How smart people end up in the wrong careers

Many high performers think they’re doing everything right—yet still feel somehow wrong about their day-to-day. And the advent of AI means work-related decision-making is more complex than ever. As job uncertainty ups the ante, more employees might be tempted to settle for the “B+ life,” in the words of Suzy Welch, author of Becoming You: The Proven Method for Crafting Your Authentic Life and Career (HarperCollins, May 2025). In this episode of McKinsey Talks Talent, Welch talks to McKinsey leaders and talent experts Brooke Weddle and Bryan Hancock, as well as Global Editorial Director Lucia Rahilly, about where so many successful people go awry—and more importantly, about how to discover work that you value, that’s economically viable, and that you’re genuinely wired to do.

The following transcript has been edited for clarity and length.

Moving beyond the ‘B+ life’

Lucia Rahilly: I’m so excited to meet you and talk about your book, Becoming You. I genuinely wish I’d encountered it when I was starting my career, lo these many years past.

Suzy Welch: Me too. That’s why I wrote it—because I needed it.

Lucia Rahilly: Let’s start with some context. Your book is about identifying individual purpose and developing what you describe as “relentless candor” about who we are and how we want to spend our time. We’re arguably in the throes of a paradigm shift, given the advent of AI and its potential to upend the workplace as we know it. The latest consumer sentiment report in the US showed Americans are experiencing rising insecurity about the potential for job loss over the next five years. And, of course, we’re also reading about trends like job hugging and difficulty among college grads in finding jobs. Why this book, and why now?

Suzy Welch: The book is about understanding your values, your aptitudes—what you’re good at—and what the world needs right now, and figuring out what’s at the intersection of those three data sets. The reason to read it is if you need a little guidance and tough love at a time when there’s a kind of terrible perfect storm. First, traditional career paths are evaporating as work changes dramatically. Second, there’s a gigantic values disconnect between what many people entering the workforce, at any age, value—given cultural and societal forces—and the values that hiring managers are looking for.

Bryan Hancock: Suzy, there’s a story in the book framed as “my B+ life”—the idea that an OK life is not OK. How would you encourage people to think about that takeaway in light of the broader environment?

Suzy Welch: A B+ life is a job that sort of meets some of our needs and gives us some chance of doing well. We can hover there for a long time. It’s very easy to get used to B+.

So the book says, “Let’s figure out exactly what your values are.” Data suggests that only 7 percent of Americans are sure what their values are—they often mix them up with virtues. Almost no one knows what their actual cognitive and emotional aptitudes are. And the problem with interests, the third data set we need to excavate, is that the world is noisy and complicated, and it’s hard to drink from the fire hose telling us what’s out there and available.

This is a discipline: knowing our values, our aptitudes, and our economically viable interests. When we go through that discipline, we can take the difficult step of pushing through the B+ life to see whether an A+ life is available to us. I’m not saying that’s true in every case—you may have constraints—but it’s available to more of us than we let ourselves think.

Discovering the work you’re wired to do

Lucia Rahilly: Suzy, you mentioned how difficult it can be for people to home in on their values. And “values” can be a charged term, at least in political discourse. How do you think about values in a way that informs professional growth?

Suzy Welch: Values are distinct from virtues. Virtues are social constructs that most people agree we should all have more of—kindness, resilience, decency, honesty. Values are things you can operationalize. They’re personal choices about how we organize our lives. Values are the underlying desires, wants, and motivations that galvanize our actions. They’re almost like a DNA profile of what’s motivating you.

There are three well-known values inventories. I developed a values inventory at the University of Bristol, where I earned my PhD, called the Welch–Bristol Values Inventory. It identifies 16 values that inform your career choices, and force-ranks them and shows how much you’re living each one. But values aren’t enough. You also need your aptitudes.

Lucia Rahilly: Walk us through what aptitudes are and the difference between skills and aptitudes.

Suzy Welch: Aptitudes are the cognitive and emotional wiring that makes us better at some things. There are various cognitive aptitudes, and they exist on a continuum. Where you fall on that continuum makes you better or worse at certain kinds of work—that’s hardwired.

Think about it this way: Are you a generalist or a specialist? Are you a brainstormer, a font of ideas, or an idea processor—someone who develops one big idea a year and takes it under consideration? Are you a diagnostic problem solver—most consultants are—or a fact-checker, someone who processes one task at a time?

Different kinds of work need different kinds of wiring. You can do work you’re not cognitively wired for, but it’s harder. If you’re a specialist by wiring, you should be doing specialist work.

Bryan Hancock: One of the things we’ve observed about managers becoming managers is that not everybody is cut out to be a manager. In many organizations, the only way to succeed has been to transition from being a great individual contributor to managing people. We’re starting to see some organizations ask, “If you’re a really strong individual contributor, why don’t we create paths where you grow in responsibility and pay without necessarily having to take on broader managerial roles?”

Suzy Welch: I totally agree. The only way to make more money or gain credibility in many organizations is to be promoted into managing people, and it’s very frustrating.

