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Sandra McKee
interviewed by Emma Taylor on February 7, 1996
"What we expect from the workplace is a lot different now."
Sandra McKee is a senior professor at the DeVry Institute of Technology, in Atlanta, and the author of "Life Management: Skills for Busy People," to be published this summer. She calls the book "just plain folks that have learned some stuff, talking to other folks." She talks to Tripod about the quest for job satisfaction.
Tripod: Your approach to the workplace is that a person's job must contribute to their life in a meaningful way. Can you explain that a little?
SM: Yes. We spend an awful lot of time in our job every day, one third of our life at work. What we're finding is that people are suffering from stress-related illness, if for no other reason than that they just have the wrong mindset. Often someone will say, "I need to work for this company and whatever job I can get is good, because it's a good career move for me." What happens is that when they get there, they find that the things they like to do have nothing to do with the job that they were hired for.
We do this often, even in pursuing college. If you can't figure out what you like, you have a difficult time in college then directing your career from your academic background. What happens if you get a degree in political science? What do you do for a living? Do you go onto politics? Well, not necessarily. But there are jobs that use some of the same skills, and some of the same activities that you enjoyed about your political science major, in the workplace. You're more likely to derive satisfaction from doing those things.
Tripod: So are we asking more from our jobs now than say, our parents did when they started working, twenty or thirty years ago? It seems that they went to work in order to pay for the things they enjoyed. But now we want to enjoy our jobs, too.
SM: Absolutely. And I think part of it came from the old hippie introversion of the sixties, where we said, there's got to be more to life than to go earn the dollar. We looked at our parents, and we saw that. What's an interesting outgrowth is something I call "cocooning." Women are stopping and reassessing their careers. One of the things we're finding is that women in their thirties are beginning to look at women in their fifties, and they're saying, "I really don't want my job to be like that, where I just go earn a dollar. I want to reassess my work's contribution to my life."
Tripod: What is it that draws people to jobs they do not enjoy? Is it the money, or do they just not spend enough time thinking about what they really enjoy?
SM: Some of it is that they really don't understand what they like to do. Some of it is the money, yes, because when you've been poor through four years of college, or three years of high school, the lure of being able to pay for that first car, or a nice place to live, is a pretty big deal. Also, I believe that at certain stages in our lives, we're willing to compromise different things. At other stages, we are not. I know a guy in his mid-twenties now, very successful, but he's a new father, and he says, "I'm going home every day at five. If that's a problem on this job, I can't work this job." It's with a prestigious company, and for a fairly high salary, but he said, "No, my family matters." So I think that we've begun to see as a society, the detrimental effects of being in the wrong place, professionally.
Tripod: What's the first step in finding a job that will be meaningful to you?
SM: I'm a big believer in testing. There's all kinds of psychological testing, in fact a lot of companies now are starting to do psychological profiles of their jobs, so they can match people better. If you do some of that, that's helpful, career counselors are helpful. I think the best thing is to take a piece of paper, and write down things you like to do. Say for a girl coming out of high school, she says, "I like to baby-sit." Well, what kind of career is that? That might mean she just likes to do things with lots of people, she likes to be instructional, she likes to be nurturing. That doesn't necessarily mean that she has to go into daycare.
Do you like to work with people, versus do you like to work alone? Do you like to work in a very structured situation, in other words, should the results be very clear to you? There are some people that work on projects that last a year, and they don't see the results for a year, and they can't handle that. And there are some people who say, "Yes, I want my results every week, " and they get it, and they talk about immense job satisfaction. So you have to figure out, are you short-term or long-term oriented? You have to figure out, do you like to do things with your hands? In the old days, that used to be merely tinkering, such as mechanics, or welding or something. Now, we find tactile-oriented people are enjoying the computer. But they don't want to do the verbally-related things. If you're very verbal, if you like to talk to people a lot, don't get a job where you've got to sit by yourself. You will constantly seek out other people.
Tripod: Going back to what you were saying about workplace stress -- people seem to focusing on it now more than ever. Is it more of a problem now, or are we just more aware of it?
