Surely we’re more than our jobs

March 14, 2019
by James Stanier
Leave a comment
Growth
Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash.

So what do you do?

There is a house for sale two doors down from where we live.

At the weekend, I was working outside of our garage, filling the car with scrap wood from an internal wall that we had demolished.

A man, who I would place somewhere in his forties, left his parked car and approached me. He had seen the listing online and had come for an initial drive by. After telling him what I knew about the area, such as the levels of quiet and the schools, he asked me a question:

“So, what do you do?”

It’s such a simple question. But it’s loaded with many implicit sub-questions in the context of somebody thinking of buying a house and becoming my neighbor:

  • What kind of status do I have?
  • What kind of money might I be earning, as a signifier for the greater socioeconomic status of the area?
  • Am I doing something that is respectable, insofar that it might reflect on the kind of neighbor that I am going to be?
  • Am I going to be making noise during the night, or am I likely to be asleep like most people who work standard office hours?

I’m sure that he didn’t intend to make me dwell on the motivation of asking this question so deeply. Yet, the fact is that our work identity means a lot in society.

But what actually is a work identity? How is it formed? Can it ever be problematic?

Work identity

Have you ever met somebody new and have had that same question asked of you? What kind of reaction did you get in reply? Did you impress, or was it an “oh”?

Have you ever paused to think why it even matters what you do for a job, given that you may be meeting someone in a social context, rather than work context?

Whether we like it or not, work defines a significant portion of our identity. We may be an engineer first, a father second, then a cyclist, then a brother in our own internal hierarchy. A work identity can even become a person’s entire identity: consider entrepreneurial culture, and the perception that successful entrepreneurship implies an entire way of life.

Work identities, and how we relate to them consciously and subconsciously, can cause conflict within us. We should aim to become more aware of them and how we can try to work with some of the problems that they bring.

But who am I?

How work identities exist in tension or conflict with oneself and with other people can be challenging. The field of work identity is broad and fairly academic, but from my own experience as a manager and leader (cough, I hate describing myself as that), I often see people struggling with some common issues:

  • The work identity shift from being an individual contributor (IC) to a manager.
  • Balancing work identity with non-work identities, such as being a parent, or carer, or friend.
  • Mixing authoritative work identities with flat company cultures. Am I someone’s friend or colleague?
  • Dealing with role engulfment which is where one’s work identity becomes their primary identity, and the life conflict that entails.

Let’s have a look at these in turn.

The shift from IC to manager

“Oh, so now you’re their boss?”

This is the primary work identity conflict that I see, especially in new managers. Making the transition from IC to manager involves the undertaking of an entirely different role and identity.

  • They are now responsible for some number of staff and their performance as well as their own.
  • They are also likely responsible for some conceptual area, such as an engineering team or some part of a software application architecture.
  • They now have a new set of peers, subordinates (cough, I hate that word) and more senior staff that they report to.

Their status in the organization has changed, and hence their work identity needs to reform.

There are many questions. How should they act towards their manager, their peers, and their own staff? Should that be the same or different? Are they now managing people that were previously their peers, or even their friends? How is that going to form how they think about themselves and how others think about them?

Some people can naturally flow between being friendly, authoritative, relaxed, directive and back again. However, this is a learned skill.

Some new managers fail to embody their new managerial work identity and thus fail to establish any authority, making them ineffective. Some will embody a caricature of a manager – with no true conviction – which can be laughable and Alan Partridge-esque.

I’ve found that there are two good places to start when learning the ropes as a manager:

  • Going through a contracting exercise to more formally establish relationships between their staff and with their own manager.
  • Reading and practicing the principle of Radical Candor, which is the closest thing I’ve found to embodying the right level of candidness and empathy required to operate well as a manager in challenging organizations.

Merely doing exercises and reading around embodying a managerial identity isn’t enough: being able to turn up and down different facets of your personality at given times, and thus form a strong work identity that you are comfortable with, takes real repeated practice.

New managers may need to resist the urge to shy away from social activities, like sitting down to lunch with their team, or consciously practice giving uncomfortable feedback even if it initially feels unnatural and scary. With time, switching between identities becomes easier. But it’s never easy.

