There are basically two types of workers, right? Either you are an upward climber, or you choose to cruise on easy street. But wait a minute. Does everyone need to approach their career as a time-driven, multi-tasking, power-expressing endeavor, or is it alright to have a job that is relatively low stress, perhaps largely rote, and not one you take home with you both physically and mentally?
Well, sure it is. Or it should be. Shouldn’t it? But a funny thing happens when you try to put a non-judgmental tag on this type of job style. Look how easy it is for us to describe an ambitious, upwardly mobile, goal-oriented, tough-minded, high achiever. So, what do you call someone who does not approach work with a winner-take-all attitude… slow-mover, grunt-worker, low-end loser with limited goal-orientation?
None of these are very flattering. In fact, they and others like them are downright demeaning. Does that mean that career choices are divided into the worthy and the not worthy, valued or marginal, good and bad?
Unfortunately, the way we typically view the stratification of employment is a holdover from a traditional linear view of ladder climbing. Those on the higher rungs are generally viewed as more accomplished while those on the lower rungs are seen as novices at best and incapable at worst.
Looking at work diversity through this narrow lens discounts the various non-status-oriented reasons why people choose the work that they do. In fact, it is fair to say the ladder metaphor has outgrown its relevance. Career choice today is much more multi-dimensional and much less about points on a continuum, as was true even a couple of decades ago.
Career progress zigs and zags and flies in directions that are more spontaneous and less pre-determined. For example, randomly ask several forty-somethings if they are working at jobs they would have imagined doing when in high school or even college. Chances are that they have ended up in workplaces that they never would have imagined at the time.
To be sure, some of the metrics that defined career success in the past are still important, i.e., amounts of income, levels of responsibility, and significant decision-making authority. But quickly joining this list are some new highly valued success measures such as amounts of family and personal leave, results-only work management, and lack of job stress. Might someone these days choose a career that promises independence and uninterrupted nights of deep sleep over money and power? The answer increasingly is, yes!
When we as a culture accept more readily the different ways career-life fit are expressed, then we have a greater chance of truly creating conditions by which individuals choose careers that dovetail chosen lifestyles in profoundly satisfying ways. Think of how often some compliant young people choose a career direction because it fits more with convention, usually determined by the previous generation’s values, than it fits with their innate personalities and lifestyle wishes.
Separating workers into winners and losers based on criteria that does not speak to life contentment really does not make sense. People who choose to work as coffee shop baristas, supermarket bakers, golf course greens keepers, or licensed practical nurses can be as successful as any executive, business owner, or attorney if we agree that how healthy and happy they are, is how their work choice is to be judged.
So, what are acceptable and non-demeaning ways to describe the opposite of a high achiever? Maybe self-directed, balanced, purposeful, a skilled __. Let us give ourselves a break and stop labeling each other. To do so seems uncomfortably close to making class distinctions, which we now know is not very helpful. Reframing how we view the general workforce however is.