SM: We know where it's coming from, and we know what the symptoms look like. I think, before, typically it was the male supporting the family, back in the fifties, and he would go home and plop in front of the television, or he would go home and drink, or be ugly to somebody -- we thought, "That's just the way Bill is, or that's just the way Fred is, and isn't it a shame for his poor wife." Now, we understand that he probably hated his job, derived no satisfaction from it at all, therefore he was easing the pain by whatever way he could. That sounds a little over-dramatic, and not everybody's in that situation. Some people would just like to do something more interesting. But I do think that we are in a different place now. We have so many stresses in our lives. Also, I think the two-parent working family is making a difference. Before, mom's sole purpose in life was to make dad comfortable and happy when he got home from work. Now, mom's coming home from work in the same shape dad is, so you don't have that nurturing buffer there to help out either. It's changing the family, so what we expect from the workplace is a lot different now, and what we expect from our families is beginning to change, for the same reason.
Tripod: What prompted you to take this approach to the workplace?
SM: I've heard some people talking about it -- Fred Audit at Georgia State University talks a lot about seeking joy as a focus for your work. I heard him speak about five years ago. Also, in just watching people, what they're suffering under, and also watching the choices that they make. At the college where I teach, most everybody here was in industry for numerous years, and they chose fewer hours, a different focus and less money as a life path, because they wanted to change something about the balance in their lives. So I think people are making conscious choices about what is valuable to them.
Tripod: What is the biggest barrier people face in accepting this new approach?
SM: A part of it is the expectation that it's okay to be happy where you work. I agree with you that people do indeed carry that burden of, "You get a good job, and you stay there, and shame on you if you don't like it." But there's nothing wrong with finding a good job that you happen to like, too. Now, unfortunately, if you're out of work and looking for a job, you tend to get in that rush of, "I've got to find a job, I've got to find a job." But sometimes it's the very next one, that you missed going to, that would have been the right job. You can weigh the factors in a job, and choose the job, rather than just letting the job choose you. Oh, that sounded pretty good, didn't it?
Tripod: Yeah, it did, great answer! So I assume that you're very happy in your job now?
SM: Oh, absolutely.
Tripod: Has that always been the case, or did you have to make some drastic changes?
SM: I made choices. In fact, I became very dissatisfied at one point with the job I had here. I'd gotten bored, because throughout my life I've gone back and forth between academia and industry, and to do just purely one or the other, I felt like I was lost. So, what happened was, I said, well, I'm really dissatisfied, and I began to do this process, and it turned out that I found exciting ways to enrich what I do professionally. It got to where my job was more interesting, because I was doing other things that related to my job, that weren't the same, day-in, day-out. So I too have hit that wall on numerous occasions in the past, evolving what I really want to do. And I think you do go down some of the wrong paths, you think you like something, and you get there and realize, "this isn't me." But it's having the courage to say, "I've got to start looking again." To me the ultimate freedom in your career is knowing that you can go out and get another job. I think people get locked in, and they think they can't get another job, so they stay in a job they don't like.
Tripod: Are there ways to apply this approach without actually leaving your job?
SM: I think so, I think the whole notion of enrichment is what's important. If you've got a satisfactory job, and you're still not getting some of the things that you need, there are other ways that you can get them. Professional organizations, I find, are immensely enriching. You talk to other people who are in your field, you do interesting things. Some people do self-study things, like if you're at your job, and you notice that there's another area of your work that's interesting to you, but you don't do that, you make it a point to go study what's going on in that area. You serve on committees, you talk to people in the break room, you find out other things that are going on.
Another thing I think is real helpful, is trying to learn more about what connects your company to the environment, and then what connects that to your job. Then it's really interesting, because you say, "Oh, god, the Dow dropped a hundred points, how does that affect my work?" Then everything becomes a lot more lively. If your company says, "Well, we're announcing a change in the production cycle," you investigate it, and you find out why that is. The more you know about the workplace, sometimes, the more interesting it becomes.
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