When I was a little little kid, I was a four years old on my first airplane ride and we got to go up front in the cockpit because you could kind of do that back then. And it was. Totally dark, no moon over the Atlantic Ocean, there is like a billion stars in the sky and I went back and told my mom I wanted to be a stewardess and my mom, to her credit, she wasn't. Honey, you might want to think about being a pilot. And there you go. That's what I wanted to do from then on. Sharon Pressler has flown lots of different kinds of airplanes since then, including fighter jets. She was the first woman in the US Air Force to fly the F-16. It's just always been the coolest looking airplane, that bubble canopy and the big engine. And it has the highest tolerance, which is nine times the force of gravity on the earth, which is significant. It can do anything. Sheeran's had an extraordinary career spanning more than three decades. But recently, after 14 years as a pilot with Southwest Airlines, she hit a particularly bad patch of turbulence. Her whole industry did. I was the captain who always brought, like chocolate for the flight attendants, and I'd go give them some chocolate, even if it's breakfast time, it's OK to have chocolate for breakfast. Here you go. And that changed my first flight after we kind of really understood what was going on with covid. We had a bunch of those Clorox wipes. So I took those to the flight attendants instead. I'm like, hey, anybody wants some wipes. The pandemic had a catastrophic impact on the airline industry and Southwest eventually offered buyouts. I hadn't even really thought about my retirement moment yet because I had 10 more years to fly and I wasn't planning on leaving. But after some serious reflection, she chose to retire. So we're a couple of hundred that retired in the same two week period, which is unheard of. Despite all the turbulence, Sharon knows she's lucky she looked beyond the horizon to a new career. More on that later. But for now, buckle up. Ladies, gentlemen, this is Captain Pressor speaking. I know it's been a little bit turbulent, especially in the economy, but it's going to smooth out. Thanks for listening with us today. I'm Adam Grant and this is work like my podcast with the TED Radio Collective. I'm an organizational psychologist. I study how to make work, not suck. In this show. I take you inside the minds of fascinating people to help us rethink how we work, lead and live today, navigating career turbulence, thanks to Morgan Stanley for sponsoring this episode. You know what turbulence feels like on an airplane. You had some nasty wind and everything is out of your control. You've probably faced that kind of turbulence in your career, too, when your job, your workplace or your industry is changing dramatically around you and you feel powerless to shape it. The current pandemic has compounded that disturbance on a massive scale. In the face of uncertainty, we often freeze up. Researchers call it a threat, rigidity, response. When we feel powerless to counter the threats around us, our thinking becomes constrained. We hang on for dear life, stop taking risks and play it safe. The past year has left us all reacting to dramatic change. But psychologists find that when we encounter turbulence, instead of pushing harder against the headwinds, we're generally better off tilting our rudder and charting a new course. In other words, expanding your thinking at exactly the moment when all your instincts are telling you to lock it down tight. I was in my 40s and I worked in the mortgage division. When all of this mortgage business hit and they laid off the entire division in Jacksonville in 2009, Erin Scott had been working for a bank in Florida for 14 years when he lost his job during the recession. He started looking for a new job in finance. I would estimate that surely I applied for at least two hundred jobs. I think I have like three interviews in that whole time as more time passed without any callbacks and became more open to exploring other roles and for lower pay as long as they were in state your station for one particular kind of fish. But in time when you start casting your net a whole lot wider feeling dejected. Aaron finally started looking out of state, which would have meant leaving his entire family behind. My brother, my sister, my mom and dad, they're all right there. When you talk about moving to California from Florida, that's you know, that's a desperate move. But something's, you know, something's got to give here. I couldn't find another job to save my life. Aaron spent two and a half years looking for full time work. He had a newborn son, so his financial responsibilities were growing. And just when you thought things couldn't get any worse, his wife had a stroke. This is the most driven woman I know. And when you see that kind of person sitting in a wheelchair, I just felt the weight of the world had this little boy. You're thinking, my wife looks to me, my son looks to me, what am I going to do? I just finally I went to another room and I just closed door and I just kind of had a little pity party. What is a pity party? Well, I didn't want to say I cried, but that's what I did. With so much out of his control in that moment, Aaron found a way to take some of the control back. Instead of focusing narrowly on the mortgage industry, Aaron broadened his lens. He found a part time job as a substitute teacher to pay the bills, which was a resourceful move, an example of what psychologists call being proactive. Be proactive can be