Hey, everyone.
Do you ever feel like you're living a B-plus life?
Today, we're going to hear from Susie Welch, NYU professor and author of the book Becoming You.
Susie's going to talk to us about how to find a career that actually fits.
And of course, dodge the many that do not.
This is an episode previously broadcast on our McKinsey Talks Talent podcast featuring talent experts, Brooke Weddle and Brian Hancock.
This is the McKinsey Podcast, where we help you make sense out of the world's toughest business challenges.
I'm your host for today, Lucia Reheli.
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.
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, et cetera.
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 the
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+.
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.
And then the problem with interest, which is the third part of the third data set we need to excavate, is that
The world is really noisy and complicated, and it's very hard to drink from the fire hose that's telling us what's out there and what's available.
We have to open our aperture and find out what's coming, and so this is a discipline.
To know what our values, our aptitudes, and our economically viable interests are.
And when we go through that discipline, we can take the difficult step of pushing through the B plus life to see if there is an A plus life available to us.
And I'm not going to say that's true in every single case because you may have constraints, but I think it's available to a lot more of us than we let ourselves think.
You parse the difference in the book between values and virtues and describe how difficult it can be for folks to home in on what their values are.
Values is kind of a charged term, at least in the political discourse and so forth.
How do you think about values in a way that informs professional growth?
Values are very distinct from virtues.
Virtues are social constructs that everyone generally agrees we should all have more of, like kindness, resilience, decency, honesty, goodness.
Values are things that you can operationalize.
Values are personal choices about how we organize our lives.
Values are the underlying desires, wants, and motivations that galvanize our actions.
It's almost like a DNA profile about what's motivating you, and those are our values.
There are three well-known values inventories.
I developed a values inventory at the University of Bristol where I got my PhD, which is called the Welsh Bristol Values Inventory.
It identifies 16 values.
Each one of them will inform your career choices, and it force-rank orders your values from 1 to 16, and it tells you how much you're living each one.
Of those values.
Talk to us now about aptitudes.
Again, you differentiate skills from aptitude.
So walk us through what aptitudes means and what that difference looks like.
Aptitudes are our cognitive and emotional wiring that make us good or better at some things.
There are eight big cognitive aptitudes, and they also exist on a continuum.
So let's just think about what they are.
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, somebody who lays one big idea a year and you have to take it under consideration, or are you just a person who spouts ideas?
Different kind of work needs different kind of wiring in this way.
Are you a diagnostic problem solver?
Most consultants are.
Or are you a fact checker?
Somebody who processes and does one task at a time.
So there's eight big 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.
One of the things that we observed that was hard about managers becoming managers is not everybody's cut out to be a manager.
And in many organizations, the only way to succeed was you were a really great individual contributor, and now we're going to make you manage people.
And this is where we're seeing some organizations think they're saying,
Hey, if you're a really good individual contributor, why don't we create paths where you can grow in pay and responsibility without necessarily having to take on the broader managerial roles?
You have to.
Good organizations have to do that.
I totally agree with you because this still goes on.
But the only way you're going to make more money or get more credibility in the organization is for them to promote you to managing people.
It's very hard.
It'll be interesting now that AI is resulting in increased de-layering.
Specialists may be more valuable than ever, it seems.
Susie, do you want to speak briefly to the third part of your Venn diagram, economically viable interests?
For most, you need to figure out your economically viable interests.
And you would think this would be so obvious, but people's aperture is so closed.
There's great research that shows that when kids graduate from high school, they can list without prompting five jobs, only five.
Okay.
And two of those jobs typically are the jobs their parents hold.
We would think that this data would show that when kids go to college, that suddenly the world breaks open and they're just aware of so many more jobs.
But the research shows that after college, they can unprompted name seven jobs.
And of course, now more than ever, jobs are changing like crazy.
But even more than that, there's megatrends, which are the AI industries of the future.
I loved the example you had in there about shipbuilding.
And you may not know, but Brooke is one of the foremost experts in shipbuilding labor.
And so, Brooke, I was wondering if you would, you know, bring in here a little bit of the isn't shipbuilding great?
Isn't this a great future and economically viable future, a growing field where you can make a lot of money and progress quickly?
Yes, ships being the new chips.
