C H A P T E R

O N E

Misemployment

• Is the energy and enthusiasm that once defined you bleeding away?

• Does your anxiety level skyrocket as you pull into the company parking lot on Monday mornings?

• Do you emerge from the subway with feet of lead, lugging a briefcase full of unfinished reports you told yourself you would work on at home but didn’t?

• Does the happy talk in the elevators drive you to distraction?

• Do you walk around your workplace with your shoulders around your ears waiting for the ax to fall?

• Does the clock move in slow motion?

• Are you spending too much time on tasks that seem unimportant?

• Do you often feel at odds with your boss on important issues?

• Do you want to shout: "How can you people stand this place?!"

• Are your job frustrations spilling over into your personal life?

If these questions ring a bell with you and your answers are mostly "Yes," you have a problem. The problem is misemployment. Misemployment explains why every conversation with close friends inevitably gets around to job frustration or anxiety, why your boss hasn’t dropped by your office for a friendly chat in a long time, and why the fast track no longer runs past your office door.

Misemployment affects the happiness and well-being of millions of Americans. It erodes self-confidence and self-esteem. Its impact extends far beyond your work life. Like unemployment, misemployment feeds family problems and contributes to divorce, substance abuse, and depression.

Misemployment is a problem that all too often is ignored until it’s too late. Job surveys suggest the majority of Americans are misemployed. The majority! If that estimate seems extreme, talk to friends and co-workers to find out how many of them are satisfied with their careers. Talk to the recently retired; how many of them feel they spent their working lives watching the clock or calendar?

Look at the dour faces of the commuters packed into the bar car as the 5:40 PM train pulls out of Grand Central Station; the men and women bleakly facing the traffic on the 405 Expressway in Los Angeles.

In over twenty-five years of Human Resources management and career assessment consulting, I have interviewed thousands of individuals and not one has ever challenged the painful assertion that the majority of American workers are dissatisfied with their jobs. Look around you. The majority of your friends, coworkers, bosses or employees are probably misemployed!

Let’s be clear. Misemployment is not underemployment. In the nineties this was labeled the "McJob" syndrome and defined as: work, salary and status far beneath one’s educational level, skills or ability. Neither is misemployment being in a job that demands a higher skill level than you possess. No, misemployment is more complex and, therefore, more difficult to address.

You may have a prestigious job making a six figure salary and still be misemployed. You may be a walking definition of success — respected, envied, emulated — and be misemployed. You may be in a mid-level position going nowhere — a classic symptom of misemployment — or right out of college, starting a new career, determined, highly motivated, but heading down the wrong career path. Misemployment affects the 55-yearold partner in a prestigious law firm, the 27- year-old account executive, the 40 year-old administrator, and even the occupants of the White House …

Jimmy Carter was misemployed as President of the United States. No wonder the American people voted him out of a job in 1980. Having been forced into a career change, Carter has become perhaps the most successful ex-president in history, a global troubleshooter and peacemaker, best selling author and builder of homes for the poor. Most importantly, Jimmy Carter is a happy, useful and fulfilled man with his abilities appreciated both locally and globally.

Similarly, the keen intelligence, fierce independence and combativeness that served Hillary Clinton so well as an attorney hurt her as the nation’s First Lady. She was expected to retreat into the stereotypes she had spent her life resisting:

to play up to the cameras, to act like a housewife in the background. As First Lady, she was misemployed. But, fortunately for her, it was a temporary job; and she was able to pursue an opportunity that she felt would realize her full potential. Time will tell, but in her job as senator she may be more appropriately employed because it is a position that allows her to be in the spotlight as an advocate for the causes that incite her passion.

Most of us do not have a term limit on misemployment. We have to draw a line ourselves and say enough is enough. A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.

To put it simply, you are misemployed if you’re in the wrong job for your personality. You know misemployment both by the feel and by the facts. Stop a moment. Breathe deeply. Drop your shoulders. Let the weight of the world slide off of them. Sit down and let your feet sink into the floor. Relax. You don’t have to suffer through years of uninteresting and unrewarding work.

You do not have to tolerate a boss with whom you cannot connect. Nor he or she with you! This is not the way it’s supposed to be. Job Satisfaction Is Your Responsibility When you’re miserable and misemployed, you can either do nothing or do something.

Doing nothing often appears to be the easiest way to go. Deny, ignore the tell-tale signs of misemployment. Think that any day the situation is going to get better. But if you’re truly misemployed, it won’t. If you are counting on the company to see your plight and save you, you’re grasping at straws. Has your company ever tested you or taken responsibility for making the best use of your talents? Probably not. Eighty per cent of America’s workforce is employed by small businesses where assessment tools or career consulting is not usually available. And where assessment programs are available, they usually assess the wrong things.

Thinking you will be noticed eventually is an invitation to be overlooked or ignored. Leaving your future up to the company is lazy at best — disastrous at worst. When you ignore the inevitable, it blindsides you and catches you unprepared. You kid yourself right up to the minute the ax falls.