really annoying advice, it isn't about working harder or taking the bull by the horns or whatever your nagging uncle keeps telling you to do, you're probably doing that already. It means doing what you can to change the circumstance rather than grinding against it, identifying the ways, large or small, that you can exert some control in an out of control situation. It turned out that Aaron loved teaching. A few years later, he ended up pivoting it into his current career, where he's helping others learn from his earlier setback. I work at a nearby prison, Hamilton Correctional Institution. Aaron now helps people navigate one of the biggest headwinds imaginable time in prison. What Aaron's learned about how formerly incarcerated people re-enter society has implications for adapting to all kinds of turbulence, from being downsized to being demoted to having a gap on your resume. People who have spent time in prison faced major obstacles when they're trying to land a job. Employers are often hesitant to give them an opportunity. If they look you up and they find out you are really into some bad stuff, sometimes that's the end of it. They're just going to pass on you. Aaron coaches his students to call out the elephant in the room. I made some very poor decisions. I've paid for that. I've made a lot of changes in my life. I would really appreciate the opportunity. Why do you think it's important, Aaron, to address the elephant in the room and actually talk about it directly? The number one thing is you control the narrative to some degree when you do that. Controlling the narrative, this is a key strategy for being proactive in the face of career turbulence, crafting a story about how a headwind has made you stronger or better. Research demonstrates that in the job search, sex offenders are better off owning their mistakes than making excuses. Your headwinds may be lighter than time behind bars. Maybe you lost a job that was a bad fit, or you took time off to care for a child or a sick family member. Or maybe you have a physical or psychological disability that prospective employers wrongly judge. And although it's illegal to discriminate against people with disabilities, employers have biases. In a series of studies, people with disabilities were rated more favorably if they brought them up at the beginning of an interview rather than waiting until the end or concealing them altogether. Psychologist find that in the face of setbacks, taking charge of the narrative doesn't just signal to others that you're in control. Forming a story can also boost your own motivation and build your confidence to overcome past struggles and move forward in the future. When Aaron was searching for a job, he decided to take this principle a step further, he started proactively asking interviewers to call out the elephant in the room to tell him what his disadvantages were. Well, first, I want to thank you for allowing me to come in and speak with you. I'm very interested in this position. Is there anything in this interview or perhaps on my résumé that might give you pause about considering me for the position? Part of what I think is so clever about asking that question is even if it doesn't get you the job today, you learn something potentially for the next interview. That's exactly right. I did learn from that interview sometimes, but I learn it helps me get the job that is the right job for me here in advance. Doesn't mean you have to take it, but it does mean you can weigh it. Sometimes there's a little nugget in there that will help you. This is another form of proactivity in the face of turbulence, seeking feedback by asking what your limitations are and how you can improve, you don't just get to peek inside the black box of how to get that job, that connection or that coveted project. You also get in a sense of control to address the issues that may be preventing you from getting an opportunity. But people won't always tell you what you can do better. And sometimes you can't even get your foot in the door to ask them, you know, all those YouTube videos that you watch and all those things that interrupt you and jam their way into your face. I do those. Dallas McGlaughlin started building websites as a teenager and taught himself how to do SEO search engine optimization. You know, when you direct people doing Google searches to a particular website, like what? Those pop up ads you're always avoiding. Dallas got so good at SEO Marketing that he dropped out of music college to do it full time and for a few years that's what he did. But when Dallas decided he wanted to work for a big agency, not having a formal degree became a major disadvantage. It meant nobody was looking at his resume and prescreening tools and technology that just siphoned me or filtered me out. I just wasn't even passing those checks and balances. Remember, I dropped out of college to go do this. I just knew that I could do that better than anybody stepping out of a college with a communications degree. When you faced a headwind, you need support. If you're like most people, your instinct is to reach out to your strong ties, the people you know well and trust to have your back. But research has shown that you're more likely to get a job through weak ties. Your more distant acquaintances, they travel in different circles and have access to a broader pool of connections and ideas, which puts them in a better position to open up new opportunities. Sadly, the people who need those ties the most are the least likely to reach out to them. Research