this book help you escape The Success Trap.

Part One

The Success Trap

Why people stay in jobs they don’t like

CHAPTER ONE

The challenge of work in the 21st century

What’s wrong with the world of work today? I should start with a caveat: in many ways everything that appears to be wrong has a silver lining. So, admittedly, the question is a flawed one. But for the sake of argument, let’s try to investigate what we will call the ailments of the 21st-century labour market.

Let’s acknowledge the positive. The global community, rallied under the banner of the United Nations in 2015, formulated its aspirations for a better future for all in the form of the Sustainable Development Goals. In a 2019 review of progress, the United Nations’ Secretary General’s assessment of goal 8 (that aims for ‘decent jobs and economic productivity’) was that while labour productivity has increased and unemployment is back to pre-financial crisis levels, ‘the global economy is growing at a slower rate. More progress is needed to increase employment opportunities, particularly for young people, reduce informal employment and the gender pay gap and promote safe and secure working environments to create decent work for all’ (UN, 2019).

The 2019 World Happiness report shows that material standards of living are the highest they’ve ever been, but happiness levels do not seem to match up. Across high-income countries, mental health statistics show alarming levels of depression and anxiety. In Europe, fewer than 12 per cent of people report being engaged with their work (Helliwell et al, 2019). In a State of the Global Workplace report, Gallup found that 85 per cent of employees are disengaged from work, and this amounts to a US $7 trillion loss in productivity. Western countries were among the worst, with only about 10 per cent of employees reporting that they feel engaged with their work (Gallup, 2017). Of course, there may be measurement issues here. However, information collected from tens of thousands of individuals in the UK at different times of the day via a smartphone app, provided millions of bits of data. It shows that paid work is ranked lower in terms of wellbeing than any of the other 39 activities individuals reported engaging in, with the exception of being sick in bed (Bryson and MacKerron, 2017)!

For a more specific insight into the trends around work satisfaction, among UK doctors, one in three GPs is thinking of leaving their job in the next five years (Cook, 2018).

What’s going on?

What’s wrong with the world of work today?

It would be easy to fill the pages of this book with economic analyses of labour market changes over the past few decades, and discuss quantifiable factors such as stagnant wages, rising costs of living and the impact of these on indicators of wellbeing. If we did, it would not be surprising to discover that paid work has a significant impact on overall life satisfaction and general happiness. This is what economic analyses in the UK, the United States and elsewhere in the world have shown (De Neve and Ward, 2017). Indeed, paid work is a central part of many people’s lives. They spend a considerable part of their waking hours doing paid work or seeking paid work if they do not have it.

However, it would be fair to say that while the scientific revolution and the growth of capitalism has dramatically improved our material quality of life and life expectancy, they have failed our deeper existential wellbeing. This is where a social, philosophical and psychological analysis could go deeper into the qualitative, less easily measurable elements of the social fabric of modern society and our human experience of work. After all, as the aphorism goes: not everything that counts can be measured and not everything that can be measured counts.

While challenging in its lack of measurability, exploring the human experience is where we can make real gains in collective and individual insights that can change the course of our lives. But first, let’s look at the global picture within which we work.

VUCA: Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous

VUCA is an acronym that stands for Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity and essentially means: what the $%&* is going on out there?! It was first used in 1987, drawing on the leadership theories of the time. Today, it has taken root in theories and ideas related to strategic thinking and leadership in organizations (Bennett and Lemoine, 2014). It has also been used to describe the challenges faced by those organizations; for example, the disruption that can occur from new technologies, political shifts or natural hazards like extreme weather events and infectious diseases.

Here’s an example of how VUCA shows up in the organizations that we work for and also in everyday life. In 2011, Thailand experienced some of the worst floods in its history. This brought critical manufacturing factories to a standstill. At the time, the global electronics industry was finally recovering from a massive earthquake in Japan earlier the same year. Thailand serves as an electronics manufacturing hub for hundreds of companies around the world, including the California-based global hard-drive leader at the time. So, the devastating floods had an impact on company operations globally, including through the availability of devices like laptops. In other words, our world is so interconnected that the availability of laptops and screens can be affected by the weather on the other side of the globe. The impact of disasters is no longer local – we are all interconnected and vulnerable to the impact of disasters wherever we are, even if the disaster doesn’t occur in our own country or region.

