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From the constant LinkedIn updates of ex-colleagues climbing the corporate ladder, to friends hitting career milestones or landing their dream roles . . . its easier than ever to feel professionally behind. Theres a name for that feeling you cant shake: career dysmorphia. Youve probably heard of body dysmorphia (an actual medical diagnosis) or money dysmorphia (not a medical diagnosis). Career dysmorphia is an anecdotal term that follows a similar line of thinking: a disconnect between someone’s professional achievements and their perception of their worth. Some classic signs: You hold back from going for promotions because you feel unprepared, even when others insist youre more than capable. You keep collecting certifications and degreesnot out of ambition, but from a lingering fear of never being enough. Or maybe you sit through meetings with ideas in your head, but hesitate to speak up. Also called job dysmorphia, the topic has gained traction in recent months: on LinkedIn posts, in YouTube videos, in articles on lifestyle sites, news sites, and youth publications. Similar to imposter syndrome (minus the fear of being exposed), career dysmorphia describes not just a singular moment of self-doubtbut an outlook that defines your view of your entire career. Its unsurprising. We live in an era where success is curated and easily shareable via LinkedIn updates (Im excited to announce . . .). Many feel inadequate. According to a 2024 Gallup survey, employees across America are feeling increasingly detached from their jobs. Others are impacted by toxic bosses or workplaces that don’t recognize and reward their contributions, which could potentially fuel job dysmorphia. Only 30% of U.S employees feel that someone at work encourages their development, down from 36% in March 2020, another 2025 Gallup survey found. Career dysmorphia born out of workplace discrimination adds another layer of complexity. The old adage “you have to work twice as hard to get just as far” holds true for many women, people from low-income backgrounds, people of color, and many other marginalized communities in the workplace. Whether its caused by an innate feeling of inadequacy or by external pressures and societal inequalities, career dysmorphia is a cycle that can hold workers back from reaching their true potential. Its always worthwhile to employ the same techniques as you would with general comparison anxiety: set social media boundaries, naming and processing your feelings, or spending time with people who admire you and build you up. Overcoming confidence issuesin the workplace or otherwisealways takes time. (If nothing else, you can try laughing at LinkedIn vs. Reality posts like this, this and this.)
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E-Commerce
Weve all heard the saying, When you change the incentives, you change the behavior, and most of us even believed it at some point. But with experience, you find that human behavior doesnt fit into such neat little boxes. People act the way they do for all kinds of reasons, some of them rational, some of them not. The truth is that incentives often backfire because of something called Goodharts law. Once we target something to incentivize, it ceases to be a good target. A classic example occurred when the British offered bounties for dead cobras in India. Instead of hunting cobras, people started breeding them which, needless to say, didnt solve the problem. Smart leaders understand that behavior is downstream of culture. There are norms that underlie behaviors, and those norms are encoded by rituals that guide everything from how you hire to how you promote, and how you determine compensation. Thats why you cant just tweak incentives. For meaningful change, you need to activate cultural triggers that shift norms from the inside out. The surface behaviors you see In 1984, Michael Dell launched his eponymous company from a college dorm room with a simple idea: bypass the reseller channel and sell customized computers directly to customers. The model gave Dell a clear cost advantage by eliminating dealer markupsand even more importantly, it allowed him to receive payment before paying suppliers This direct model was a simple idea and a clear competitive advantage, but none of the incumbent industry giants, such as Compaq and HP, managed to adopt it. It wasnt for lack of trying. The advantages of Dells model were well known, widely publicized, and seemingly straightforward to replicate. There were a number of efforts to replicate it. Theoretically, switching to a direct model shouldnt have been that difficult. If a college student like Dell could set it up in a dorm room, surely multibillion-dollar corporations could do the same. They could just easily tweak commissions so that salespeople would be incentivized to focus on selling directly to customers rather than resellers. Yet the real world isnt so simple. Consider all of the salespeople servicing retail and reseller accounts. Theyd spent years earning status within the organization by building those relationships. Its not just about financial incentives, but the identity and status conferred by the connections everybody worked so hard to build. Its not just salespeople either. Logistics would have to be completely redesigned. Longtime employees would have to sever relationships and build others, learn new skills, and do their jobs differently. Jobs are more than just transactions; theyre expressions of who we are