reveals that when their jobs are under threat, people with lower social class tend to narrow their networks. While people with higher status tend to broaden their networks, they reach beyond the inner circle, which actually turns out to be a way of changing course when the going is rough and it's something we should support everyone to do. Or if you want to be really proactive, you can expand your network to include complete strangers. That's what Dallas did, he came up with a plan to recruit the recruiters into his network. He took the same CEO marketing skills he'd been using to attract customers, except now he targeted employers first. He built a website for himself. Next, he made a list of every notable person in the Phoenix agency ecosystem CEOs, CFOs, marketing directors, you name it. And then he made paid search ads targeting each of them. So let's say you're an executive named John Smith and you're Googling yourself because you have nothing better to do. You type your name into Google. And the very first result that pops up says, hey, John Smith, I'm Dallas McLaughlin. I'm a digital marketing expert and I really want to work for your company. Click here to find out why I basically turned the entire hiring process around and I stopped sending resumes. This is so clever. So wait a minute. How many people actually followed up and how many people ignored it? I only targeted maybe 12. And I heard from for the very first follow up I got, they said, please stop doing this. I don't like it because they didn't like the fact that you were so effective in advertising that you were able to annoy them and create them out a little. Yeah. You know, it's also me screening them out if they don't like what I'm doing and they clearly don't understand the value in what I just did. And they're not going to be able to properly utilize me within their organization. I don't want to work there anyway. The fourth one, they were just like, come into the office, you're hired, you're in. We don't need we want to have a job opening. Wow. So you went from over 100 to four out of 12 interested in at least learning more about you to 100 percent success rate once you got an interview. Yeah, and that was it. Dallas found a proactive way to showcase his skills specific to the field. Instead of going to the recruiters, he turned the tables and brought the recruiters to him. This kind of initiative can help you expand your network and access to new opportunities to. A few years ago, I got a cold email from a web designer. She sent me a mock up of how she thought my homepage should be redesigned. I wasn't even looking for a change, but she did such a great job that I hired her on the spot. Not everyone will have time to experiment like this, but if you can manage it, it's a promising way to proactively change the situation. There's evidence that side hustles can boost our engagement and performance in our full time jobs, and sometimes they even become a career. Go do that thing that excites you. If you are an architect, go draw blueprints. If you're an auto mechanic, go fix everybody's cars. And if you do that long enough and you do it well enough, somebody is going to notice. Captain Sharon Pressler could have chosen to stay in aviation, but once the airline industry starts furloughing now, there's a glut of pilots, right. Because everybody kind of tries to take a step back and go. So I'll go back to being an instructor. Well, guess what? Everybody else is trying to go back to being an instructor, and there's just not the demand. The more she thought about it, the more she started to reframe the disturbance as an opportunity to take off in an entirely new direction. This whole covid mess and the wreck that the airline industry has become right now for me was an unexpected opportunity. So I'm back in school. I'm getting a master's in psychology with an emphasis on coaching young adults and help them successfully transition to adulthood. And it's just something I wanted to. I've been interested in for a while and mentoring kind of program, although I will miss flying at Southwest. I'm excited about it. It's a big change, but I'm excited about it. In the face of the storm confronting the airline industry, Sharon changed course, something the pandemic and recession are forcing all of us to do in varying degrees. Premier grappling with uncertainty. We tend to focus on what's right in front of us, our strong ties and our next move. But what is turbulence mean in the long term to forecast what might happen to your future career? You can learn something from looking to the past. More on that after the break. OK, this is going to be a different kind of ad, I play a personal role in selecting the sponsors for this podcast because they all have interesting cultures of their own. Today, we're going inside the workplace at Morgan Stanley. For many people, morning routines often include a good cup of coffee and for the team members at Morgan Stanley's global headquarters in Times Square, the coffee comes with a special pairing. We stick together and be kind to each other, love each other, respect each other, and everything is going to be fine. Do you meet Edith and Angela? They run a coffee cart together in the heart of New York City. I met my wife in Brownsville, Texas, too many years ago, a long time ago, 1975, 75 75. On a typical morning, they head into the city at two 45 a.m. to set up the coffee cart. They've spent a lifetime together in that cart. She can be on the docket. I like to talk that much. Over the years, they've gotten