Why this COMMON obstacle is CRUSHING your career dreams!

Hello and welcome to Working It 👨🏼‍🍳

This week I watched the second season of Bear, following Chicago chef Carmy Berzatto (Jeremy Allen White) as she prepares to open a fine-dining restaurant. While people on LinkedIn are haughty about The Bears leadership lessons, a big one is right there in the open: Carmy’s second-in-command, Sydney Adamu (Ayo Edebiri) leads Leading with Heart: Coach K’s Success Strategies for Basketball, Business, and Life by Mike Krzyzewski, first published in 2000.

For those of us who don’t follow basketball, Coach K is a famous Chicago native. As Sydney tours the city’s food spots, to investigate, the book at her side, someone tells her, “It’s a Krzyzewski thing: courage and confidence lead to decision making.” Look Bear to see how that works. And probably not coincidentally, there is a new pocket edition of Leading with the heart. The wisdom of Coach K (and Sydney) is yours for £14.99/$18.99.

Read on to learn about efforts to enhance career opportunities for low-income individuals while at Office Therapy mentoring a new retiree.

Send me your recipes, leadership book recommendations, tips and ideas for what we should cover in this newsletter at isabel.berwick@ft.com

How to avoid ‘class washing’ 🧽

Would it surprise you to learn that social class is the single most important factor negatively affecting career advancement? I was surprised, I admit, but I am a privately educated white woman who went to Oxford. As the saying goes, popularized by writer David Foster Wallace, fish do not see the water in which they swim 🐟.

when a huge KPMG survey analyzed the career paths of 16,500 employees over five years, found that “people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds (LSEB, a new acronym for me) took an average of 19 percent longer to move to the next grade” compared to those from higher socioeconomic backgrounds.

The survey also measured career progress against other indicators of diversity: gender, ethnicity, disability, and sexual orientation. The impact of an individual’s home background, as measured by parental occupation, was greater than any other potential barrier to advancement.

In 2021, KPMG the goal was set to have 29 percent of partners and directors from a lower socioeconomic background by 2030. (Their most recent numbers show it is currently 21 percent.) It has been joined by the first major law firm to take action in this area. slaughter and may it aims to have 25 percent of its total staff from LSEB by 2033 (currently 18.8 percent).

However, the scale of the task of diversifying the legal profession is shown in Slaughter and May’s modest goal of having 15 per cent of their LSEB lawyers by 2033, up from 10 per cent today.

I asked Sophie Pender, a lawyer, social mobility activist and founder of the 93 percent club (a members club for people who didn’t go to private school) for their thoughts on the Slaughter and May engagement. she is positive:

“The announcement represents a seismic shift in the way the City begins to view social mobility. For years, socioeconomic background has sat at the bottom of the list in relation to the hierarchy of problems that large companies are trying to address; The tables are now changing as these companies begin to recognize that you can never get a truly diverse intake. of employees if consideration of the socioeconomic environment is not at the center of these initiatives. It is very likely that we will see a wave of businesses following suit over the next year.”

And Sophie has particular praise for Slaughter and May: “Setting targets is often a highly politicized topic, with both internal and external stakeholders, so I applaud any organization bold enough to be the first to do it.”

KPMG and Slaughter and May may be leading the way in social mobility, but Helen Dallimore, principal consultant at Byrne Dean, a specialist in workplace culture, points out that there is now a lot of highly visible corporate effort in this area. “The type of actions taken, often paraded on LinkedIn, include outreach to non-selective public schools, more accessible mentoring schemes, apprenticeships and work experience programs.”

Everyone reading this will probably say, “Oh yeah, that sounds familiar.” And perhaps feeling a little defensive. To be clear, all of these efforts are a good thing, but it doesn’t, as Helen says, “addresses the root causes of internal biases around class. Currently, many [organisations] they are not achieving the necessary cultural and structural changes to effectively address those biases.”

And action at the surface level that fails to address the underlying problems is inevitably known as “class laundering.” 🚿

What really works to improve social mobility at work in the long term? Email me with your thoughts and solutions: isabel.berwick@ft.com. We will return to this topic here and on the Working It podcast.

This week on the Working It podcast

There’s another chance to listen”Why we love to hate middle management”. I have come to believe that great middle managers are the solution to almost all corporate culture, productivity, and communication problems. So ignore the bad PR that team leaders put up with, and listen to me chew on the joy of management with Andrew Hill, FT’s senior business writer.

