Speaking of Psychology - Job therapy and toxic coworkers, with Tessa West, PhD

Episode Date: August 21, 2024

Are you and your job just not clicking anymore? New York University psychology professor Tessa West, PhD, author of “Job Therapy: Finding Work that Works for You,” talks about the most common sources of job dissastisfaction, how you can figure out why you’re unhappy at work and find a job that’s a better fit, how to handle -- or avoid -- toxic coworkers, and the importance of good communication at work. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

No one goes to Hank's for his spreadsheets. They go for a darn good pizza. Lately, though, the shop's been quiet. So Hank decides to bring back the $1 slice. He asks Copilot in Microsoft Excel to look at his sales and costs. Help him see if he can afford it. Co-pilot shows Hank where the money's going and which little extras make the dollar slice work.

Now, Hank has a line out the door. Hank makes the pizza. Co-Pilot handles the spreadsheets. Learn more at M365Copilot.com slash work. Are you and your job just not clicking anymore? Maybe a toxic coworker is making your life miserable, or maybe you're trying to figure out why you're not getting promoted, or why your workload is suddenly out of control.

Or perhaps you're wondering whether you're even in the right field. Maybe it's time to change not just jobs, but your career. Today I'm going to talk to an expert in the science of work and workplace communication about how to handle tough career situations like these, and why improving communication with your coworkers, bosses, and others is the key to finding a successful and satisfying career. So what should you do when your job isn't working for you? If you're considering a job or career change,

how can you figure out why you're dissatisfied with your work and what could be a better fit? How can you handle toxic coworkers or avoid getting stuck with them in the first place? And overall, how can you find fulfilling work where you will thrive? Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, the flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association that examines the links between psychological science and everyday life. I'm Kim Mills.

My guest today is Dr. Tessa West, a professor of psychology at New York University. Dr. West studies the science of interpersonal communication in many contexts, including in the workplace. Her latest book published in July is called Job Therapy, Finding Work That Works for You, and her previous book published in 2022 is Jerks at Work, Toxic Co-workers and What to Do About Them. Dr. West's research has examined questions such as how status differences between people shape how they behave, why it's so hard to give honest critical feedback, how class, race, and cultural differences can make communication in the workplace difficult. and what can we do to improve it? She has published dozens of research studies and received

multiple grants from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. Her work has been covered by media outlets, including Scientific American, the New York Times, and CNN, to name just a few. Dr. West, thank you for joining me today. Thank you so much for having me on the show. Your new book is called job therapy, but you're a research psychologist yourself, not a therapist. Why did you decide that framework of therapy was a good way to look at work and career issues? You know, it's interesting. I actually kind of came around to this idea studying close relationships, studying romantic relationships and relationships we have with our family members, our children and our parents. And at New York University, where I work, I've been teaching

a course on close relationships for about 15 years. And I started to see a lot of overlap between mean the ways people were talking about their workplace issues, the emotions that they were feeling, you know, complex things like ambivalence, loving and hating your job at the same time, trends around interviewing like ghosting and icing and these kinds of things. These same things were things that I've been teaching in the context of romantic relationships and concepts that therapists that therapists in that space have been grappling with for a really long time and helping people kind of get their head around. And I thought, why not adopt something? some of those therapeutic perspectives, some of the things that we know help people through difficulties

in their interpersonal relationships to our relationships with our career. Now, in the book, you outline five key drivers that make people consider leaving their jobs. Can you talk briefly about those? Yes, I actually started with the toughest kind of most existential one, which is having an identity crisis at work. This idea that you can just fall out of love with something. that has been defining you for a really long time, that your core sense of who you are as a person, your identity as a human being, is very much wrapped up in your workplace identity,

but you're starting to question that. And I think people who go through this are often very advanced in their careers. They've spent a lot of time and money getting there. They have a lot of status. And so kind of grappling with falling out of love with something that still defines you is a common experience among our kind of more well-seasoned career goers out there. From there, I talk about being drifted apart from your job. And this is a little bit like looking over at your spouse and thinking, who are you? You are not the person that I'm married, that I initially got into this romantic relationship with. I don't recognize you.