to know their customers. He's very good in keeping track of the orders. And I am with the names Mr. Mackey likes. He has a lot coffee and a large coffee. You know, that's the standard order from one of their regulars, Mike Buckin Burger. If I happen to be running late and there's more than like one person waiting and I realize I don't have time, it kind of just destroys the morning. It goes beyond them just knowing your order and having it ready for you. So as soon as you see them, it's a huge smile. It was my favorite part about going to the New York office. No offense to my colleagues. Mike works at Morgan Stanley. When he did a stint in Hong Kong, Edith and Angelo would check in on him. I always describe them. They're the parents of the block and they, you know, interact with you that way. They're looking out for you guys as as kids. It does feel like that. Like all of us, Edith and Angelo's world was turned upside down in March. Twenty twenty. They started to notice people wearing masks and talking about working from home with a mass of the people coming from people with a mask and etc. . And I said, what's going on here? People say, well, I want to stay home to work. And then we thought that we've got a problem there. I start getting worried. As New York City shut down, their entire livelihood was now in question. My colleague Ercan sent an email to three of us and the subject was either Sant'Angelo and the body was, what are we going to do? In New York? Street vendors were excluded from pandemic relief programs. So Mike sprang into action. He helped him set up a Venmo account and employees from Morgan Stanley rallied together to contribute. Then they organized a virtual breakfast with Edith and Angelo to collect donations, and it just snowballed from there. We were very surprised. We were amazed. Like I say, we knew that they came by not that much. And we continue paying all our bills. And I'm telling us today it it's amazing. It's amazing. Amazing. I found in my research that cultures of giving don't just start from the top down. They often grow from the bottom up. Morgan Stanley employees ended up raising enough money to support Edith and Angela over the past year, but it didn't end there. They've now provided financial support to thousands of food vendors in New York City during the pandemic. For Mike and his colleagues, giving back is deeply embedded in the Morgan Stanley culture. It's always been first class business in a first class way, but also supporting the communities we operate in. You know, this all happened because of how we felt about them. We you know, we just can't believe how much they do for us. These more people. You're not small people to them. You matter to them. At Morgan Stanley, giving back as a core value, a central part of their culture globally. They live that commitment through long lasting partnerships, community based delivery and engaging their best asset. Their people learn more at Morgan Stanley Dotcom giving back. Turbulence in an individual career is tough to navigate, but right now, literally millions of people are all struggling with a massive upheaval all at once and one that inherently lasts a long time. Bad economic conditions make everything in our lives feel unstable and out of our control. Millions of jobs have been lost through the pandemic and millions more are at risk. People of color, especially those in lower paid jobs and without college degrees, have suffered the most. Research shows that job loss doesn't just create financial strain. It also increases the risk of depression, anxiety and marital problems and undermines our sense of control and confidence. If you haven't lost your job, you still may be feeling job insecurity, which has been linked to negative mental and physical health outcomes. There's even evidence that economic insecurity reduces our pain tolerance. But just as chaos doesn't mean we've lost all control, a moment of huge upheaval like this one doesn't mean everything is lost. Recessions can shape careers in ways that are profound and profoundly surprising, we don't yet know the outcome of this recession because we're still in it, but we can look to past recessions for wisdom to guide us through our current journey. Just ask Emily BIanche. I would submit job after job after application after application and would hear nothing. Occasionally I get an interview and I find out eight other people were being interviewed and it was really nerve wracking. It took an entire year to get a full time job. In 2001, Emily had just graduated with her bachelor's degree in psychology when she lived through her first of three recessions, the dotcom bust. During the boom of the late 90s, there was just an incredible sense of entitlement of what's the world going to offer me? Should I start my own company? Will I be a millionaire? By twenty five expectations that were insane. And you fast forward two years to my class and it just it had completely changed. You know, you go to college, you spend all this money and you think when you come out, I'm going to have some options. And then that historical moment, I really didn't. That was true for many, many other people graduating in that time and certainly true for many people graduating right now. Emily knows it's true now because she studied it as an organizational behavior professor at Emory University. Emily is one of the world's foremost experts on the psychology of recessions. Do you ever have these horrible moments, given what you study where you say, well, you know, when bad things