and how we see ourselves. The norms that underlie those behaviors While Dells direct model was gaining dominance, the company that launched the PC revolution, IBM, was going through a crisis of its own. After decades of market leadership, it had become a faltering giant, losing competitiveness in the very industry it had pioneered. It wasnt until Lou Gerstner arrived as CEO in 1993 that the company began to reckon with the deeper cultural issues driving its decline. Irving Wladawsky-Berger, one of Gerstners chief lieutenants, would later explain what had gone wrong. At IBM we had lost sight of our values, he told me, and then continued: For example, there was a long tradition of IBM executives dressing formally in a suit and tie. Yet that wasnt a value, it was an early manifestation of a value. In the early days, many of IBMs customers were banks, so IBMs salespeople dressed to reflect their customers . . . IBM had always valued competitiveness, but we had started to compete with each other internally rather than working together to beat the competition. In a similar vein, when Paul ONeill took over aluminum giant Alcoa, he told reporters and analysts, If you want to understand how Alcoa is doing, you need to look at how we treat safety. If we bring our injury rates down, it wont be because of cheerleading or posters. It will be because the people at this company have agreed to become part of something important: theyve devoted themselves to creating a habit of excellence. In both cases, transformational leaders, ONeill at Alcoa and Gerstner at IBM, understood that the behaviors they were seeing were a function of norms, some explicit and some otherwise. Both also understood that if they were going to change those behaviors, they had to reshape the rituals that encoded those norms into the culture. Changing rituals to encode new norms Gerstner noticed when he arrived at IBM how the companys rituals reinforced internal rivalry. Instead of collaborating, business units often worked to undermine one anotherhoarding information and maneuvering for dominance. As he would later write in his memoir, Who Says Elephants Cant Dance: Huge staffs spent countless hours debating and managing transfer pricing terms between IBM units instead of facilitating a seamless transfer of products to customers. Staff units were duplicated at every level of the organization because no managers trusted cross-unit colleagues to carry out the work. Meetings to decide issues that cut across units were attended by throngs of people because everyone needed to be present to protect his or her turf. Gerstner understood that if he was going to change IBMs culture and turn the business around, he needed to dismantle the rituals that were reinforcing dysfunctional norms. Through company-wide emails and personal conversations, he made it clear that collaboration was now a core expectation. He even fired a number of senior executivespreviously regarded as untouchablewho were known for infighting. While Gerstner broke old rituals that encoded the infighting norms, ONeill focused on creating new ones. He introduced a simple but powerful rule: any time someone was injured on the job, the unit president had to inform him within 24 hours. But to achieve that, their vice presidents needed to be in constant communication with floor managers, which required them to create new rituals of their own. These rituals encoded new norms ofresponsiveness and transparency that were used to share information that went far beyond safety. Soon, company executives all over the world were actively sharing local market conditions, competitive intelligence, emerging problems, and best practices from across the organization. Gerstner and ONeill both achieved historic turnarounds at iconic companies because they understood how the cultural triggers of norms and rituals shape behaviors. Designing a performance culture Lou Gerstner, reflecting on his legendary turnaround at IBM, wrote, Culture isnt just one aspect of the game, it is the game. In the end, an organization is nothing more than the collective capacity of its people to create value . . . What does the culture reward and punishindividual achievement or team play, risk-taking or consensus building? Every culture encodes norms through rituals. How you hire, promote, produce budgets, and account for expenses and profits all involve ritualized processes. These reflect both explicit and implicit values that guide people on how theyre expected to act. Deliberately or not, leaders are constantly sending signals and people are constantly reading them. Its not uncommon for leaders to be unaware of the signals they are sending. Take stack ranking, which requires managers to rank employees by performance and eliminate the bottom 10%. It’s meant to encode norms of excellence. But often it does just the opposite, encouraging employees to undermine each other instead of collaborate together effectively. All too often, leaders try to shape behavior through incentives. But trying to bribe and bully your way to a performance culture is like closing the barn door after the horse has already bolted. To effectively shape behavior, you need to address the norms and rituals that underlie it. Incentives might enforce compliance, but they wont inspire passion or creativity. To build a true performance culture, it is not enough to simply plan and direct action; you have to inspire and empower belief. You do that by being deliberate and precise about how you design cultural triggers.
