Author Talks: Is ‘now’ the right time to leave your job?

In this edition of Author Talks, McKinsey Global Publishing’s Raju Narisetti chats with Tessa West, professor of psychology at New York University, about her new book, Job Therapy: Finding Work That Works for You (Portfolio/Penguin Random House, Summer 2024). Two years after her first Author Talks interview, West delves more deeply into the psychological issues that frame the workplace experience and outlines five categories of worker discontent. She offers insightful solutions to help workers overcome a crisis of identity and to customize plans for a fulfilling career journey. An edited version of the conversation follows, and you can also watch the full video at the end of this page.

Why did a relationship scientist write a book about jobs?

Why would a relationship scientist think that writing a book about jobs is a good idea and makes sense? When it comes to the workplace, we have a relationship with our jobs and with our careers in much the same way that we have relationships with other people.

As I talk to people about the growing pains they’re dealing with at work, or any of the hiccups they’re facing, the language they use is relational in nature. They think about their emotions, their ambivalence—up-and-down feelings: “I love my job”; “I dislike my job”; “I feel disconnected from it”—in the same way that we talk about our relationships with other people.

Embracing this relational mindset can really help move the needle on getting people to understand the psychological source of their unhappiness at work.

What’s the crisis of identity playing out in our jobs?

This crisis of identity is the existential feeling that a lot of us go through at work. You can imagine that you’ve been working for a really long time at a place or you’ve put a lot of work into becoming an expert at something. Then all of a sudden, you start to question whether this is really the right thing for you. This can be a very scary feeling for people. “I’ve put so much work into this already. Does it really make sense for me to be switching gears at this point in my life?”

In much the same way that we think about leaving a marriage or a long-term relationship that we’ve invested in, we’re going to have a lot of ambivalent feelings about leaving a job. When I focus on the crisis of identity, I really focus on two main constructs.

The first construct is the degree to which the identity at work is central to who you see yourself as: “Is this a core element of my identity?” The second construct is what scientists often call “identity satisfaction.”

I can feel like something is a core component of who I am but not necessarily be satisfied with the role that component is playing in my identity. These are two separate things that can be correlated with each other or not. It’s very possible for you to feel like something is central to your identity but not actually feel satisfied.

What are the five situations we could end up in at work?

I wanted to break the book down into five main building blocks, or five main psychological starting points, that people can find themselves in. These aren’t mutually exclusive; you can certainly identify with more than one:

1. Crisis of identity. This is the person who has spent months, often years, honing skills. But that person is struggling with a nagging feeling that maybe this isn’t really the right career move. That person’s journey really starts with asking a big question: “Do I still feel like my career is a core piece of who I am?” They must process the loss of that old identity before they can move onto something else.

2. Drifted apart. You may have been in a relationship with someone and later realize you don’t recognize this person anymore. You used to be in love, you used to have chemistry, and now you’re not quite so sure what happened. Is it you who’s changed, or is it the other person?

   Have you changed too much from this career, or has this career or job moved in a direction that no longer fits? You must begin the journey by digging deep into where those changes are occurring. Is it the entire industry that has changed, or is it this organization? Perhaps it’s just your team, the people with whom you spend time. Understanding those sources of changes is key for moving on.

3. Stretched too thin. This person is someone who most of us have been at some point in our lives. These folks are struggling with getting things done in a timely manner.

   They constantly feel like they have to choose between two different courses. The choice may be between a job they love or a task that they’re really interested in and must complete. They may have an endless pile of work and often not complete it daily. That’s a source of chronic stress. Other people aren’t really struggling so much with how they work but the roles they fill. Maybe they’ve taken on way too many roles. Some of those roles aren’t congruent with each other. In fact, some of them actually counteract one another. They’re struggling with figuring out how they can fit all of these things into one workday.

   For these folks, really digging deep into how they work and what work they’re taking on—and whether that work’s actually helping them get ahead—is a key piece of their starting point.

4. Runner-up. You may have been in a situation where you are chronically finishing in second place on some kind of competitive team. These people tend to get rewarded at work, and they’re doing well, but they can’t quite make it to the next step. They are chronically in second place and struggle to know why. These people are often missing key pieces of feedback about what those missteps are and figuring out whether that misstep is that they’ve missed key roles or changes in what determines status at work. These people must determine where they need to go next.

