Burnout Buddies, Layoff Etiquette, and Multiple Career Personality
Video Transcript:
Today’s post is all about friendship and connection in the world of work, and we are gonna be on a journey with a lot of different stops. We touch on:
Friendship and burnout: How friends can help each other cope with burnout
An essay by Erin Mantz called “The Work Spouse is Dead”
What to say and do if your friend gets laid off
Scripts for connecting with a work friend
How to be a good friend to yourself when your career trajectory isn't easy to explain to yourself or others
And I’m gonna close up today’s session with a closing dedication to a dearly departed friend of mine and mentor of mine, Hugh Weber, who came to me through the world of work.
Let’s dig in…
Friendship and burnout: How friends can help each other cope with burnout
Last week I posted one of my illustrations on Instagram and like many of them, it was a little bit of a joke. This one was about the dizzying manufacture of buzzwords that the world of work and journalists who write about work are constantly coming up with.
We’ve all heard of quiet, quitting, and presenteeism and rage applying. These are all terms that are constantly thrown around. And so I thought it would be funny to take an imaginary look at the buzzwords that are being manufactured and coming soon, eg. quotient quitting and secret striving and wonky workaholism, which is when you have a coworker who works really hard but just keeps doing things wrong.
But the one that really resonated with a lot of folks was Burnout Buddies. It sounds like people were either feeling like they needed a burnout buddy, or they already have a burnout buddy, or they really need one. It really struck a nerve. And so I wanted to touch base on that really quickly to say that A) it’s a real thing, and B) if you need a burnout buddy, or if you’re feeling like Burnout Buddy is a something that you could be for somebody else, I have a post on my blog from a little while ago about how friends can help heal burnout together. This was about work-from-home burnout, but I think it applies regardless of whether you’re working from home or not.
In the blog post, I describe a few different books that are really good for burnout that are all fantastic. I also describe some different activities and things that you can do if you are trying to heal your burnout together. You can do physical activities together, whether that’s yoga or a boxing gym, or doing something more mellow like quietly writing, meditating together, or going to a park and looking at trees together. Spend time with someone who understands your feelings of burnout and isn’t going to judge you — this kind of quiet acceptance can be super nurturing and healing.
Is the work spouse over??
Okay, on to stop #2 which had to do with a short Medium essay I read last week called “The Work Spouse Is Dead,” by Erin Manz who runs Gen X Girls Grow Up. As a Gen Xer myself, I really related to this very short essay that she had about the nostalgia she felt for the many, many work spouses that she had in the past, the different ways that they supported each other and got through good days and bad days. It made me feel quite nostalgic myself. Whether you’re Gen X or not, if you really crave that feeling of having that work spouse, which goes like even deeper than a work friend, this might be an article that you wanna check out. Hint: Share it with someone you’d like to be work spouses with.
What to say and do if your friend gets laid off
Along those lines, something else that popped up last week that I think is good for inspiration, I encourage checking out, is what to do if your coworker gets laid off. Unfortunately, there’s not a lot of great etiquette around layoffs. Particularly when it comes to navigating work friendships, and this article by Scarlet McCarthy is a fantastic look at that.
When she got laid off, she said that a lot of the people that she had worked most closely with were totally silent. They didn’t even send a short message or express their condolences. Scarlett says, “we live in a capitalist society that values your work first. Your job becomes your identity… So radio silence from people with whom you spent the majority of your waking life feels like a dismissal of your personhood.”
She has some great tips on how we can improve the etiquette of layoffs, particularly with work friends. Things like:
Letting your coworker know what you enjoyed about working with them
Offering to help them with their job search
Offering to help with their resume or their LinkedIn
Connecting them with people in your network
These are all great ways to be supportive!
And keep in mind that some of these things could be more helpful even a couple weeks after the layoff, rather than kind of bombarding them with it at the immediate moment when their head is spinning and they’re just trying to figure out what’s going on.
Scripts for connecting with a work friend
If you want to connect, not with necessarily a coworker who has just gotten laid off, but someone who’s kind of been lost to the winds of time, I joined Jesse Hempel last week for Hello Monday episode of LinkedIn News Podcast, and we had a really great conversation about friendships that are found in the workplace. We discuss whether we need to call them “work friends” or they’re just friend friends. But anyway, we use this qualifier “work friends,” and in the last 90 seconds of the episode, Jesse does a really sweet thing where she reaches out to a former work bestie and records herself letting that friend know how much she mattered to her.
So I’m gonna play that short clip for you so you can hear it; it’s the last 90 seconds of the episode. If you are thinking of reaching out to a former work bestie and you don't know what to say or you feel awkward because it’s been a long time, let this inspire you to move forward.
And get more advice for cultivating workplace friendships in my guest visit to IDEO U’s Creative Confidence podcast, vodcast, and blog.