And when we go through this experience, a lot of us think that it's really the other person or in this kind of metaphor, the career that's changed. It's not so much us. And so their journey is really about understanding who's changed, you know, and how much I have changed. and often we change, not for the better or the worst, but in different ways and parallel ways. I also talk about this kind of idea of being spread too thin. And I think, you know, this chapter of the book is really for everybody, even if you're not

having a career crisis. I think we are in an age of sort of unprecedented busyness. We often take on roles and tasks that really aren't actually helping us advance in our careers and we're not quite sure why. We tasks switch all the time. Probably your listeners are familiar with checking their. phones or their emails or ordering groceries while on work calls. This seems to be sort of the norm rather than the exception. And helping people kind of deal with those everyday little issues

that are preventing them from feeling good about their jobs, but also moving ahead. And then the last two chapters of the book aren't about falling out of love with your job, but about your job not loving you back. And I think for those of us who've ever been a runner-up at work, we struggle with getting a promotion or raise, but we don't know why. That can be a really frustrating experience. And I've learned that often kind of comes down to huge communication gaps between what promoters tell you, or at least they think they're implying what you should be doing to get ahead and what you think you should be doing. They're often misaligned. I end with the underappreciated star. This is the person who brings a lot to the workplace and they get a lot of paths on the back.

They get a lot of nice Slack channel messages and, you know, emails, but they're not rewarded in the ways they care about. And I think kind of one struggle for these folks is really getting down at the bottom of the question is, does my industry even care about stars? You know, is there even a market for someone with my level of expertise that costs as much as I do, or is good enough just fine? And I became very cynical in doing research for this book that often the answer is good enough is fine, and that's why you're not getting what you want. But it's really all about sort of loving something that isn't giving those things back to you that you feel like you're giving to that job or to that career. Should we really expect to be in love with our jobs? I mean, it is work after all, and we have

relationships outside of work. But, you know, is that putting too much importance on something that is basically, you know, it's giving you the money to live and work and put a roof over your head and eat food? I love this question. So the first answer is absolutely not. It is not necessary to be in love with your job. When it becomes an issue is when you are in an industry or you're working for a company that expects that level of identity commitment, where everyone who thrives there is in love with their job and they see it as a core part of who they are and you maybe don't actually have that same kind of relationship with your career, that mismatch is where things start to go awry. Or you want to be in love with your job, but you don't know how to get it. I do think that kind of the matching

component is really key. But I also think it's important for us to remember that our relationship with our career, we spend more time in that relationship than we do in our relationships at home. Just literal hours of the day, more of them are spent at work than they are at home. And, you know, I do a lot of research on stress contagion, how the stress we feel at work can be caught by our family members, by our friends. And the direction tends to go from work to home. That's the stronger direction of stress contagion than home to work. And it's because we spend more time at our jobs, and we do, even with our children, you know, even raising a child or with a loved one. And so I do think it's important to really try to grapple with how much you want to be in love

with that thing, but not underestimating the extent to which your negative emotions around it can actually affect other types of your life that you do really care about. Now, you mentioned in the introduction to the book that you've noticed a shift in recent years, especially post-pandemic and how people were thinking about and talking about their relationship with their work. Can you talk about that and how much of that shift do you think is due to the pandemic? Yes, I think, you know, we first saw this rise of kind of, you know, global unhappiness of onwee, of angst around our careers, rising during the pandemic. But I felt like during the pandemic, it was much easier for us to kind of finger point and blame it on the stress we were feeling from working from home.

