The 4 Ways High Performers Sabotage Their Careers
Many workplace studies show that high performers are among the most dissatisfied and disengaged employee groups. At the first glance, this might sound surprising. You’d think that having a performance level that’s consistently higher than your peers’ would guarantee job happiness and fulfillment. Unfortunately, it doesn’t. Rather than being rewarded accordingly, high performers often get punished!
Now, we’re not suggesting there is some kind of diabolical conspiracy against high performers. And there are companies and managers out there that know how to treat and reward their best employees. Yet often, high performers feel like they’re being punished as a consequence of being great at their jobs:
They are expected to take on more (and more complex) tasks and perform them at a higher quality and shorter timelines than their peers.
They are required to do a lot of tedious work to compensate for their lower-performing peers.
As long as the work gets done, their employers don’t invest money or time to improve the overall performance level of the team, so the situation becomes self-perpetuating.
A high level of performance isn’t sufficiently rewarded with promotions, raises, and bonuses.
All this adds up to a sense that high performers often have thankless careers. Many of us have either been in this situation or know people who are in it. And it’s not pretty. It starts with a feeling of persistent stress, getting annoyed at small things, and not being able to relax. We lose the ability to enjoy our achievements because there are always three more things on the task list. And before we know it, we have the Sunday blues, every week, like Groundhog day.
Why do we accept it?
That’s the million-dollar question! Because the thing with high performers is that they’re usually good at making themselves heard. They talk to their managers. They propose changes and improvements. But if things don’t change, why do so many people choose to remain in unhappy jobs instead of moving on and finding an employer that appreciates them? No doubt, the reasons are many and complex. But there is one reason that’s both common and firmly within our control to change - we sabotage our own careers.
How we sabotage our careers
Many people have tendencies to sabotage their careers, and high performers aren’t immune. In fact, we see 4 forms of sabotage that are very common in this group in particular.
1. We forget why we’re doing this
One trait that many high performers have in common is the ability to think strategically. Or, in other words, to choose their actions based on a specific goal they’re trying to achieve, and do that consistently over time. It’s the grown-up version of the marshmallow test.
Back when we were starting out in our careers, most of us had a reason for choosing our career paths. It could have been about a sense of personal fulfillment, making a certain amount of money, or any other reason. Some of us had explicit career plans for achieving those goals, complete with milestones and the whole shebang. Others rely more on their intuition - a feeling of whether they were on the right path.
When we are dissatisfied and disengaged over long periods of time, we lose touch with our true north. The reason we chose a career and the goals we had for ourselves take the back seat to the everyday frustrations. And the energy we spend dealing with these frustrations is energy we’re not spending to get back on track. So we get stuck in unhappy jobs.
2. We convince ourselves that persistence is always a virtue
Our strengths and weaknesses are more connected than most people realize. In fact, they’re usually two sides of the same coin. The same personal trait that helps us achieve success in one set of circumstances can lead to failure in a different setting. This is the reason why some mistakes can come across as shockingly obvious when we’re watching them unfold from the sidelines! We think to ourselves “This person is smart. So how can they not see that what they doing is wrong and will only lead to a failure?”. The answer is that they are probably just doing the same thing that’s made them successful on previous occasions. Only now, the circumstances are different.
High performers are particularly susceptible to this when it comes to persistence. This is without a doubt one of the most important traits for a person trying to succeed at anything in life. Because we all fail at some point. The trick is to learn something from it and keep trying until we eventually make it work.
The other side of the coin is that success breeds habits. And once persistence has brought us success, it becomes second nature. So we keep attacking the same problem over and over again instinctively, without taking the change in circumstances into account. Even when we’re in a job that’s a dead end and isn’t bringing us any joy or prospect of success.
3. We normalize the thanklessness
You’ve probably heard the saying “You are the sum of the 5 people you spend the most time with”. Or some variation of it. While this might be an oversimplification (after all, most poetic-sounding quotes are), there is merit in the idea that our thought patterns and perception of reality are influenced by the people we interact with the most. In the best-case scenario, this can lead to great personal growth. We might learn wonderful new things and discover insights and patterns we never saw before. Unfortunately, we don’t always get to experience the best-case scenario. Sometimes, it leads to gaslighting and normalization of behaviors that we’re not comfortable with.
This is what staying in a thankless job for too long does to us. It wears us down over time and impacts our self-esteem if we let it. And we start thinking that this is the way it’s supposed to be. That maybe, we aren’t as good at our jobs as we thought we were. That there’s nothing wrong with what we’re experiencing each day. When, in fact, there’s plenty wrong with it. And there are plenty of career options out there where we could have an amazing experience.
4. We become risk-averse
When we stay anywhere for too long, our world becomes smaller. We become more comfortable with what we have and increasingly uncomfortable with new opportunities we might come across. The reason is that we all have a cognitive bias that psychologists call “the familiarity heuristic”. Essentially, it works like this - we equate familiarity with low risk and well-being while we associate a lack of familiarity with high risk and danger.
So what does this have to do with sabotaging ourselves? It leads us to make poor choices, especially when we are under a lot of stress. Risk assessment, e.g. in the context of whether you should leave your job for greener pastures, should be a rational decision. Why? Because risk assessment isn’t just about identifying all the bad things that can happen, it’s also about the probability of actually happening. When we rely on our gut feeling, we’re relying on the familiarity heuristic. The unfamiliar option will seem riskier and more dangerous than it is. And we will remain stuck in dead-end jobs.
How to get unstuck
If you need help getting unstuck, we’re here for you. Try our Your Next Career Step workbook (free of charge) and take the first step towards figuring out what your next job should be.