Lucia Rahilly: It’ll be interesting to see whether, as AI drives delayering, specialists become more valuable than ever. Suzy, do you want to speak briefly to the third part of your Venn diagram—economically viable interests?

Suzy Welch: Most people need to figure out their economically viable interests. Research shows that when kids graduate from high school, they can list—without prompting—only five jobs. Two are typically the jobs their parents hold. You might think that after college, the world would break open and people would be aware of many more jobs, but after college they can, unprompted, name only seven.

Now more than ever, jobs are changing rapidly. Beyond that, there are megatrends—the AI industries of the future.

Bryan Hancock: I loved the example in the book about shipbuilding. Brooke is one of the foremost experts in shipbuilding labor. Brooke, can you talk a bit about why shipbuilding is such a strong, economically viable, growing field?

Brooke Weddle: Yes—ships being the new chips. It’s highly economically viable, yet we still see a shortage of workers going into shipbuilding, particularly in the skilled trades. Some of that comes down to perceptions—not just among young talent, but among their parents, who think there’s a need for a four-year degree. But you can make six figures as a welder three or four years out of school. That’s what we’re up against, and many manufacturing jobs still carry a stigma that isn’t always rational.

Suzy Welch: I think the trades are a fantastic place to go. I’ve seen students have their eyes opened to shipbuilding as an industry. They can bring MBA skills there as well, because those companies also have HR, logistics, engineering, and all kinds of managerial roles.

Why good people make bad career decisions

Lucia Rahilly: Suzy, you’ve worked with a wide range of people—students and leaders—using this framework. Would you share an example of the concrete difference this method can make in someone’s life? For instance, you talked in the book about a student who had a job offer from McKinsey but who you felt was unlikely to be the right fit.

Suzy Welch: As I recall, the student you’re thinking of was on the fence about going into consulting. He had the offer in hand, which in business school feels like a win. But his test results kept coming out in ways that were very antithetical to the consulting life.

For example, one of his strongest cognitive aptitudes was spatial orientation. These are people who see everything in three dimensions, draw a lot, and can manipulate objects in space. They’re often very good with products and may become architects or designers. He said, “I love to go into stores and stare at packaging.” On top of that, his values showed low emphasis on achievement—the value of visible success and caring about winning and losing—and low work-centrism, meaning he wanted a true nine-to-five lifestyle. His top value was belovedness, which reflects the importance of a romantic partner, and his second was family-centrism. And this was someone walking into consulting. It was painful to see.

He went away, and about a week later, he came back to office hours and said, “Professor Welch, I’m blowing it all up. I’m going into business with my girlfriend. I’ve asked her to marry me, and we’re going to start a company making a specialty drink.” He had already designed the packaging. They launched, they’re doing incredibly well, and the first place they brought a six-pack of their product was to my office.

Lucia Rahilly: Suzy, you write about what you call the Four Horsemen—signals that don’t necessarily foretell the end of financial success, but of meaningful or fulfilling careers. What are those signs to watch for?

Suzy Welch: I call them the Four Horsemen of Values Destruction. All four start with E.

The first is expectations—someone else’s expectations for our lives, or our own expectations, getting in the way of living our values.

The second is expedience. We don’t live our values because it might make someone we love angry, or because doing so would take real discipline and energy. Life is hard enough, so we take the path of least resistance.

The third is economic security. We make decisions based on hard numbers, even if money doesn’t truly matter to us, because numbers feel concrete. We’ve all made bad decisions based on numbers—buying the wrong house because it’s cheaper, taking the wrong job because it pays more, or going on a vacation we don’t want because it costs less.

The fourth is events. Sometimes things happen in our lives, and our values temporarily stop being expressed—but then we don’t fight to reclaim them. You get fired or lose your job. When my husband passed away, I fell apart, as most widows do. There was a long period of deep grief, and I completely let go of my values around work and achievement.

How CHROs can help

Brooke Weddle: From a company perspective, what would you say to a CHRO—a chief human resources officer—who wants to help employees become better versions of themselves? What are some ways to do that, from better assessment at the start of the talent cycle to upskilling and reskilling that take these characteristics into account?

Suzy Welch: A CHRO’s job is to help people understand themselves in detail so they can be placed in career paths that align with their values, aptitudes, and interests. For example, a large nonprofit brought me in to assess aptitudes across the C-suite. We realized that everyone at the table was a specialist and that they needed more generalists. We also use the Enneagram, a personality-type indicator, with executive teams and other groups.

That led us to create what we call the Becoming Book, which lets people build a user manual of themselves. It has a strong organizational application: In group settings, people bring together all this data and, using AI, turn it into a user manual. Teams then share those manuals with one another. You learn your colleagues’ values, aptitudes, and foundational biographical stories. It’s an efficient way to say, “Here’s who I am.”

I especially love it when you see bosses handing it to their teams and saying, “You want to know how to work with me?” It increases clarity by having everyone speak the same language.

Bryan Hancock: One thing that stood out to me, especially thinking about organizational application, is how you talk about resilience—specifically, resilience as the intersection of grit and forgiveness. Could you expand on that?