The stress of, you know, the global economy catch, just crashing, people sick, you know, that, The pandemic was a very easy sort of blame for people who are experiencing workplace unhappiness. But you fast forward a few years, and here we are, and people are still miserable. Gallup just came out with a poll showing that, you know, 19% of people are just incredibly unhappy at work. But we don't quite have the same sort of source to blame it on. And I think for a lot of people, there's sort of this nebulous feeling that they're miserable and they're not quite sure why.

You hear people sort of use causal language, like once our company merged with another one, everything fell apart, or once we got rid of our in office, our brick and mortar office, communication was no longer good, or my boss moved. So they're grappling with trying to sort of blame their unhappiness on a particular source, but they're not often sort of figuring out that that source is really their own kind of psychological relationship with their career, that it's actually kind of much deeper than just, a new boss or a new office, it isn't so much these structural things, but these kind of deep psychological issues. And that's kind of the shift that I've seen in the last couple years since the pandemic.

When people are feeling dissatisfied with their jobs and they start to think about leaving, I mean, you talked about five key drivers. Is it always, is it just one or is it always just a multiplicity of drivers? That's a really good question. I think for most of us, there's a lot going on. I think, you know, I created a survey to help you figure out what driver most strongly resonates with you, but almost everyone who I studied has at least two or three. I think almost everyone feels, you know, spread too thin at work. So I think the key is identifying sort of what is the main driver. And then from there, what are the kind of secondary order drivers that are going on?

The only real choice point I think you have to make, at least in reading my book, is figuring out if you want a new job or a completely new career. That's kind of one of those big psychological questions that you need to grapple with. But most of us have a lot going on in terms of those psychological drivers for sure. Let's shift gears for a minute and talk about your first book, Jerks at Work, which is a great title. You identified five different types of jerks at work. Can you briefly, if that's possible, describe them and what their character traits are? Yes. So the first is the kiss-up kick-downer. So if anyone's ever worked in a place where they have a colleague who, you know, really mistreats people at the same level as them or beneath them,

but the boss loves this person. They're high performer. You know this sort of a nerving feeling of not being able to get ahead because someone's blocking you who is just adored by people high status. And, you know, the kiss-up kickdowner, I think is a common experience, especially in pretty kind of cut-throat careers that a lot of us, you know, have been in. I worked in shoes, I worked in sales, and this is where I identified this person in academia. There's plenty of kiss-up, kick-downers. But I think there's other types of people that we deal with that are difficult. You know, there's bulldozers at work. The people who don't just kind of talk the whole time in a meeting, but actually go behind the scenes to leverage their status and power to disrupt group

processes. We see this a lot with things like hiring committees where they just keep ending in an impasse and they're not quite sure why. It turns out a bulldozer is talking to the boss or the boss's boss and saying, I don't like the process here because their candidate wasn't chosen, these kind of clever tricksy moves that they do. We also have credit stealers at work, people who will maybe give you credit for small things in an attempt to look like a team player, but they actually are taking credit for the bigger things.

And I think it's very difficult for us to kind of know how much credit we deserve. Most of us think we deserve most of it. So allocating credit, figuring out that process is kind of one of the main issues around that one. And then I also talk about free writing, which is just ubiquitous. Everyone's been on a team with freewriters. One thing a lot of us don't realize is freewriters tend to be well-liked, well-connected people who brings something to the team. Often it's, you know, gossip or fun or the ability to get dinner reservations, something that acts as a social glue in the group. And for that reason, they're able to

kind of allocate all their work freely among all the other members and get away with it. I also talk about a couple different types of bosses, the micromanager, who most of us are probably also familiar with, that person who works all the time but gets nothing done. You know, I actually feel for these people. They often just receive poor training. And then And the other side of that is this neglectful boss. And often we actually see the two kind of going hand in hand. While I'm micromanaging you, I'm neglecting someone else. And that neglectful boss kind of goes in and out of caring. They show up at the 11th hour. They, you know, put their foot down. They demand changes and then they disappear again. And it's just a very sort of anxiety-provoking

experience. And then I end with a gaslighter. And this is, you know, probably the most pathological of all the people I talk about. These individuals, lie with the intent of deceiving on a very big scale, often to cover something up or to get you to be involved in something that they don't want others knowing about. And the psychological damage that they do can last, you know, 10, 20, 30 years. And the victims of gaslighters often feel socially isolated and they feel like they don't know who they can go to for help. Out of all the types of Dursa I talk about, I think most of them are kind of accidental or unaware to some degree, with the exception of the first and the last.