Maybe you’ve already quit trying. Sadly, many individuals have embraced the "salt mine" view of the work environment. They believe that their jobs are supposed to be emotionally unrewarding and unfulfilling; that’s the price they must pay for a livelihood. They become lazy or rigid in their thinking. They become creatures of habit, or they believe that change is too complicated or too difficult to effect. They refuse to plan, learn a new skill, re-educate themselves, or take advantage of the opportunities that swirl around them. In many cases, they become the kind of boss or colleague they dislike the most.

Denial of misemployment or giving up on job satisfaction usually has disastrous consequences. The first area affected may result in physical health problems: headaches, unexplained tiredness, back and neck pain, and all the diseases to which stress contributes. (Isn’t that all of them?) Mental health is also affected; depression, anxiety and irritability lead the pack as examples in this area. Substance use can become substance abuse.

And if you don’t get sick first, the other likely result of doing nothing is YOU WILL BE LET GO. Misemployment is often unemployment waiting to happen. Misemployment is often disguised as poor performance. Your dissatisfaction has shown on your face, in your walk, in your productivity. Your termination (past or future) may be part of a general downsizing, but why are you chosen for downsizing instead of the other guy? Could your dislike of the job have anything to do with it? You have been fearing termination for a long time, yet you secretly wish for it. It will end your current source of misery. If you were going to be out of a job, wouldn’t it be better to end your employment on your own terms and without the black mark on your record? Of course!

Your only reasonable course is to do something to change your life. But not just anything. A lot of people change jobs when they get sufficiently unhappy but fail to educate themselves correctly on their needs and the characteristics of the jobs they are considering. Thus, they go out of the frying pan into the fire, from one form of misemployment to another. And another and another, as I myself have done.

Now, the first course of action, if you’re misemployed or unemployed, is to make a realistic assessment of what you should be doing and where you should be doing it.

Making an assessment is scary because it may confirm that you are misemployed and point the way to dramatic change. Most change is stressful. But preparation is the best way to manage stress. Preparation overcomes fear: fear of failure, fear of financial disaster, fear of the unknown. As Bear Bryant, the famous University of Alabama football coach, liked to say, "Luck is preparation meeting opportunity."

The opportunities are out there. You may have to change your job or elements of your job; but be assured, once you’re in the right job, money, advancement and satisfaction will follow.

I know thousands of people who love their jobs. Not every one of them makes a million dollars per year; not every one of them travels the world or controls billion-dollar budgets. But they are happy and satisfied. Most of them have been confused and disappointed at some point in their careers; many were even despondent. Today they are living, breathing, laughing proof that it is possible to be successful and fulfilled.

C H A P T E R

T H R E E

The

M u l l i n g

Fa c t o r

If you're like the thousands of individuals we’ve consulted at The Mulling Companies, you’re not leaving a company because of the work itself. In fact, about two thirds of our clients come to us because of incompatibility with the boss and almost all the rest because of problems with the work environment.

None of them wants to repeat their misemployment. But how do you know the right boss and the right work environment? It’s not as easy to determine the ideal boss and work environment for your personal work style as it is to determine your interest and aptitude, but, like interest and aptitude, finding the right boss and work environment is first a matter of measuring yourself.

The Mulling Factor is an assessment tool especially designed to identify your work style to help you clearly understand the kind of boss and work environment that will allow you to flourish.

Recognizing your own style and requirements for comfort puts you in charge. The Mulling Factor provides direction for a journey too many of us undertake without a compass.

The Mulling Factor incorporates my twentyfive years of experience in the field and the professional expertise of William P. Brittain, Ph.D., an industrial psychologist whose specialties include program planning, system design, management development, personnel selection, testing and evaluation. Dr. Brittain is a nationally recognized authority in the application of behavioral evaluation in management and career development and, like myself, has spent more than twenty-five years assisting individuals in finding optimal employment.

We have agreed there is a strong need for understanding work style preferences so fewer career mistakes will be made. Therefore, we have developed an assessment tool that individuals could use to make certain that the job they choose is the best one for them.

The Mulling Factor assessment has been administered to a thousand individuals in many different careers and on all rungs of the corporate ladder. In the five years we’ve been using The Mulling Factor in the cases where we have been able to follow up, no one has taken a job that didn’t succeed for them. The majority of The Mulling Factor graduates have achieved happy, productive employment.

"The things The Mulling Factor assessed I had known previously, but never really seriously considered. When they were pointed out to me, it was like: That’s it! Of course! You better believe I paid attention to those things when I got the next job. The Mulling Factor and its interpretation changed my perspective," said Roger Ellison, a project manager who came to us for consultation. "And I think I have the right job this time. Every day I notice things at work that fit this whole theory. I feel like I have this secret clue no one else has."

For people like Roger, The Mulling Factor opens the door to self-discovery. The analysis it provides is critical in helping them select among career opportunities that fit their interest and aptitude profiles. It is not the only tool used in examining fundamental employment concerns; however, it is the compass they use on their voyage through the job market.

The Mulling Factor is composed of statements designed to measure the qualities you believe to be typical of your work style or preferred way of handling work situations. Before you actually look at The Mulling Factor, be assured — there are no "right" answers and there is no "right" work style that you should have.

Each work style is an asset in the appropriate situation. This book is based on The Mulling Factor and the critical information it gives you. Please take the time to complete The Mulling Factor so you will be able to interpret your results as you read the remainder of the book.