I mean, talk about economically viable, and yet we still see a shortage of workers going into shipbuilding, particularly in the skilled trades, right?
And some of those perceptions have to do not only with young talent themselves, but what do their parents think, right?
And don't I need to get a four-year degree?
And even though I can make six figures as a welder, you know, three, four years coming out of college.
So that's what we're up against in shipbuilding.
And a lot of the manufacturing jobs have this kind of stigma associated with them that is not
Completely rational in some instances.
Yeah.
And I'm not even thinking, I mean, look, I think the trades are a fantastic place to go.
I've had students have their eyes open to shipbuilding as just an industry, and they're able to take their MBA skills there because those companies also have HR, logistics, all sorts of managerial roles.
So Susie, you have a
Obviously collaborated with a wide range, not only of students, but also with leaders at this point using this framework or versions of it.
I'm wondering if you have an example that might
Best bring to life the concrete difference that using this method can make in a person's life.
And I did think to myself, you don't have to use this example, but you gave an example in the book of a student who had a job offer in hand from McKinsey.
But who you thought was unlikely to be the right fit.
So you could use that and tell us how that encounter unfolded.
If I'm recalling the student you're thinking of, he was a
Very, very on the fence about going into consulting, but he had that offer in his hand and it felt like, okay, that's a win when you're in business school.
But then his test results kept on coming out in ways that were very antithetical to the consulting life.
So for instance, one of his very high cognitive, one of the cognitive aptitudes is how spatially oriented we are.
They just see everything in three dimensions.
They draw a lot.
They can manipulate objects in space.
And these are people who are often very, very good with products or they become architects or they become designers.
And then at the other end of that continuum is abstract thinking.
Like I'm very, very high on abstract thinking and very low on spatial visualization.
And this student was off the charts on spatial visualization.
And he said, I love to go into stores and stare at packaging.
And on top of this, his values showed that he had quite a low value of achievement, which is the value of having success that other people can see, really caring about winning and losing.
He had low work centrism, meaning that he's a person who wanted a real nine to five kind of lifestyle.
And his top value was belovedness, which is about the value that we hold for a romantic partner.
And then his second value was family centrism.
And this was a kid who was walking into consulting.
He was like, this is painful to see.
And he went away.
And when he came back about a week later to office hours, he said, Professor Welch, I'm blowing it all up.
I'm going to go into business with my girlfriend.
I've asked her to marry me.
And we're going to start a company making specialty drink product.
It was really cool.
And he had already designed the packaging for it.
And in fact, they launched, they're doing incredibly well.
They had a six pack of it.
And the first place they brought it was to my office.
Susie, you write about what you call the four horsemen.
That presumably harbinger the end times, not necessarily to financial success, but to meaningful or fulfilling careers.
What are those signs to watch for?
I call them the four horsemen of values destruction.
People say, why is it I don't live my values?
They all start with E. The first one is expectations, which is that somebody else's expectations of our lives or our expectation of our own life gets in the way of us living our value.
The second is expedience.
We have to fight for our right for our values.
Sometimes we don't live by our values because it makes someone we love mad.
Or we have to just do something that would take real discipline and energy.
And life is hard enough as it is.
And so we just take the path of least resistance.
The third E is economic security.
We will make a decision based on a hard number, even if money doesn't matter to us.
Because it's data we can see.
So we have all...
In our lives made dumb decisions based on a number.
People buy the wrong house because it's cheaper.
They take the wrong job because it pays more.
And they go on a vacation that they don't want to take because it's less expensive.
And then finally, events, it's the fourth E, the force horseman,
And that is sometimes things happen to us in our life and our values temporarily have to stop being expressed, but then we don't go fight to get them back.
Like you get fired or you lose a job or, I mean, when my husband passed away, I felt
Fell apart, as most widows do in a period.
There was a great period of kind of just deep grief.
And I completely let go of my values around work and achievement.
Susie, I wonder just from a company perspective, what would you say to, let's say, a CHRO, a chief human resource officer who wants to help
His or her employees become better versions of themselves, according to the book that you've written, what are some of the ways that they could do that?
Including, I think of like at the start of the talent cycle, better assessment, right?
To better sort and place people.
I think of upskilling, reskilling that could take into account some of the characteristics you're talking about.
What are your thoughts on that?
