How to get yourself ‘unstuck’ at work

Hello and welcome to Working It.

I was honoured to write an FT obituary last week for Jane Gardam, the English novelist, who was one of my favourite writers.

Thinking about how to speak or write about a life, in the round, is always a challenge. And it made me think: what is the place of work in our lives, and those of our family and friends? Our careers can play a huge role in developing, and sustaining, our identity (and our lifestyle, let’s be honest 🚘). Is the old saying really true that nobody goes to their grave wishing they’d spent more time in the office? Keen to hear your experiences and ideas: [email protected].

PS The Economist’s long-standing obituaries editor, Ann Wroe, writes the best “lives”. Her recent book, Lifescapes, explores the search for our souls: what makes each of us unique 🙋🏽?

Read on for a fresh perspective on the role of questions at work and in our lives, and in Office Therapy I advise a new manager in search of professional development.

Don’t embrace uncertainty, get past it 😎

I think we are all sick of the shiny keynote speaker/coach-y/workfluencer exhortations to “embrace uncertainty”. (I may have been guilty of saying this myself 🙈 .) It’s a pointless statement because it’s just stating the obvious; certainly for anyone who is managing or leading in the volatile era of geopolitics (and also workplaces) at the moment.

But, as humans, we find uncertainty hard: we are hard-wired to “try to dispel doubt, to seek the comforting bedrock of certitude”. So: what can we do instead? That’s the starting point for Elizabeth Weingarten’s new book, How to Fall in Love with Questions: A New Way to Thrive in Times of Uncertainty.

Elizabeth is a journalist and behavioural scientist, and she begins her book with a research-based definition for uncertainty: “a sense of doubt that stops or delays progress”. Once we’ve understood this, we can start to think about how to get past it. “It’s often about approaching uncertainty with curiosity rather than fear, converting that sense of helplessness and stuckness that many of us feel, into power,” she told me.

Getting “unstuck” 🍚 (sorry, sticky rice is the best I can do) is at the core of Elizabeth’s book. And while a lot of its advice hinges on our outlook and personal decisions, she also details strategies to ask questions that are specifically useful for workplaces. Overall, her approach is about asking, then living with, the right question for us. We only need to live with one question at a time, and we don’t even have to answer it. (In fact, it’s preferable not to rush to conclusions and binary decisions.)

Elizabeth’s inspiration stems, in part, from the poet Rainer Maria Rilke (bet you weren’t expecting that level of class in this newsletter ✍🏻). In 1903, he wrote to a younger fellow poet, advising him that seeking answers to life’s big questions wasn’t the priority. Instead, “try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms”.

I like the idea that simply finding the right question for our individual situation, and then addressing that, and living with it, gives leaders agency at a time when they might be dealing simultaneously with (off the top of my head) AI disruption, economic downturns and the roiling effects of political decisions in the US 😥.

Elizabeth gave me ways to reframe common questions that might be useful for Working It readers. The key is to approach your situation with curiosity, rather than fear and defensiveness:

On risk taking in an uncertain context, ‘What if we try this and it doesn’t work?’ becomes ‘What possibilities might emerge if we try this?’ And if you are thinking about your own approach to leadership, reframe ‘am I a good enough manager?’ as ‘how might I start to identify my strengths and weaknesses so I can grow?’

Finding the right question for your own situation is the key 🔑, Elizabeth told me. Not doing so can be detrimental to how you manage your team. “When we are dealing with a sense of fear and threat, if we don’t work through that we could pass it off to the people that we work with.” By becoming more self-aware about the big questions we face as managers and leaders, we ultimately, in Elizabeth’s view, “can actually lead folks through uncertainty”.

If you think this sounds too “touchy-feely” for your leadership tastes, don’t be fooled. Elizabeth has no time at all for “the charlatans of certainty”, the people who promise definitive answers if you sign up and follow their course/system/strict yoga practice. We all know that fast, easy answers don’t work. But we crave them anyway.

• In a nutshell: We don’t need “one-size-fits-all” systems to overcome our natural distaste for uncertainty. Asking a big, relevant question, and sticking with it, works far better.