Category:
E-Commerce
I think these hiring managers are playing in my face. Ive been on the hunt for a new gig for a large chunk of this year, and it feels like Ive seen it all. Ive watched some appealing job listings be pulled down within hours, while others sit stagnantly for months. Ive heard tales of scammers trying to dupe job seekers; legit employers advertising phantom roles to collect talent data and present an illusion of company growth. These days, the job market is feeling like the wild wild west out here and theres no catchy Will Smith bop to dance along to. Navigating that treachery is hard enough. But Ive managed on a few occasions to escape the black hole of applications and get some interest from potential employers. With those strides, the churn has become so exhausting that it has me desperate for a much-needed Bali getaway that I ironically need a job to afford. The slog of these intricate application processes is to blame. A popular meme once asked, What feels like begging but isnt? My answer is what I refer to as the corporate Hunger Gamesa process infamously associated with startup and tech culture in which youre put through rounds and rounds of interviews, tests, and various submissions. When you go through enough of these, which can take weeks at a time, its hard not to feel burned the hell out. A few months back, I threw my fedora in the ring for a marketing role where I clocked that my experience was a perfect fit. I cooked on that cover letter, calibrated my resumé just right to fend off the ATS filters, and said all the right things on the phone screen. But that was only the beginning. Next was the video entry, which involved awkwardly responding to a series of prompts like Tell me about a time you failed via self-recorded one-minute clips. If I wanted to do an audition tape, Id sign up for America’s Got Talent, but whatever. An IRL meeting with the hiring manager followed, then two panel interviews on Zoom, and an (unpaid) assessment that devoured a whole Saturday. Several weeks later, I made it to the final boss. But it didnt matter. After much consideration . . . they went with the other guy. Same as the last two applications, where I was on the unfortunate end of a really tough decision. Its giving always the bridesman, never the groom. After a few of these corporate decathlons, you start to feel it in your spirit. The rejections sting, sure, but its the grind that really takes its toll. Every time you toil away at a resumé revampor pull another weekend shift on a pro bono case studyyoure investing pieces of yourself. And when it doesnt pan out? Its hard not to take that L personally, word to His Airness. The job hunt has a way of chipping away at your confidence until you start questioning whether the skills youve sharpened for years are obsolete. Its a solitary experience. Telling your friends or family youre still looking sounds passive, like youve just been sitting on your sofa waiting for a gig to land in your lap. They dont see the spreadsheet of job trackers. The hours of prep for interviews that go nowhere. The facepalm moment when you realize the role you were excited about is paying $25,000 less than you deserve. Im not one for sob stories, though, so this definitely aint that. Put that violin back in its case. Ive managed to maintain my sanity by treating my mental health with as much discipline as my job search. Its the boundaries for me. Three applications per day, max, and then I shut the laptop. Short walks and gym time are booked in my schedule between those virtual calls. And sometimes, yes, sitting on the sectional on a Wednesday afternoon with Highest 2 Lowest playing on the TV is acceptable. Its all about pacing yourself so you dont crash (or crashout) before reaching the finish line. Searching for a new gig in this economy is not for the weak. Do what you can to secure your bag. And give yourself grace for the things you cant control: the hiring freeze you didnt know about, the manager who already had an internal candidate in mind, the flaky recruiter. Youve got something to offer, and its only a matter of time before someone armed with hiring power (and hopefully a signing bonus) recognizes that. The Only Black Guy in the Office is copublished with LEVELman.com.
Category:
E-Commerce
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