that gas lighter and that kiss-up kickdowner. They tend to actually be acting out in kind of self-interested ways. Others, maybe not so much. Which raises the question, and I know you get asked this all the time, but how do you know that you're not the jerk at work? Well, don't expect anyone to tell you if you are the jerk at work. One of the things I study a lot is feedback and how terrible we are at it and how anxious it makes us to be forthcoming. And so I think for a lot of jerks, they have to learn to read the tea leaves in interesting ways. I think kind of one of the kind of more interesting ways that they learn about this is when they apply for new jobs. And when that job seeks out recommendations or references, they get crickets in return. It's not that anyone says anything

bad. They just don't say anything good. And at NYU, I handle a lot of promotions among our professors. And we can tell if someone's a jerk when we solicit 20 letters and get two back for instance. Those are the kinds of clues. And so if you're worried about being a jerk, there is kind of a formula you need to follow of how to ask for very specific feedback, following anything you've done that isn't about your reputation, but more about your specific behaviors. But I do think that a lot of one-on-one coaching, and I do a lot of one-on-one coaching. And I find that people who are being coached because their boss thinks they're a jerk are just heartbroken when they find out that that's why they're in this meeting with me. You know, oh, I'm so excited for this leadership

training and I'm like, this is not a leadership training? I'm supposed to de-jerk you. And your boss didn't want to tell you, so here I am welcome to deliver the news for you. And then they cry and get over it and then, you know, we move on from there. But it's often a pretty heart-wrenching experience. And can jerks be rehabilitated? Yes, I think that, you know, not every jerk can be rehabilitated, but by and large, jerks tend to grow out of systems and structures that are, you know, in place to help sort of thrive in those situations. You know, there's, there are kind of hierarchies at work that are zero sum where kissup,

kickdowners can only get ahead by doing that. They're Machiavellian. Everyone who's made it before them was also Machiavellian. And what do you expect when you are reinforcing that kind of thing? And so I think when bosses and people like that try to play whackamol with their jerks, I usually tell them to stop. Look at the systems and structures you have in place and look at your interview questions and look at your onboarding and are you doing things to allow jerks to thrive here. What is the culture? And I know that's a big nebulous word, but it comes down to like what are your processes and procedures that are inadvertently creating a fertile breeding ground for jerks.

So to that end, I think, yes, most can be by changing structures and systems. Have you ever rearranged your furniture and discovered the carpet underneath looks brand new, while the rest of it looks, well, not so new? It's time for a carpet upgrade. At the Home Depot, we have stylish choices at simple prices from all the top brands. Best of all, we can install it for you, starting at only 49 cents per square foot. So all you have to do is pick your perfect floor. Start your carpet project today at the Home Depot. How doers get more done.

Exclusions apply for licenses, see Home Depot.com slash license numbers. So for a listeners who might be interviewing for a new job, what can they do to make sure that they're not walking into a workplace that's populated by jerks or to take it beyond the negative walking into a workplace where they think they might fall in love? This is a great question. I think that the single thing that you can do that you have control over is to speak to as many people as you can who work in that organization, not necessarily in your role or on your team, but in kind of parallel parts of the organization, past and present. You know, in job therapy,