How to be a good friend to yourself when your career trajectory isn't easy to explain to yourself or others
The next thing I wanted to talk about has to do with being a good friend to yourself when your career trajectory isn't easy to explain to yourself or others. Our inspiration for this segment comes from Jen Hewett. Last week I went to a talk by Jen Hewett. She’s this incredible Black textile artist and printmaker, and nowadays she’s mostly known for her gorgeous textiles and prints and home goods.
But not that long ago, this was not her full-time gig. In an article in SF Gate about people with “multiple career personality,” Jen described herself and the sense of separation that she used to feel when she spent four days a week as an HR consultant for small businesses and three days a week as an artist and printmaker.
In the article, she described that the benefits of her freelance hybrid life were much more appealing to her than getting the stability that would come from having a more straightforward work trajectory. But it was really, really hard for her sometimes to figure out how to explain that to people or even whether she should talk about it at work.
There’s a great term that was quoted in the article called “persona management” — that’s a term from Toni Littlestone, a career coach in Albany, and it captures the challenge of navigating a hybrid career. In the article, Jen describes that it was a challenge to decide how she was going to present her double life to her work her coworkers, and sometimes she did not even want tell her coworkers about it at all. She just kept her artwork and printmaking on the side, not on the radar. That’s something that I totally related to when I created Better Than Small Talk and wrote my book, We Should Get Together. I hardly told anyone that I worked at Slack or Pandora with about it for so, so, many reasons. The only people I told at work were my closest work besties.
If this is something that you’re juggling with your own multiple career personality, or if you’re working on a really cool side project that you wanna keep separate from your work life, this is an article that you’ll probably find validating, even though it’s from over a decade ago! It is fantastic and I highly recommend checking it out if you have multiple career personality. Also, I encourage you to find a community of other creative careerists who understand what the journey is like and who can help it feel less lonely. A great resource to check out for this is the Puttylike website, run by Emily Wapnick. She coined this beautiful term: multipotentialite, and it’s something that I identify with as a person with many interests and creative pursuits. Emily’s work celebrates what a superpower it is to be passionate about multiple things and to not necessarily have to choose one thing to identify with or express yourself in the world as. She runs a great community for multipotentialites and, her TEDx talk is really beautiful and it’s an inspiring resource for folks who are passionate about multiple things.
Goodbye, Hugh Weber
I want to end with a closing dedication to a dearly departed friend and mentor of mine, whose name was Hugh Weber.
This is our very first tweet exchange when he reached out full of positivity and support when my book was about to come out. On January 1st, 2020, he found time to message me and offer to support my book and my work. 😭 He did this kind of thing for SO MANY people.
He is — he was — an amazing guy who represented so much for creativity and community in the design world for years and years and years. Unbeknownst to me, before our first phone call that first week of January in 2020, Hugh had spent much of the previous year, 2019, in his role as an AIGA board member, visiting chapters all around the country and visiting to understand what was getting in the way of membership and how were members doing. He found out that there was a great deal of loneliness and isolation that designers were feeling and that they were suffering with, often silently and alone. So Hugh and I clearly had a lot to talk about together, a lot of shared commitment to cultivating community, especially for designers, which we both were. Every conversation we shared over the next three years filled me with joy, hope, and inspiration.
As a human being, Hugh was the epitome of kindness and positivity, and support. He cared even more than I do about connection in the design community. And he did SO MUCH for so many years to support the work and development of artists, designers, and creators of all stripes. I encourage you to get some inspiration from Hugh’s long list of creative and impressive accomplishments at his LinkedIn, which covers everything from being the Managing Director of Design Observer to being co-founder of The Bubble Parade, an event that welcomes people of all ages to get outside, share a walk filled with bubbles, and enjoy a popsicle at the finish. The Bubble Parade was founded by then five-year-old, Emerson Weber and her dad, Hugh. In 2015, the Bubble Parade drew over 3,000 people and raised funds for Ronald McDonald House Charities.
Hugh was a man who stood for kindness, creativity, and possibility. And so I will leave you with a few of his iconic words, which were also the name of one of his most recent creative endeavors. It was called We Must Be Bold. So, in his words: We Must Be Bold. We Must Be Bold. We Must Be Bold. Thank you, Hugh, for everything that you shared with me, all of our conversations, all of the joy and support and positivity. This man is just incredible. Thank you for being a part of my life, Hugh. Thank you for inspiring me and so many others. Never gonna forget you.
I encourage you all to please take some time right now — not tomorrow, not on Friday, not next week — but do it right now: Take a minute to send a kind note of appreciation to a work friend or a mentor in your life. Even if you think you don’t have a mentor or if there’s not a specific person who comes to mind as a work friend — Pause and think about somebody that you have learned from. Somebody whose presence or energy you’ve appreciated, somebody who shared something that you’re thankful for, whatever it might be. Whether it was a fleeting interaction or somebody who has shown up over and over and over again to support your journey. Please take some time to reach out and send them those notes of appreciation, because you never know when that might be your very last chance to do so.
That’s all for today.
Thanks so much for being here. Continue to shine on this week and remember, be bold. We must be bold.
Till next time.
XO
Kat