• Want more? I enjoyed watching Elizabeth Weingarten in conversation with Heather Havrilesky (author of the world’s best advice column, Ask Polly).

Office Therapy

The problem: I have been promoted and now run a small team, but I have had no management training. Nor will I get any. What free, or near-free, and globally relevant resources for a beginner/self-taught manager can you recommend?

Isabel’s advice: This question was sent in after a recent Working It newsletter highlighted that, globally, only 44 per cent of managers said they’d received any training. What I suggested is below; your ideas are very welcome, do send them in and I’ll build a resources list here and on LinkedIn: [email protected].

*Podcasts I rate: Fixable by Frances Frei and Anne Morriss, anything by Adam Grant [and his newsletter] and the Squiggly Careers podcast, plus the latter has free career and management/self management resources on its website. There’s also the FT Working It podcast archive: 150 episodes, with lots of experts offering management wisdom 🦉.

*Amy Edmondson at Harvard is a great writer on management and leadership, and her work on psychological safety is really important. LinkedIn has a course by Amy, and the social media platform has got some good learning resources overall, including a new manager certificate.

*On that note, the digital version of the Harvard Business Review is a great resource, and not expensive. 

US workplace insights from Charter: the perils of unedited ChatGPT

AI tools are saving us time, but are also generating a new workplace problem: people dumping reams of AI-generated memos on to colleagues, creating more work for them 🤬.

Kevin Delaney, editor-in-chief of Charter, the future-of-work media and research company, told me that he’s experienced this, including with one contact who asked him to review a 1,200-word strategy memo that was clearly written by GenAI. Kevin spent time drafting a thorough response, to which the person never replied. Rude 😒.

Kevin and his colleague Jacob Clemente suggest workplace norms to avoid annoying co-workers when you use ChatGPT and other AI tools. Most importantly: don’t be AI’s intermediary. Only select the best ideas it generates, and when you send those through to colleagues for review, add your own thoughts and evaluations about each one.

Five top stories from the world of work

1. Slaughter and May holds junior lawyer pay at £150,000: The UK law firm has gone public with its decision not to raise salaries for newly qualified solicitors, a sign the talent war in the sector may be cooling, writes Suzi Ring.

2. The AI hiring arms race is a huge mess for everyone: AI hiring started with employers seeking more efficiency and fairness, then candidates countered with AI-driven applications, and now the whole thing is a mess. Sarah O’Connor surveys the dismal scene and suggests solutions.

3. The rise of single parents by choice: As more women who have good careers are choosing to have children without a partner, Kate Hodge talks to “solo parents” about the challenges of keeping work and family life together.

4. Will train WiFi ever work? Henry Mance tries to understand why we still can’t get good WiFi on a train: it’s expensive and hard to implement at scale — although there is an element of “be careful what we wish for” (looking at you, 5G on the London underground 🤯).

5. Can you run a company as a perfect free market? Inside Disco Corp. I can’t believe I haven’t read about this before: a huge Japanese company runs its entire workplace as a free market, using an internal currency called Will. Eye-opening reporting by Harry Dempsey and David Keohane.

One more thing . . . 

The cardinals are in Rome for the conclave to elect a new pope. According to Politico, some first-time voters have been taking guidance: “As crazy as it might sound, some of the 133 high-ranking clerics set to enter the Sistine Chapel when the conclave starts on Wednesday have looked to the Ralph Fiennes movie ― handily titled just Conclave ― for pointers.” If it’s good enough for the cardinals . . . you’re in for a treat if you haven’t yet watched the film 🍿.

View from the top (floor) 🌁

As I didn’t get any great photos from Working It readers this week*, you will have to indulge my love of roof terraces. Last week, I went to the London office of KKR, the private equity group, for a rooftop reception. We were celebrating the charity Envision, which partners with schools and business mentors to equip young people with communication and confidence skills. A great cause, and a great sunset 🌅.

*Do send me the view from your desk. Or have you got an exceptional outdoor space at work? If your photo is published in Working It, I’ll send you a “lucky dip” of new management and leadership books: [email protected].