3 lies about work that have been damaging your career for years

3 lies about work that have been damaging your career for years3 lies about work that have been damaging your career for yearsLeadership is a thing. People need feedback. The best plan wins. These are some of the things you may have been hearing at work for years, and theyre also some of the lies identified by the authors of Nine Lies About Work a Freethinking Leaders Guide to the Real World, by Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall.Buckingham, a best-selling author and the head of People and Performance research at the ADP Research Institute, and Goodall, the SVP of Leadership and Team Intelligence at Cisco, dismantle these leidions in an evidence-based way over the course of the book and will have you looking at ideas like people have kompetenz in a new way.Follow Ladders on FlipboardFollow Ladders magazines on Flipboard covering Happiness, Productivity, Job Satisfaction, Neuroscience, and moreLadders spoke to Buckingham and Goodall about three of our favorite lies.People care which company they work forPeople care more about their local work experience, the authors wrote the gruppes they work on.Its impossible to measure culture. We were trying to look at the world in an evidence-based way rather than a theoretical way, says Buckingham. There are a lot of nice theories out there, but lets look at the world as it actually is and where the evidence is, and then lets draw our conclusions on how to work better with one another from there.And one of the theories is that culture matters a great deal and that companies should build different kinds of cultures in order to get the best out of their people because thats really what people care about.But you look at the evidence and two things strike you, says Buckingham. One is that you cant measure culture. There is no way of measuring what the culture at Chick-fil-A is, versus the culture of Tesla is, versus the culture of Goldman Sachs. There is no way to do that. We cant binnensee it.People care about their locali zed experiences of work their gruppes. The second thing that we do find when we go into companies and start measuring things, are really specific things, like voluntary turnover, or accidents on the job, or customer satisfaction, says Buckingham. We find range. We find a lot of range inside the same company. And along with that, we find a range in attitudes expressed by the employees in the company.So when you put those things together, you go, Gosh. When people say they care about something at work, at least in terms of how that caring is expressed in actual behavior, then the thing theyre caring about is their local team experience.So thats kind of the evidence of the world as it is. When you look at measuring things inside the same company, you find variations inside the same company, in which case yes, maybe people care which company they join, but once theyre there, they seem to care much more about their local experience.When it comes to working, its all about the local-lived experience. What is your local-lived experience at work? asks Buckingham. You push on that, and you find a local-lived experience is the actual people who bring actual work into your little world every day. Its not a theoretical thing written about in Fortune Magazine, its an actual thing that happens every day. People come into work, they bring stuff, they keep your confidences or they dont, theyve got your back or they dont, they recognize you or they dont, they understand what your unique strengths are or they dont, you trust your team leader or you dont.All those things are super important to your actual lived experience at work, are team experiences, says Buckingham. And so all this stuff that we read about company culture is a nice journalistic narrative, but its not true. Its not real in the sense that a team is real.Company culture can be too broad to feel if youre working inside it. In a way talking about culture is like talking about nation-ness, says Goodall. Its like sa ying theres a thing called American-ness or British-ness whereas of course, and maybe its more visible if you look at the experience of living in a particular country that youd read the news media and you realize very quickly that other people in the same country are having very, very different experiences of what that country is like then you are, which is to say that experience is a local thing and its true in country as much as its true in company.People have kompetenzPotential as its currently interpreted by companies is elusive, non-evidence based, and leads to many people getting mislabeled as either high-potential or low-potential, write the authors. (Elon Musk is one famous example the authors used as an emp.oyee who was mislabeled as low potential). The myth of potential, according to the authors, is so dangerously open to interpretation that its bad for careers. Instead, it is better to think of career trajectories in terms of momentum.Companies use the label to maximalize their human capital. The sin, I suppose, at the heart of this whole idea of potential, is that companies want to be and believe themselves to be maximization machines, certainly of their physical assets, certainly of their financial assets, and certainly of their human capital, says Goodall. And yet it seems a very strange thing to do, and in something applied in the face of all the evidence for a company to say, Well, our people are our most important asset, but hang on a secondSome of them have the potential to grow and some of them dont. So were only really going to invest our attention on maximization attention in a few people. And usually, its very few. Its less than half in most cases. It flies in the face of the evidence that every human brain can grow and continues to grow throughout life.The other contradiction, by the way, is that we do rate people on potential and we are probably as humans unreliable raters of other people. So that is bad data anyway. And then you can pu sh a little bit further and say, Well if potential is an inherent and unchanging quality in a human being, why would you re-rate everybody on it once a year? Theyve either got it or they havent. And as it turns out, the thing that every human being has is the ability to grow. The question is, how and in what direction and how fast?Potential is top-down, momentum is collaborative. We argue in the chapter that the right ingredients for a conversation of these two categories of things, says Goodall. The first about momentum is, What is unchanging about you? What energizes you? What are your ansaugens? Who are you as a person? What is your mass? And then secondly, How fast are you moving through the world? How fast are you acquiring experiences and skills? Whats your current level of performance? Whats your past level of performance? From those