Balancing work identity with other identities

There is a tension between your work identity and other identities in your life. A person may be the CEO of a company during the day, but a mother and partner during the evenings and weekends. These different identities don’t always get along with each other.

Although there is an argument that achieving work-life balance can be impossible due to the demands of modern careers, the scheduling of time as a CEO and a parent and a mother is straightforward: the main tension comes from having to intermix work identities with personal identities.

The parent identity that is singing along with Pepper Pig, only to get interrupted by a work call, must then switch to the work identity of the CEO, if only for a brief moment, and then back again. Becoming expert at this comes with practice. Initially, it can take a lot of time to switch into and out of one’s work identity, and can cause stress and conflict between the self and others.

I used to struggle with switching identities most when the apartment that I lived in was less than 5 minutes walking distance from the office. After particularly intense work days, my partner would notice how I “wasn’t myself” for a period of time after work, or that my interactions with her were different (typically colder and more robotic) to how I acted at the weekend.

With time I came to learn that it would take me a while to switch away from my work identity – which was that of a new manager in a fast growing startup – into my identity as a partner and peer.

If you struggle with this, there are some strategies that I found helped me:

  • Consciously deciding to leave my work identity at the office, or at the computer, and telling myself to switch back into my home identity. This may sound contrived, but it worked. “OK, I’m done. Time to start my evening.”
  • Putting some physical activity between the end of the work day and the beginning of the evening. This could be cycling or walking a longer route home from work, or it could mean going to the gym. The physical exertion and subsequent release of endorphins resets the mind.
  • Taking some quiet time when I got home. Just five minutes of meditation helps greatly.

Mixing authoritative work identities with flat company cultures

A common source of tension is the contrast between a company’s desire to have an open, friendly culture that feels like a flat hierarchy and the conflicting authoritative work identities that exist within it.

Does a culture of everyone being equal cause issues when the boundaries between traditional friendship and org chart status blur? Our company has a friendly culture, encouraging everyone in all parts of the organization to take part in social activities, and many close social groups exist both inside and outside of work.

However, the more senior one becomes in an organization, the more carefully one must shift between different identities in their persona. Embodying a friend identity whilst out for drinks with one’s team may need rapid shifts to the manager identity when talking about a sensitive work-related subject, and then back again to being a friend when switching to a conversation with another colleague.

The difficulty of constantly shifting these identities can sometimes explain why senior people in an organization find work-related social events hard: they have to be able to embody the right identity at the right time in order to uphold their professional position, but also be able to have fun. It can be exhausting, and I’m sure we’ve all dealt with that colleague who’s had a little too much to drink.

Additionally, those in management positions who are not able to shift between identities with ease can find it hard to get on in flat company cultures. Either they are unable to shake the manager identity and thus feel excluded from the fun, or they are unable to turn on the manager identity when it is needed, lessening their authority and having people question their competence in their role.

It really isn’t easy.

Preventing role engulfment

We have spent most of the article thinking about the difficulties of switching between work and other identities. But what happens when, over time, someone’s entire identity is defined by their work?

There is a term for this: role engulfment. It is used to describe when one role – or identity – grows to become the dominant aspect from which one views themselves. This can happen in any context, not just work. For example, people may attach a negative role to themselves which they begin to define themselves with, such as being ill, or badly behaved, or unable to learn.

In a work context, role engulfment describes the situation where someone begins to identify themselves as wholly the role they perform. We mentioned the entrepreneurial identity earlier on in the article, and how it can engulf one’s lifestyle.

Someone may view themselves primarily as a CTO, or CEO, or a senior engineer. Given how work-centric the younger generation of our workforce has become, this may be happening more than ever.