I talk a lot about networking, which feels like a yucky word for people. But networking really comes down to information gathering. It means learning new things. It means learning hidden curriculum and norms around a workplace that normally you wouldn't experience until you're already working there. Most of us only interface with hiring managers. We don't actually ask hiring managers, is can I talk to team members, you know, who work in this organization? And if you don't know what to say to them, because you're afraid they're not going to say anything bad about the organization, just you can ask one simple question, which is, finish the sentence. Before I started this job, nobody told me that. And you will get all kinds of fascinating answers around hidden norms, around expectations, around

roles. I surveyed lots of people and asked them this question. And most of the answers came down to things that they were expected to do as part of the role that were not advertised ever, not in the job advertisement, not were discussed, and norms around interpersonal dynamics at work, things that they were expected to do to get ahead, people they were expected to talk to, ways that they are expected to respect one another, all of these kinds of messy, fun, interpersonal dynamics, and that one question will shed a whole bunch of light on what an organization is actually like to work for. When you're doing that kind of homework, I just want to ask about some of these websites, places like Glass Door, for example. Do you think it's worth going there? Or is that just a place for people who are really upset and disgruntled to let it all out?

Glassdoor is a lot like teaching evaluations for professors. You will get two answers. I love it here. It's wonderful. I hate it here. It's terrible. People who are in the middle of the distribution of happiness who are, it's fine. It's not great.

They tend to not put ratings on Glassdoor. And this is true for all kinds of ratings from Airbnb to Amazon to, you know, as a professor, the teaching evaluations I get. And so just know that if you're reading. those things on Glassdoor, you're getting a pretty biased sample. You're getting the lovers and the haters. What you don't know is how representative those lovers and haters are of the general group of people who work there. You know, if there's five negative reviews, does that mean that 50% of the people who are miserable and you're getting that a good selection? Or does that mean one percent are miserable? You also don't know whether those people are all networked with

each other and what you're actually getting as one experience through five voices or five unique experiences that are all representative of a different problem. And I think, you know, any time you network with people at work, you're able to kind of suss out how much of this is due to, say, a common boss or, you know, a past office that had a bad culture versus kind of individual experiences. And so that's what one-on-one conversations will give you above and beyond Glass Door. I know people love rating, reading ratings and reading a lot into them. It's a passive experience. It's an anxiety-free experience. Talking to people is harder. It's more uncomfortable. It's more awkward. But it's just less rich data that you're getting when you do that. Spoken like a scientist.

Yep. Now, APA recently published our annual work in America survey, which looks at how people are feeling about their workplaces and their work lives. And one of the major themes that came out this year was around psychological safety at work, the idea that people who feel psychologically safe are more satisfied and happier in their careers. I'm curious about how you react to that. Can a culture of psychological safety deter jerkiness and really make it more of a workplace where you will be happy and fall in love? I keep using that metaphor. Sorry. Yeah, sorry. You're trapped now with falling in love with your career. I've forced it on you. and now you're never going to be able to think about a job another way is like a romantic partner

that I did not choose that. Yes, I think psychological safety is a really interesting concept and it's one that a lot of us, especially Gen Z and millennials love. I do think that when we think we need to be a little critical about what it takes to be psychologically safe because I think there's a lot of work showing that people value psychological safety, but what they find that threatens it is often things like clear, critical feedback, you know, because they haven't quite developed the muscle for it or because their organization hasn't shown them the right way of delivering and receiving that feedback in a psychologically

safe way. So I think the concept is super important and you want to feel like if you get negative feedback from your boss or you give it even upward to a boss that you're not going to face negative repercussion socially for it. It takes a lot of work for an organization to be able to do both things at once. Give you that critical feedback, give you what you need to succeed, help you network, and also make you feel safe at the same time. And I'm saying this having read APA's kind of stress report, which shows that Gen Z and millennials are through the roof and how anxious they're feeling, how stress they're feeling, and then the likelihood that they're going to quit a job because of those things. And so I do think we kind of need to square that circle a little bit. We need to figure out