things we can help you understand how fast youre moving. So if you put those together, who are you at your core and how fast are you moving thro ugh the world?And the big point is that a conversation about potential finishes up from a team leader to a team member running along the lines of, Either you have it, in which case everything is happy and good things will shower down upon you, or you havent got it, in which case this is an awkward conversation because Im telling you, youre all washed up, which is (A), weird, and (B), inhuman in a moral sense, and (C), in a factual sense because all human brains can grow.A conversation about momentum, on the other hand, is a joint exploration, says Goodall. Its what we know about you, is what you know about you How fast do you want to go? Where do you want to go next? How can we adjust your momentum so that its pointed in a slightly different direction or accelerated or slowed down? Those are real conversations in the real world, and the lie of potential is holding us apart from those genuine conversations.The idea of potential comes from a misunderstanding of maximization.Goodall sa ys, I think it comes from a misunderstanding of maximization in many ways. I think companies say, Who should we invest in? We cant possibly invest in everybody because there are only certain things that we can see from the center and we should cast our seeds on the most fertile soil But if you if you say, Well look. All of this stuff lives on teams. We dont need to decide at an organizational level who merits investment and who doesnt, and thats in practice, a harmful thing for us to do. But what we do need to do is help our team leaders have the right sort of conversations with every person on the team so that everybody can explore their path to growth in whatever they want.Work-life balance matters mostWork-life balance puts workers in an impossible position, the authors say that its possible to balance your life. It also encourages the notion that work equals bad and life equals good when theres much more give-and-take to it than that. Theres love in work and life, and perhaps an other way to sort your life is by maximizing doing things you love and minimizing doing things you loathe.We are all inspired differently. The funny thing about life is that it contains all we need is in it for each of usand each of us is wired so differently, says Goodall. We get a kick out of different things, different situations, different contacts, different people. Some of us like confrontation, some of us hate it. Some of us like empathizing with the emotions of others, others hate it. Some of us like getting down on all fours with our kids and mucking around with them like that, and others are verythats not really how we parent.Its not about balance. Life offers up fuel to each one of us in really different ways its How do you move through life, says Goodall. One of the challenges and balances is its all about stasis and stagnation. Balance is stationary. If you ever got that position, youd want everyone to stop moving. If you ever got your life perfectly balanced, you would want there to be no movement at all in case it tipped over and fell away. So as a metaphor for life, its not only impossible to find that balance, but its a really bad metaphor because you keep moving through life. And so your challenge is not to find balance. What it means is the real aspiration for everyone is, How do you move through life in a way that allows you to contribute, but do so in a way that fills you upit doesnt drain you and burn you out?The challenge for us is not to find balance and it isnt just to figure out the purpose of your life or something, its to move through your life in a way that pays really close attention to those particular activities or situations that invigorate you, lift you up, that you purple drank into, get your blood going and then leaning away from those that drain you, that bore you, drag you down, says Goodall.Its about love/loathe. If you can move through life paying attention to those particular situations or activities that we call the re d threads, says Goodall. If you can pay attention to your red threadsno one can identify yours but you. Yours are not the same as the 15 other people in your job yours are really different. In terms of getting the categories right, wed better move away from work and lifeAnd instead, intentionally move to the different categories of love and loathe.Work is part of life. Goodall says, The Mayo Clinic research seems to suggest that even if you get 20% of your life like that, built with red threads, you are meaningfully less likely to burn out than someone who is at 19%, 18%, 17%, 16%. So the important thing in that categorylets get the categories right. Your life is set up to speak to you in a language that only you understand. So we should be helping you as a child, as a student, as a worker to use life to fill you up. Thats a very interesting proposition and its a really meaningful and realistic aspiration, and none of us are talking about it. And instead, we are putting out in front of people this precarious aspiration called, work/life balance.Work is part of life, so setting up work versus life, is a false category. Because work is part of life. Whether youve got your community life, youve got your family life, you got your work life you got your friend lifeyou got life. And then within life, you got some things you really loathethat you lean away from And then other things seem to draw you in.Work isnt bad, life isnt always great.The damage that this wrong categorization does, is that it tells us that work is bad and life is good, adds Buckingham. And if youre not sure that thats actually true, then lets invert it and lets imagine that were saying, You need to achieve work/life balance because life is too toxic and work is so magnificent that you need to be working more. Thats clearly not what it means. It means exactly the oppositethat life is the little spoonful of sugar to make the medicine of work go down if you like. And what that means is that were no t having a conversation of where are you on fire at work? Where are you powerful at work? Where are you thriving at work? Where are you growing at work? Whats great about your work? Many people find it. Sadly, many other people dont. And we need to help people around us in life which includes work, find their red threads because you only have a certain number of years on this planet and we should all live them as fully as we can.You might also enjoyNew neuroscience reveals 4 rituals that will make you happyStrangers know your social class in the first seven words you say, study finds10 lessons from jngste im bunde Franklins daily schedule that will double your productivityThe worst mistakes you can make in an interview, according to 12 CEOs10 habits of mentally strong people