Your job as a CHRO is to understand and help your people understand themselves in the details so that they can be put into career paths within the organization that are the most aligned with their values, aptitudes, and interests.
A large nonprofit brought me in to do aptitudes with everybody in the C-suite, and that's
It was like, oh my God, everyone around this table is a specialist.
We need to bring in some generalists.
And we also do the Enneagram, which is a personality type indicator of the different people on the executive team or even on any team.
So all of the output of this is that we've now created what we're calling the becoming book, which allows everybody to create a user manual of themselves.
And this has almost an entirely organizational application where companies together in a group setting, every person takes all of this data and it's using AI.
We turn it into a user manual and then the teams
Share with each other, each other's user manuals.
And you learn about what your team members and values are, what their aptitudes are, what their foundational biographical stories are.
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 defeated.
Incapacitated, 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 gonna 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.
We noticed that the number of people who take the values bridge really peaks at night.
And one of my engineers said to me, yep, that's when people start spiraling.
So the bridge itself is designed very carefully to separate you from your crisis and actually get at your true values.
And we think it does.
I mean, its efficacy testing shows that it's 94% efficacious.
So have people been using the Becoming You process as they think through retirement?
Yes, the third halfers, love it.
I mean, this was another surprise application, that and addiction recovery.
It's actually being used right now in two addiction recovery organizations.
But the big surprise was very early on
The number of people who were like, okay, I've been owned by the man.
I've been owned by my company and I'm 55.
I've got some money.
I can design the rest of this story.
And we are amazed by the wave of people who show up in the three-day immersives in New York City in droves and they're like very on fire.
Because they're like, I can do so much more than I could when I was 25.
It is kind of an amazing thing.
But I think that this question of who we are and what we should be doing with our lives feels very, very urgent.
Yeah, it is fascinating to hear the different kinds of people and organizations that this research is resonating with.
What about the opposite end of the spectrum?
What about even going back further in the funnel?
No, it's high school.
It's high school.
The amount of incoming interest in this being developed as a high school curriculum is a tsunami.
It does belong in high school, a version of it.
Your values are not formed yet in high school, but how great to give high schoolers a language to talk about values.
And I love your point about a common language, right?
Because I do a lot of work with executives on culture and culture is not exactly synonymous with values, but there are a lot of similarities, right?
People talk about things in vague ways,
I teach management and in that class, I do teach how you develop your culture and we use the values bridge because without a language, it gets very fuzzy.
Right.
You just talk past each other.
Yeah, you just do.
And you start saying things like, our values are excellence.
I was like, oh, really?
Your definition of excellence and my definition of excellence, are they the same?
I mean, you start putting up words on boards and you start saying things like, we value collaboration.
Really?
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, 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 if we're
How do we do that in such a way so that we don't produce cultural friction?
Right.
So I think you could use.
You certainly could.
Right.
You certainly could.
I don't know if you're already doing that, but it just struck me.
No, we're not.
I mean, we can't keep up with our growth.
It's crazy.
But that is something I hadn't thought about.
You 100% could chain agents in the values, 100%, because the values are behaviors, okay?
They're just pure-on behaviors.
And so you either are high or low in something.
So if you wanted an agent to have high achievement and high work centrism, they would have very certain ways of acting that somebody who was low on those would not act.
So yes, you could.
Yeah.
And imagine doing that at scale across an organization versus relying on human managers to kind of figure out how to do that.
Really amazing.
Yeah, I think I need to go lay down.
That's a biggie.
That is one that has not dawned on us yet.
And I'm looking at them thinking, oh, those poor people with what I'm about to go tell them.
But that's very, very interesting, Brooke.
Okay.
Well, there's the big thought for today.
I feel faint.
Thank you.
Fantastic discussion.
Thank you so much for joining us, Susie.
Thank you, Susie, so much.
My great pleasure.
I love meeting you and love talking to you.
Thank you so much for having me.
Thanks so much for listening to the McKinsey Podcast.
I'm Lucia Rahilly.
And I'm Roberta Fasaro.
Find us on McKinsey.com.
We'll have a transcript of this episode up shortly.
And if you have any questions based on this episode, please email them to us at themckinseypodcastatmckinsey.com.
If you enjoyed the show we'd love for you to leave a rating and a review.
We'll see you next time.