how we can create psychological safety while people are stressed and anxious at work, and while they also need that negative feedback to kind of move forward. Not negative, but critical feedback, specific feedback to actually move forward. And it's a lot of kind of complex concepts, kind of all being, you know, working at one time that I think we do need to do some work to figure out how to make them all kind of work in unison. another conclusion that that we reached looking at the data from that survey was that there are issues intergenerational issues in the workplace that are happening right now and we're probably for the first time ever in a situation where there can be as many as five generations in a single

workplace we're finding that the younger folks are not relating well to the people who are older are you seeing things like this as well in your work yes absolutely and I think you know we could take this conversation in so many directions. I think we're seeing it with retirements among boomers, a lack of urgency to retire. I think the ways in which older generations prefer to communicate with one another are very different than the ways in which younger generations prefer to communicate. Older generations prefer face-to-face communications, phone calls if that can't work out. They don't like, you know, Zoom calls, Slack channels, those kind of communication channels that give you less information. They perform more frequent interactions, not formal interactions.

And above all else, they prefer you to confront them face to face, not to do it on TikTok, not to do it publicly. And I think there are norm differences around confrontation, around comfort around these things, a lot of which are rising from these anxiety differences that we're seeing in generations and mental health issues. And I think the older generations are less comfortable with things like generative AI being used at work. They want a more sort of organic human, you know, pass the touring test kind of experience. And I think, you know, one thing that we're not doing a lot in this conversation is talking about what older generations have that is better than younger generations. They are less anxious. They have richer social networks. They have tacit

knowledge and experience with mentorship that we often kind of throw aside and say, why can't you just leave? Why can't you just retire and make room for the younger people? And I think that it's a huge missed opportunity there. In defense of the boomers, I really do think, you know, it's a missed, and Gen Xers, it's a missed opportunity to actually enrich in communication. And I say this knowing that AI is taking over a lot of jobs, but what it's not taking over, the human interfacing ones, things like hospitality, healthcare, things that require you to communicate well with another person. And older generations tend to actually be much

better at that than younger generation. So, you know, I'm all about like, let's bring that knowledge in to kind of help solve some of these intergenerational issues that we're seeing at work. So I want to switch topics to exit interviews. I read an article in which you said that the default response in exit interviews is to lie is bold. And I'm wondering then, is there any value to exit interviews. And if you're the exit interviewee, what's the best way to handle an exit interview and make it worth everyone's time? Yes, I think that I'm pretty sure you're referencing this Wall Street Journal article I wrote about it all the lies. We tell it work, all the ways in which we lie. Exit interviews, when they're often framed from a hires or organizational perspective,

It's a, it's a, it's HR person asking you why you're leaving, often in these kind of broadways that don't get at specific issues you might have faced. And if you are to be completely honest, there could be a major sort of loss to your reputation and status. And so what organizations aren't thinking about is what would this person have to gain by being honest? Why would they want to tell the truth? And, you know, what, if you're never going to talk to these people again, why would you sort of

give them that kind of feedback. So I think if you want honest answers, you can't wait first until the exit interview to actually ask those questions. And if you're the employee, you need to insist that these questions are asked at multiple stages during your time there. I actually don't think it's up to the employee to be honest in these interviews unless they're given an incentive to do so. Many of them are going to rely on these places to give them recommendations for the future and it's harming their reputations, to be honest. So if you want honest answers, ask very specific questions that would be difficult to lie about. If you want, you know, friendly overtures, ask, how was your time here?

How was your boss? You know, things that are so vague, they could really mean anything. And you're just going to get a lot of head nods and smiles and say, I just had a better opportunity elsewhere without the truth. Because you haven't been asking for the truth the entire time that they were here. As the famous saying goes, you can't handle the truth. Yeah, they also don't. I'll add one other thing.