Since this podcast first aired, I’ve been going through a book called Power to the Middle: why managers hold the keys to the future of work By Bill Schaninger, Bryan Hancock, and Emily Field. The authors are McKinsey consultants, but don’t let that discourage you. It’s a good read and full of evidence of the brilliance of the medium 🤩.

*Next week there will be a new episode of Working It, about the future of working together and how to avoid the traps of noisy people and their phones and Zooms. It turns out that people have many opinions about this. . . 

office therapy

The problem: I just retired from an employer I have worked with for almost 40 years. The job was rewarding but very thorough and customer oriented. I was ready to go, but the new reality is weird. I’ll spend the summer relaxing, but what advice can you give me for a short-term objective or goal? The friends seem to think that I should have lots of ideas. [charity committees, travel etc] but i feel empty

Elizabeth’s advice: You are bound to find “rare” things: you are going through a profound change. This is the best advice I received while going through sudden change: Don’t make major decisions while the disruption is still fresh. Also, don’t listen to those suggestions from well-meaning but clueless friends.

In due course, you may want to get some expert advice on your “next step”, perhaps from a coach who specializes in transitions, but an easy first step is to read Shifting gears: Creating the life you want after a full run By Jan Hall and Jon Stokes.

Gabriella Braun, psychoanalytic consultant and author of All we areHe adds that retirement is a change that, “unlike other transitions, reminds us of our mortality.” However, ready we are for retirement, it generates anxiety. “You need to adapt, even face loss. Your feeling of emptiness, common in grief, suggests that you are either consciously or unconsciously doing that.”

As Gabriella sums it up (and here’s some advice we should all follow in times of disruption and transition): “Don’t worry if you’re up and down at times, it’s part of the change. And you are changing your whole way of life. Take your time.” 🐌

Do you have a question, problem or dilemma for Office Therapy? Do you think you have better advice for our readers? Send it to me: isabel.berwick@ft.com. We anonymize everything. His boss, colleagues or his subordinates will never know.

Five outstanding stories from the world of work

1. Bad bosses are evolving, not disappearing: LSE behavioral scientist Grace Lordan offers examples of how bullying has become covert as yelling and bullying has become unacceptable. But it continues to thrive. . .

2. The self-employed face a large increase in penalties for late tax payments: The 4.4 million self-employed people in the UK will face late payment interest of 7.5 percent, up from 5.5 percent, if they don’t pay a tax bill twice a year.

3. The rise of the ‘workcation’: Working from a vacation spot, often for quite long periods, has become a dream for many employees and companies like Alphabet and American Express offer much more location flexibility to staff. Simon Kuper discusses this (scenic) evolving employment trend.

4. Working from home is full of surprises: As more data emerges about the benefits and drawbacks of working from home, Pilita Clark’s column reveals the reality behind persistent myths about productivity and engagement.

5. Nigel Farage, NatWest and the fight for “woke” capitalism: After ousting the CEOs of two banks, the right-wing activist is now taking on the entire financial system on behalf of those who have been stripped of bank accounts and credit cards for political or other reasons, report Jim Pickard and Stephen morris.

One more thing . . .

Ten years ago we didn’t hear much about the effect of trauma on our lives, but now, as this New York magazine article shows, it’s America’s Favorite Diagnosis. Much of that awareness raising originated with a best-selling book: The body keeps score by Bessel van der Kolk. The article, which includes author Danielle Carr’s visit to one of van der Kolk’s retreats, will make you, if nothing else, think twice about our very casual use of “traumatic” to describe anything vaguely unpleasant.

Labor trend of the week 🕵🏾‍♂️

Act your salary: This phrase is a play on words (“act your age”) which means that the employees are just doing their job, and nothing else.

#Actyourwage has gained momentum in recent months as the cost of living rises rapidly, but wages have risen much more slowly. It’s been bubbling up on TikTok as a newer, more timely refinement or alternative to “quitting quietly” (last year’s viral work trend). And it makes a lot of sense: why shouldn’t people in low-paying positions refuse to do more tasks or overtime than they’re actually paid for?

Where are you working from? 🌞☔️

We know that many in the Working It community are drenched in the rain in the UK or drenched in the heat in Europe and North America. by Simon Kuper workcation article has us craving a desk (or lounger) with a view, so show us where you’re working from this summer. Just make sure you tell the boss first 😎. Email: isabel.berwick@ft.com.