HBR

Midlife Crisis? Just Another U Shaped Curve

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Subsequent research discovered that this age-related U-shape in job satisfaction is part of a much broader phenomenon. A similar midlife nadir is detectable in measures of people’s overall life satisfaction and has been found in more than 50 countries. On average, life satisfaction is high when people are young, then starts to decline in the early 30s, bottoming out between the mid-40s and mid-50s before increasing again to levels as high as during young adulthood. And this U-curve occurs across the entire socio-economic spectrum, hitting senior-level executives as well as blue-collar workers and stay-at-home parents. It affects childless couples as well as single people or parents of four. In short, a mid-career crisis does not discriminate.

Why So Many of Us Experience a Midlife Crisis Harvard Business Review Hannes Schwandt — https://getpocket.com/explore/item/why-so-many-of-us-experience-a-midlife-crisis?utm_source=pocket-newtab

This post originally appeared on Harvard Business Review and was published April 20, 2015. A link popped up on my browser webpage.

U shaped curves are everywhere.

Managing the “Invisibles” – Harvard Business Review

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What Does It Mean to Be an Invisible?

Many of the Invisibles I met with are at the top of their fields; some are in charge of complex operations and of scores, even hundreds, of workers; many are well remunerated. I wanted to know: How is it, in an age when seemingly everyone is aggressively self-promoting, when we’re told that in order to get ahead we must have a brand or a “platform,” that these people—consummate professionals all—are satisfied with anonymity? How can they have the confidence to do their demanding jobs and yet not the ego to want to be widely known for their work? Despite the diversity of their careers, I found that all Invisibles share certain traits, with three in particular at the core.

Ambivalence toward recognition. We all do work that is anonymous to some extent, but most of us strive for recognition. That is how we feed our sense of self-worth. Invisibles take a different approach. For them, any time spent courting praise or fame is time taken away from the important and interesting work at hand. In fact, their relationship with recognition is often the inverse of what most of us enjoy: The better they do their jobs, the more they disappear. It may only be when something goes wrong that they’re noticed at all.

via Managing the “Invisibles” – Harvard Business Review.

New Research: What Yahoo Should Know About Good Managers and Remote Workers – E. Glenn Dutcher – Harvard Business Review

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We found that individual effort was highest in the 100%-in-house teams. The addition of remote workers reduced the in-house workers’ exertion.

And why did the in-house people reduce their effort when a teleworker was added to the team? Because they believed that the teleworkers were less productive. Which wasn’t true, by the way. We found no evidence that the teleworkers were shirking.

The implication is that teams containing teleworkers would benefit from knowing that remote members are working just as hard as everyone else. Managers can play a role in this, providing data about teleworkers’ productivity. Our research indicates that if team members know that all other members are working hard, the negative effect of including teleworkers in teams goes away.

So companies don’t have to get caught in a tug-of-war between letting their employees work remotely or forcing them to come to work and collaborate. Collaboration can happen even among in-house employees and teleworkers. It simply takes a different managerial skill set.

via New Research: What Yahoo Should Know About Good Managers and Remote Workers – E. Glenn Dutcher – Harvard Business Review.