happen, I get good research out of it? You know, certainly during the Great Recession, I thought that, but not now. Now I'm like, enough. Good. OK, so you're not a bad person anymore? No, I was in graduate school and I've reformed. Emily had a front row seat to the dotcom fallout of 2001, and she observed similar patterns in new graduates during the Great Recession of 2009. That was when the world fell apart. You could feel it everywhere, you could feel it walking around New York and when all those folks started graduating the class of 2009, there were so many articles about how they were just doomed. This was a generation that I completely had the rug pulled out from under them. The research that was available about recessions was ominous. A setback at the start of a career cast a long shadow. People who graduated in recessions continued to earn less. A decade later, it's not only that you suffer now, but that you will also continue to suffer, at least financially, for a long time to come. But it isn't all bad news. As Emily looked around her in 2009, she saw a strange pattern. One thing that really struck me was that so many people were expressing gratitude. These people had just been dealt this really tough hand. And yet again and again, I kept hearing people say, I'm so grateful I got this job. It's not what I hoped for. But, you know, it's a place to start. And there is very little data on it, at least from a site perspective. She was familiar with a classic study of Olympic athletes on the podium. Bronze medalists looked happier than silver medalists. The poor silver medalist were disappointed . I almost won a gold. The bronze medalist felt lucky. At least I got a medal. Emily wondered if something similar would hold for recession graduates. I found that people who graduated when the economy was doing worse, even though they were 10 or 15 or even 20 years out of those initial experiences, they were more satisfied with their current job than people who graduated in good economic times. At some of the sounds like good news, provided we can get reemployed, it seems like your data would suggest we're going to be happier with our jobs and more likely to appreciate them. Yeah, this is the first surprise people who start their careers in a recession may feel less entitled to the perfect job and more grateful to be employed. I don't mean to diminish the very serious and real obstacles that people who are graduating, but any recession face, but that there may be sort of this long term silver lining if you take your silver lining of people being more satisfied with their jobs. I worry that that's going to open the door for leaders to exploit them, that people who might have exited completely abusive or toxic workplace will stay because they say, hey, I'm lucky to have a job. Is that a risk? Absolutely. I worry about that, too. You may be at risk of tolerating circumstances which you wouldn't tolerate if you would come of age in better economic times. And why does it last? I'm thinking about the common finding that we adapt pretty quickly to our circumstances and start to get used to them. So why in 10 or 15 or 20 years after the recession is over, am I still thankful for having a job? Usually when people get their first jobs, it's in this period of life called the impressionable years. Most people are beginning to forge an identity outside of their families and their communities and trying to figure out their place in the world. And attitudes tend to be quite malleable during this period. What's going on in the world, whether economically, politically, culturally, tends to help shape those attitudes in ways that mirror what's happening at that moment. And after this critical period, attitudes don't tend to change that much. The indelible mark of the recession doesn't just affect us individually. It can have a meaningful impact on leaders and end up shaping entire organizations. It's very difficult for people who are graduating recessions to avoid kind of the humbling adversity that that type of environment presents. This brings us to a second surprise and some more long term good news despite the short term headwinds in my data. I find that people who come of age in recessions tend to be less narcissistic in terms of how they pay themselves versus how their top leaders within their company are paid. Those who come of age in recessions and then become leaders of organizations are less entitled knowing what it's like to struggle. These CEOs seem to care more for employees and behave less selfishly. They become proactive about taking responsibility. In one study, Emily discovered that CEOs who launched their careers in a recession were less likely to backdate their stock options to maximize their value. In other words, they were less likely to cheat, which is possibly the opposite of what you'd expect from a person who came of age while struggling. The people who tend to cheat are actually the people who are doing really well. A lot of cheating comes from entitlement or a belief that somebody deserves a better outcome or that nobody will notice. And I'll get a. So when you look into your crystal ball, then I don't want one of those, I beg to differ based on your findings in 20 or 30 years when people who are just starting out their career become CEOs. Does that mean we're going to see more servant leaders, more givers than takers? I would certainly hope so, based on what we've seen in the past. There are some reasons for optimism in the long run, the chaos we live through can make people stronger and