Suzy Welch: Everybody talks about resilience. What’s always mystified me is that the typical definition is, “You’re down on your back, completely defeated—now go find inner strength.” That’s when you’re incapacitated. So where does the inner strength come from? That was always the philosophical question for me.

I really needed resilience when I was fired. It was embarrassing, and I felt like I was never going to work again. Grit has to be unlocked. We unlock it by stopping the use of psychic energy to litigate what happened. It happened. We accept our own role in it. We let go of being angry at the people who did it to us. Then we can start to rebuild.

There’s no scientific validation of what I’m saying—just life experience. But I study this closely now. When I see someone get back up, they almost always talk about letting go of anger and letting go of blame.

Lucia Rahilly: You’ve said you use a version of a 360-degree tool, which brings in outside input. Is it harder for people to self-report their values when they’re in crisis—when they’re questioning what they’ve done and what their values really are?

Suzy Welch: People can’t self-report their values because their identity gets mixed up in it. That’s one reason we created the Values Bridge (which measures the alignment between your values and the way you live your life). Before it existed, I used to run people through seven exercises, and they would end up with a list of values that we tried to force-rank. I would literally watch people erase values and move others to the top—especially family. When family didn’t show up at the top, they would manually put it there because that’s where it should be. In reality, our data shows that only 11 percent of Americans have family as their top value.

Brooke Weddle: That’s fascinating.

Suzy Welch: It’s true that when people come to Becoming You [workshops], they’re often very vulnerable. Participation in the Values Bridge [assessment] peaks at night. One of my engineers said, “That’s when people start spiraling.” The Bridge is designed to separate you from your crisis and get at your true values. And we think it does—efficacy testing shows it’s 94 percent efficacious.

From rookies to retirees

Bryan Hancock: Have people been using the Becoming You process as they think about retirement?

Suzy Welch: Yes. The “third-halfers” love it. That was a surprise application, along with addiction recovery—it’s currently being used in two addiction recovery organizations. Early on, we were struck by how many people said, “I’ve been owned by my company. I’m 55, I have some money, and I can design the rest of this story.” We’re amazed by the number of people who come to the three-day immersives in New York City. They’re energized, saying, “I can do so much more than I could when I was 25.”

It’s remarkable. And it reinforces how urgent the question of who we are and what we should be doing with our lives feels right now.

Brooke Weddle: It’s fascinating to hear the range of people and organizations this research is resonating with. What about the opposite end of the spectrum—earlier in the funnel?

Suzy Welch: High school. The interest in developing this as a high school curriculum is a tsunami. A version of it belongs there. Values aren’t fully formed in high school, but giving students a language to talk about values is incredibly powerful.

Finding clarity in the throes of change

Brooke Weddle: I love your point about a common language. I do a lot of work with executives on culture, and while culture isn’t exactly synonymous with values, there are similarities. Without clarity, people often talk past one another.

Suzy Welch: I think they’re synonymous. Without a shared language, it gets fuzzy. You start saying things like, “Our values are excellence.” And I think, “Really? Is your definition of excellence the same as mine?” Or, “We value collaboration.” What does that actually look like?

We recently worked with an engineering firm in Pittsburgh that said, “We don’t have a culture.” And I said, “Yes, you do—it’s just not defined. Every organization has a culture.” Culture begins and ends with values. That’s why having a shared language matters—so everyone is speaking the same language.

Brooke Weddle: I agree. I think values are foundational, and then culture is almost like the behaviors that come to life day-to-day, rooted in those values. When you don’t have this common language or framework to be anchored on, it becomes very confusing.

Suzy Welch: And the thing we need less confusion on is culture. There’s a well-known saying that culture eats strategy for breakfast. If you don’t have a good culture, nothing gets done.

Lucia Rahilly: Suzy, I want to bring us back to where we started—the current paradigm shift, or what you call in the book the “unsettled nature of our collective future in an AI economy.” The term “authentic” has probably always been unstable, but it seems even more so as AI introduces avatars and synthetic relationships. Looking five years out, do you see authenticity—or the idea of becoming ourselves—evolving?

Suzy Welch: I can’t look five years out. But I can say that authenticity is everything. Without authenticity, there’s no trust. And without trust, there’s no business—no family, no society, no culture.

AI giveth and it taketh away. One thing it taketh away is authenticity, as machines start writing letters to one another. We’re going to have to sort that out. One powerful thing about this process is that if you’re losing touch with who you authentically are, it reminds you.

In all the noise, it can be hard to keep that clarity. We’re told so many things about ourselves. Having a clarion call about who we truly are—not based on words we pick out of the sky, but on cold, hard data—really matters.

Brooke Weddle: Are you using your values framework to train agents and digital workers? As organizations start combining human and digital workforces, how do we minimize cultural friction?

Suzy Welch: No, we’re not. But you absolutely could train agents in values, because values are behaviors. You’re either high or low on something. If you wanted an agent with high achievement and high work-centrism, that would translate into very specific ways of acting. So yes, you could.

Brooke Weddle: Imagine doing that at scale, rather than relying on managers to figure it out individually.

Suzy Welch: I think I need to go lie down. That’s a biggie. But that’s very, very interesting, Brooke.