A lot of organizations don't have a plan of what they actually do with exit interview data. They sort of collect it. You don't know what they're going to do with that. Are they going to give it to your boss? Are they going to just stick it in a file and never look at it again? You need to be transparent about what you're actually using these data for and, you know, tell people that so that they have some sense of what their information is being used for. Now, your academic research is about interpersonal communication.

and miscommunication in many different settings and situations, not just at work, but why is it important for people to think about the potential for miscommunication on the job? So I think most of us are worse communicators than we realize, partly because we have a major kind of transparency bias that we think our thoughts and feelings are just going to be sort of readable to other people. There's a lot of reasons why that's not true. In fact, I spent 20 years trying to get people to be more accurate at reading one another in interpersonal interactions and in the workplace.

And the only magic bullet is to ask, what are you thinking? What did you mean by that? And I think a lot of us walk around at work kind of underestimating the value of clear, consistent communication in developing better skills at work, at learning how to perform at work. So everything from making small corrections early on in your career, like, a Matthew effect that will then help you grow later to understanding why you didn't get a raise or promotion. And I think kind of the most salient example I have from my book is in the runner-up chapter and job therapy. I think 7% of people are explicitly told why they were passed up for

promotion or raise. Most of them had to guess. And that is a huge communication gap. Whose fault is that? It's probably both people's fault. But I don't think it just comes down to one conversation you have at work. Why didn't I get promoted? It comes down to a thousand thousand small conversations you didn't have at work around what you're doing potentially right or wrong. So I think a lot of us underestimate the power of those small, daily organic conversations we have in helping us network and helping us figure out, you know, how to troubleshoot and how to move forward. And before you know it 20 years in, you just can't manage to get that next step up and you have no idea why. And it's, that's probably why. And, you know, and that's something that I think most of us

underestimate. So just to wrap up, I like to ask this question sometimes to close. What are you working on? What are the next big questions you're trying to answer? What's your next book? Ooh. I lay a lot on you. Yeah. I mean, my lab is doing some really fascinating research of what happens when we work with people who we disagree with politically and who are moral violators. And I think one thing that's fascinating is looking at the difference between what people will say they'll do and what they actually do. And we're finding that, you know, a lot of us interact with people who we morally disagree with, politically disagree with. And we think that we're going to be pretty, you know, blunt in those interactions. But what we're finding is the opposite. The more immoral

the person you're negotiating with, the nicer you are to them, the more likely you are to let them win that negotiation. And so some of these kinds of ironic effects of complex social processes, that can shape us at work in ways that we often aren't thinking about so much. I want to also do a lot of work on anxious leadership. I mentioned in this podcast, the APA has done a lot of work on documenting the levels of stress and negative well-being among millennial leaders, among Gen Ziers, are being led by those millennial leaders. And what the dynamic impacts are to have this whole generation of anxious leaders

ushering in anxious direct reports and how that is then going to play out in the workplace. you know, to contrast them with baby boomers who are not anxious, who are direct communicators. What is that going to do for performance, for growth, for, you know, all of these kinds of complex processes? So looking at some of those cohort effects that we had talked about earlier. So those are some of the projects that I'm thinking about right now. Well, that's all really interesting. I look forward to seeing more of your research.

I want to thank you for joining me today. It's been very edifying. Thank you so much for having me on the show. You can find previous episodes of Speaking of Psychology on our website at www.w.combeingof Psychology.org or on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you like what you've heard, please subscribe and leave us a review. If you have comments or ideas for future podcasts, you can email us at speaking of psychology at APA.org. Speaking of psychology is produced by Lee Weinemann.

Thank you for listening for the American Psychological Association. I'm Kim Mills. Relax and let Ralph's delivery handle your grocery shopping this week. We start with only the freshest items, then review your list and carefully choose each one. Then we pack it all up and deliver it in as little as 30 minutes, so you can feel confident it's what you ordered. Fresh groceries, your way, with Ralph's delivery and pickup. And right now, you can save $20 on your first delivery or pickup order. Ralph's, fresh for everyone.

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