better in a very real way in terms of how they mitigate the uncertainty associated with bad economic times. One, I think very positive way is through connecting with other people. This tendency for connectivity brings us to one last surprise from Emily's studies. During moments of uncertainty, but especially economic uncertainty, we tend to rethink our relationships with others. We become less individualistic and more civically minded. Emily has found an ingenious way to measure that through pop music. When we're struggling through bad economic times, we're drawn to different lyrics in popular American music, you're more likely to see first person plural pronouns like we us. Whereas in really good economic times, you see a lot of first person pronouns like me, mine I when you think of what's often called the greatest generation, the generation that came of age either in the Great Depression or World War Two, it's been argued again and again that this is the most civically minded generation. I do think we will see that going forward in the current generation. Another way, Emily measured individualism was by looking at Social Security data to see what parents name their kids during good and bad economic times. Emily found that when the economy is doing well, parents are more likely to give their kids unique names. I'm looking at you. Blue Ivy, when the economy is struggling, parents choose from a smaller set of more common names, which are often biblical names. It used to be in the 1950s when out of 15 boys would receive the most common name. Fast forward to 2013. And now it's one out of seventy five boys receive the most common name of their birth year, if you take this idea of increasing communal orientation, decreasing individualism seriously, would you also anticipate that we're going to see more caring and more supportive work relationships in the next couple of decades? The findings that I have looked at suggests that, yes, right. To the extent that people are less narcissistic, they would also manifest in positive ways in the interpersonal level. We can all agree that recessions are terrible in the short term for so many reasons. But in the long term, having experienced their own struggles, leaders in the future may be less entitled, more honest and more caring toward employees. And in the meantime, we all may be more community focused. But during a recession, there's a darker side to this. It really depends on who your community is. There tends to be greater fondness for people within one's own group and often, not always, but often that comes at the expense of how people perceive and treat people who are not a part of their anger. Xenophobia is higher. Treatment of immigrants is worse. All these different manifestations of prejudice. The evidence shows that recessions have unequal effects along racial lines. You know, the wage gap between black and white workers, well, Emily found that it grows during recessions. She also discovered that recessions change people's attitudes about race. Her research shows that white people are more likely to report that inequality between races is natural and normal in the wake of a recession. We need to understand how to overcome this ingroup bias and broaden people's circles of concern to motivate them to care about helping those who have been most disadvantaged. Dismantling these biases is so important that we'll be devoting two episodes to it this season. Stay tuned. When you hit turbulence, it can be hard to see the way forward, it can help to look backward. What we see when we do that is that the lessons we learn in these hard times will shape our jobs and our cultures for the long haul. Some of those effects are negative and we have to be vigilant to counteract. Some of them are surprisingly positive. A glimmer of light up ahead. We also see that in the bumpiest or most chaotic moments are connections with each other are more important than ever, and it's up to us to be proactive about not only reaching out to our networks, but expanding them. If we're thoughtful about it, we have the opportunity to stick the landing, to come through turbulence, more open, more honest and more connected than before. Next time on work life and also it's exhausting. Oh, my God. Sometimes I just want to agree to disagree or don't agree to disagree. The keys to solving conflicts at work and at home are often hiding in plain sight workplaces hosted by me, Adam Grant. The show is produced by TED with Transmitter Media. Our team includes Colin Alby's creditcard, Dan O'Donnell, Constanza Kaieda, Chris Rubenstein, Michelle Quinn, Bambam Chang and Adam Thielen. This episode was produced by Joe Angelena. Our show is mixed by Require Our Fact Checkers. Paul Dabic Original Music by Hartsdale Sue and Alison Layton Brown had stories produced by Pineapple Street Studios special thanks to our sponsors linked in Logitech, Morgan Stanley, S&P and Verizon for their research, thanks to teams including Beristain Threat, Rigidity, Sharon Parker and Proactivity Connie Weinberg on the job search. Brett Lyons on disclosing stigmatized identities. Jamie Pennebaker on forming a story. Sue Ashford on Proactiv feedback seeking and job insecurity. Mark Granovetter on Weeks's Tarnya met in a narrowing versus broadening networks. Hudson sessions on side Hustle's Rick Priced on job loss and Lisa Kahn and how recessions affect careers. As brilliant as this is, I think you're slipping because I just Googled myself and there was not an ad by you to be on my podcast and maybe I'm getting complacent.