5. Underappreciated star. The last chapter is about the underappreciated star. These people tend to be amazing at their jobs. They are getting appreciated but not usually on the dimensions that they care about. They’re not being compensated or promoted. They’re rewarded by receiving more work and more tasks. For them, after interrogating whether they have that star status, they then must figure out their value in the marketplace.

   Are they valued as much as they think they are? Maybe the market just doesn’t really care about star status. They’re in the 95th percentile, but most companies are fine with the 80th percentile. Knowing whether star status is even relevant for getting a raise or promotion is something that they must delve deeply into and figure out in their journey.

So we should all become anthropologists at work?

“Be an anthropologist” is a term that we use often in social science and academia to talk about going into an organization and getting to know what that place looks like and what it would feel like to work there.

There’s a misconception that you can learn exactly what a certain career is like by engaging in passive learning—in other words, reading about it online or watching videos. There’s plenty of information out there that can give us knowledge about a workplace. What that information doesn’t do is tell us what a workplace would feel like. There are a lot about things that can stress people out at work, things that actually help them gain status. You must be in the work environment to learn these things.

To the extent that people will be working in an office and in a real physical location, they want to visit that workplace during the interview process. They can even go when exploring new jobs and physically see what it’s like. It’s not ideal to explore on a day when workers are trying to make an impression, such as an open career day. Exploring on a day when workers are just engaging in natural behavior is a better option.

By visiting, you can learn all kinds of things, like how people interact with one another, how often people come to the office, how engaged they are, and whether people behave differently when the boss is in the office. You can sense whether things that trigger your stress at work are more likely to occur in that environment. Being an anthropologist means really putting yourself in a workplace and learning, not just on paper, about what it feels like to have this career in this particular place.

Why do most of us struggle to accurately read our workplace status?

Some of the questions I explore in the book are why we struggle to read our status at work and why it’s so important for us to have an accurate understanding of our status. I’d start by saying that status is a really difficult thing to read.

Status is a variable; it’s a trait that’s inherently interpersonal. Unlike other traits, such as attractiveness or competence, which we can learn about simply by getting feedback from people in our environments, status is something that only exists in the presence of others. I’m only of high status to the extent that someone around me is of lower status than me. Determining status requires us to observe interpersonal dynamics between people.

For example, if I’m contributing in a meeting and my comments don’t generate a response, that’s actually an indication that I might not have that much status. But most people don’t associate things like change in conversational tone or topic as related to status, because that goes along with the natural flow of a conversation. If my comments don’t generate a response, that might indicate to me that I’m not as popular as I think I am. Yet I only know that if this doesn’t happen to other people in the room. Gauging status is very difficult.

The modern workplace has a lot of false lures of status. For example, organizations give people fancy job titles to lure them in. Those titles aren’t actually associated with having power, respect, and admiration from other people. Therefore, they won’t give you the status that you need.

The second major false lure in status perception happens when workers take actions that grant them status locally. They’ll do things like help one another out on their teams or step in and take on a role that nobody else wants. They’ll gain a lot of local status from the people who work alongside them—their colleagues and team members. That feels really good, and that’s actually a good thing for organizational culture, for team building, and so forth.

But the problem is those same things that often grant us status with our colleagues don’t grant us status with our bosses. When it comes to being promoted, a boss can say something like, “Well, it’s great that they help each other out, but this person isn’t contributing to an increase in sales in the same way someone else is.” So we often have a hard time knowing how the status our team members give us translates to the status that higher-ups give us. That’s a major struggle.

So you suggest we take a daily ‘stress test’?

In the opening chapter, I recommend that people take the daily “stress test.” This stress test was generated from decades of research in social science concerning how bad people are at knowing what stresses them out compared to what they think stresses them out.

I recommend some easy steps. At the beginning of the day, write down the things that you think are going to stress you out—your biggest anticipated stressors. At the end of the day, write down whether those things occurred and how stressful the experiences actually were. In addition, write down what actually stressed you out on that day.

My research, which is corroborated by social science, demonstrates that we’re actually pretty good at handling anticipated stressors. Those things that you write down in the morning? They tend to not be that bad. In fact, in my data, about 50 percent of the identified stressors were neutral or didn’t even happen. When we can anticipate a stressor, we’re pretty good at putting those psychological steps in place to help us cope with it.