HOW VUCA SHOWS UP IN YOUR WORK LIFE

You may have a general sense of decisions being complex at certain points in your career. It’s important to remember that there are many factors outside your control and know that any decision involves risk. It’s not your responsibility or even possible to figure out the perfect, infallible solution. So, in a sense, you can relax and know that VUCA is inherent to work and careers today. What does VUCA look like for you?

V = Volatility: high speed of change

Example:

In your organization: the stakeholder landscape shifts after a disaster or political upheaval.

In your career: you start a project but it’s cancelled or your role is suddenly minimized.

U = Uncertainty: the lack of predictability

Example:

In your organization: a new product or policy is launched that muddies the future of your industry.

In your career: you work towards a career for years that suddenly looks like a dead end.

C = Complexity: the lack of clear cause and effect and the multiplicity of influencing factors in any situation

Example:

In your organization: you work globally and across multiple organizations, each with their own culture, regulations and agendas.

In your career: you get the qualifications, training, networks but still can’t make it to the next level or get a promotion in a complicated political landscape.

A = Ambiguity: even if there is a causal chain, it can be misread or misperceived

Example:

In your organization: you expand your remit or market to include an area or audience that you don’t know well.

In your career: you spend time and effort developing a strategic relationship only to realize you misread the politics and capabilities.

Artificial intelligence and technological disruption

Much has been said about the radical impact that artificial intelligence (AI) and technological innovation will have on the nature of work. Elon Musk predicts that jobs will be obsolete as robots take over and that we will devote our time to leisure and more complex and fulfilling pursuits – perhaps learning music or enjoying the arts – while receiving a universal wage from the government (Clifford, 2016).

Depending on what kind of job you have, almost half of what you’re doing could be automated. One day, you could be job sharing with a robot! A 2017 World Economic Forum report The Inclusive Growth and Development Report expressed concern over public services becoming the next Uber and using the gig economy to employ locum doctors and supply teachers (WEF, 2017). A UK report published by Reform proposes that chatbots could replace up to 90 per cent of Whitehall’s administrators, as well as tens of thousands in the NHS and GPs’ surgeries by 2030, saving as much as £4 billion a year (Hitchcock et al, 2017).

McKinsey’s research, on the other hand, is more optimistic about our human contribution, and points out that it is not the occupations themselves that will be automated but certain activities within them (McKinsey & Co, 2017). They estimate that today’s technology could automate 45 per cent of the activities across all occupations but only 5 per cent of actual occupations. Interestingly, these figures cut across the occupational income ladder and cooks, cleaners, gardeners and carers, who draw on intuitive decision-making and empathy, are more protected from automation than those in high paying positions with a lot of systematic data analysis.

In their book The Second Machine Age, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee argue that we’re on the verge of the automation of most cognitive tasks, and that software-driven machines will substitute for humans (Brynjolfsson and McAfee, 2014). They believe that digital technologies are doing for human brainpower what the steam engine did for human muscle power at the start of the Industrial Revolution. They also identify three skill areas in which we humans are still far superior to machines:

1. High-end creativity that generates things like great new business ideas, scientific breakthroughs, novels that grip you, and so on.
2. Dexterity, mobility. It’s unbelievably hard to get a robot to be a waiter in a restaurant without breaking dishes and terrifying patrons...

Table of contents

• About the author
• Preface: three questions
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part One The Success Trap: why people stay in jobs they don’t like
• 01 The challenge of work in the 21st century
• 02 The makings of a career crisis
• 03 The High Achiever Paradox, imposter syndrome and other work identity traps
• Part Two Breaking free from the Success Trap
• 04 Goal-driven versus creative flow
• 05 Slow down to speed up
• 06 Unlearn your limiting beliefs
• Part Three Thriving outside the trap
• 07 Practical freedom: tools to reconnect, respond and receive
• 08 Turning uncertainty into opportunity
• 09 From the employee-expert mindset to the entrepreneur-leader mindset
• 10 Work cultures that liberate
• Conclusion: ‘It always appears impossible until it’s done’
• Bibliography
• Index