It is, however, dangerous:

  • Choices that one makes for themselves are influenced primarily by the work identity. They may not be choices that are in the best interest to the whole person. Take burnout for example: working to the point of illness in order to achieve a promotion may satiate the hunger of the work identity, but it certainly does not help the whole individual.
  • It lessens the amount of effort that a person spends on their other identities, such as a father, mother, sibling, friend or carer. The work identity begins to trump the others because the reward is seen as more fulfilling and more aligned with the true self, whilst other aspects of a person’s life suffer. Maybe visiting family isn’t as important as embodying the successful executive director and working through the weekend instead.
  • When an individual forms their predominant identity around their work, then what happens if their work is to suddenly go away? Redundancies can strip a person of their identity and not just their income. These situations can be dangerous for a person’s mental health. Many retirees suffer greatly with their work identity removed from their life.

So, what can I do?

The concept of work identities, and the other identities that they coexist with, are – in my opinion – not talked about enough in our industry. However, I think that understanding them more and being more conscious about how we live with them can benefit us all.

In a world where one’s job is the implied answer to “what do you do?” we need to understand that work is only one part of our whole identity. Humans are so much more than our jobs.

I am also a partner, friend and son as well as the VP Engineering role that my colleagues know me as. Although the job title sounds lofty and important, and one could suggest that it should become more of me, the other identities that I embody are just as important – if not more important – to ensure that I am living a balanced and well-rounded life.

Which identity do you associate yourself with most?

Growth, but at what cost?

March 7, 2019
by James Stanier
Leave a comment
Current affairs

Tough times at Revolut. Image credit to Monito on Flickr.

Get (sh)it done

How does this Slack message make you feel?

Screenshot with credit to Wired, from their article on the culture and practices of Revolut, a UK-based FinTech startup.

There are a number of aspects to this message that make me feel uneasy.

  • The threatening tone.
  • An expectation to work weekends.
  • The open, public declaration of there being a watch list, and the open, public threat that you might get put on it.
  • A “simple rule”, which is that staff that do not hit their KPIs get fired with no negotiations.
  • The Slack emoji reactions: “push”, “get (sh)it done”, a tank, the Mortal Kombat logo. The implication that this is a war, and that winning the war must happen at all costs.

Now, don’t get me wrong – I love startups, and I love an audacious belief to want to take on the world and win. However, something is going (or has gone) wrong with startup culture.

I don’t believe that we’ve ended up where we are through malicious intent. However, we are all influenced by the practices and celebrated successes of the famous companies that we see publicized in our industry, and those celebrated successes are the “unicorns”, the 10X rebels: hustling hard, being disruptive, vacuuming talent and competitors in a race to become the dominant force in the market.

We read books, we watch podcasts, we follow influential business people on Twitter, and slowly, with time, we move the norm towards an extreme because of the echo chamber that surrounds us. Building technology has been enabled by, but also heavily tainted by, growth-or-die culture.

Can there not be a middle ground?

Growth at all costs

SaaS is obsessed with growth. Valuations of companies are typically driven by their revenue and their year on year growth percentage. VCs push founders and their boards to deliver significant multiples of their initial investment.

2x isn’t enough. 5x is middling to average. 10x is the number that has become a cliché: 10x thinking, 10x scaling and 10x engineers. And sure, that’s all well and good – I’d love 10x growth as much as the next person – but relentless focus on only growth begins to breed the wrong behavior.

Growth should not trump good business practices.

Growth should not come at the cost of employees.

Growth should not negatively impact society and the planet.

For VCs, only a small handful of their many portfolio companies need to exit well for them to successfully grow their investment fund. The rest can fail, and although it is a shame, it isn’t the end of the world, because the banker’s books are balanced.

It is extremely helpful to have a challenging VC pushing a company for more, in the same way that the coach of a sports team pushes the players for more. The players should still aim to achieve within the rules of the game.

Additionally, when the VC view is just one view of a diverse selection (VC: “grow 10x or lose”, CTO: “build incredible technology”, CEO: “hire, grow and support fantastic people”), then the tension in the antagonism of opposing viewpoints can create fantastic companies.

Yet, strangely, the worldview of the banker (“grow aggressively or die!”) is becoming the de facto startup culture, ahead of the passion to build amazing things they once dreamed about, or to create jobs in local areas, or to support the lives of employees and their families whilst doing work that they are passionate about.