However, people are very bad at recognizing those unanticipated stressors and knowing those will stress them out in the future. I was very surprised to learn that most of the things people wrote in the evening were things they deal with all the time, and they’re pretty mundane, low-level stressors. Examples include not meeting a deadline and having your boss come in your office early and saying, “We need to start our meeting now.”

Things that actually stress people out are recurring things. But people don’t encode these as stressors, because they’re very used to them. It’s really critical that you document these things, along with other symptoms of stress, like sleep deprivation and feeling anxious at work. You will start to see patterns connected to your stress that you didn’t recognize before. Documenting this is critical to becoming an anthropologist in the workplace. You can start to look around you and say, “Well, this place has that thing that I’ve documented as stressing me out all the time.”

I’ve noticed when it gets noisy at work, I can’t concentrate. That was a daily stressor that I hadn’t thought about before. “I’m walking into this organization, and it’s super loud. It’s not going to work for me.” Those stressors are really critical on your journey to figuring out the type of workplace that’s likely to evoke those feelings and the type of a workplace that’s not.

What’s our biggest misconception about leaving a job?

When it comes to thinking about making a career change or a job change, there’s a lot of misconceptions out there about what we should be seeking, what our psychological starting point should be. I’ve found in my work that the single biggest misconception people have is that they need to be psychologically ready before they make any kind of move in the future.

By that, I mean they’re waiting for some kind of switch to turn on in their brain that says, “OK now I’m ready. Now’s the time to start looking. I’ve reached my maximum amount of dissatisfaction at work.” But what I’ve found in my work is that, like leaving a marriage or any other kind of long-term relationship, there’s not really a magical moment when we’re going to be ready.

In fact, if you’re feeling very disengaged already, you’ve gone too far. You want to start exploring earlier, when you’re in that ambivalent stage—when some days are good and some days are bad. It’s a misconception to believe that you must be very unhappy at work before you start exploring. It’s somewhat analogous to considering a divorce. It won’t hurt to speak with a divorce attorney before you’ve made the decision.

At work, start going through some of these steps that I recommend long before that point of disengagement. Don’t feel guilty if you’re exploring, networking, or starting to ask yourself some of these psychological questions even if you’re still happy with your job. Most people, even those who have a crisis of identity, have good identity and bad identity days. There are days when people are nice to them and days when people aren’t; there are productive and unproductive days. There can be emotional roller coasters, and that’s OK.

Feelings of ambivalence and uncertainty aren’t red flags indicating that you shouldn’t pursue a change. Those are red flags indicating that it’s time to begin exploring. Don’t wait for that magical switch.

Will people managers get anything out of this book?

I wrote this book largely for an audience of people who are dealing with their own psychological issues related to the workplace and to their careers. At the same time, I very much intend for this book to be read by hiring managers, recruiters, and managers who don’t want to lose people.

Throughout the book, there are a lot of clues that hiring managers can look for when people at work are starting to become unhappy and to disengage. Much like one could write a book for patients who are dealing with a health issue, that same kind of book is applicable to physicians who are looking for those red flags. Those signals may indicate that people are suffering from something that they can diagnose long before things get out of hand.

For example, if hiring managers are worried about workers having a crisis of identity, the book provides lots of clues that people might be experiencing this. In the chapter on people who are stretched too thin, I provide many clues about how an environment appears when people aren’t managing how they work or how they task switch well.

If you read this book from the perspective of a hiring manager, you should be able to say to yourself, “Oh wow. I think my employees might actually be struggling with this particular psychological issue. What I need to do now is go in, try to diagnose it.” I provide multiple self-assessments that one could reframe to share with others to make a determination.

Also, each chapter has a section on the kinds of questions we should be asking and answering during the interview process at multiple stages of interviews. These aren’t just questions for people who are on the job market; these are also questions for hiring managers seeking the right fit. To the extent that one reads the interview section of each chapter from multiple perspectives, one could help close the giant information and communication gap between employees looking for new jobs and hiring managers.

There are many misconceptions that employees have about what it takes to get ahead. There are misconceptions about what they ought to be doing versus what hiring managers, people leaders, and recruiters who I surveyed say they should be doing.

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