Aggressive growth at all costs towards aggressive targets can cause poor behavior that can lead to poor culture. Caring about numbers can trump caring about people, and dangerous short-term views and strategies can chosen against sensible long-term strategies. It can make people cheat. Ethics can begin to be compromised.

Take a look at this leaked take home test for Revolut.

Screenshot, again, from Wired. “200 or more sign-ups would be a very strong indication that you’d go into the next round of interview”.

In a high-stress, growth-driven environment this take home interview task could have been seen as a clever way of singling out motivated candidates and also contributing by crowdsourcing to challenging company KPIs. I doubt there was any explicit malice. However, this task is effectively asking people to work for free, which is illegal in some countries.

Cultural norms and high pressure can blinker good judgement in large groups of people. We see it through history, and we see it in companies that go horribly wrong.

Toil glamour

So who is to blame? I think all of us are.

Growth-or-die culture, hustle culture – whatever you wish to call it – is beginning to leak beyond the office and into the daily lives of a whole generation of workers. We are at the point now where many young founders have only been exposed to one way of doing business: grow at all costs until you exit or self-destruct. They can sometimes apply that same logic to their own lives.

An excellent article by Erin Griffith for The New York Times describes “performative workaholism” culture: how celebration of hustle lifestyle (read: toil glamour) is entering the mainstream as an aspiration and a badge of honor, as a grouping of likeminded individuals who have rebranded the rat race as their purpose.

Within that article, we are treated to this tweet:

We can look at the picture of the carved water cooler cucumber and laugh at how silly it is, and perhaps titter at the thought of Dunelm selling “Get Shit Done” embroidered cushions in place of “Live, Life, Love” for your sofa.

Alternatively, we can consider how even co-working spaces – that we don’t actually work for, hence shouldn’t determine our culture – are promoting burnout and workaholism to people that have not got the years of experience to realize that it isn’t going to end well.

Another noteworthy article by Anne Helen Petersen for Buzzfeed explores how Millennials that are working long hours, paying back large debts, and unable to save for their first homes, are feeling the full force of burnout, to the point that running simple errands (“adulting”) can send them into spirals of overwhelm.

A more recent New York Times article highlights the trend that 30-somethings who are financially stable – typically those without significant debt and own their first home – in expensive areas of the US such as New York, Chicago and Boston, are only able to do so with significant support from their boomer parents, even if they have a highly paid, upwardly mobile job.

Is it any wonder that fast growing startups attract those most willing to hustle unsustainably because they believe that they might just be able to escape the rat race through an acquisition or float? Is it a surprise that the rat race is so inevitable for the younger generation – regardless of the prestige of their job – that the only way to tolerate it is to celebrate it?

Is it any wonder that those with a real opportunity to achieve financial escape velocity might begin to bend the rules to ensure it happens?

I guarantee that Revolut are not an anomaly.

We need to reframe success

I believe that we need to rethink our definitions of success in our industry.

I don’t think that it is healthy to continue building companies around a primary function to produce a hockey stick. We need to stop filling up column inches with talk of unicorns and revenue multiples and dedicate time and publicity to companies that are in it for the long term.

We need to focus on, and celebrate:

  • Those that create innovative technology that is meaningful for their users and the world.
  • Those that choose not to locate in big cities and instead begin to turn around forgotten parts of our countries.
  • Those that allow remote and flexible working to enable people to ride the waves of life without letting their mental or physical health suffer.
  • Those that give staff real opportunities to learn, grow and stay for many years.
  • Those that do impactful work for the community and for charity.

Technology companies have a lot to answer for.

How many of us are Certified B Corporations? How many give meaningful amounts to charity, such as 1% for the Planet? Are we really looking after our staff first, our users second and our investors third, or have we got that the wrong way round?

Our industry generates billions of revenue, but are we doing it in a sustainable way for the health of our companies, our people, society and the planet?

Do we think that our companies are going to be around in 100 years? Are we making the right ethical choices about what we do and how we do it?

We all have a say in this matter. Leaders can set an example from the top. However, if we don’t have the power to change where we work then we can vote with our feet, even if it means being paid less.

If we’re not willing to do that, then why not?