James' World 2

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Morénike Giwa Onaiwu’s daughter, Legacy, was diagnosed with autism in 2011 just before she turned 3. Months later, Dr. Onaiwu, a consultant and writer, was diagnosed as well.Credit…Annie Mulligan for The New York Times

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A digitized woman with long blonde hair dances in front of a blank spreadsheet. She’s showing you how to remove blank columns, or maybe to combine cells, or perhaps how to create a new formula to help you format an entire row. She is ecstatic to be there.

The woman is 30-year-old Kat Norton, better known as “Miss Excel,” who in 2020 began going viral for her high-energy, 15-second TikTok dances superimposed with hacks for navigating the popular data software program Microsoft Excel. Within months, she’d launched her very own digital class: the Excelerator Course, made up of 100 sub-10-minute video tutorials and packaged for the price of $297. Students can complete the tutorials and corresponding workbooks at their own pace, on their own time. They choose between the original or the advanced course (or shell out $997 for a course on the full Microsoft Office Suite), going from a total Excel newbie to a pro in just 12 hours.

The classes were a hit, particularly among her core audience of 25- to 35-year-olds who were looking to bulk up their resumes or improve their marketability; many of them were working from home due to the pandemic and considering a potential career change. And Norton is the platonic example of an online course teacher: She’s proficient in an in-demand skill and, perhaps most importantly, she’s very good at selling it.

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Paige Vickers for Vox

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When it’s dark outside, and the lights are on, I can see straight into my neighbor’s house. It’s a few days before Christmas, and she appears to be performing a mini Broadway show – in her pajamas. In front of a tastefully decorated tree, she squeals ‘It’s tiiiiiiimmmeee!!!!’ as she drops to the floor on her knees, spreads jazz hands, and wiggles her chest. Her smile is a dazzling white, her honey-colored hair sits in bouncy waves. Behind her, three young girls, in matching nightwear, twirl with giant candy sticks.

One day, I pick up binoculars. For hours, I observe this picture-perfect mother, her strong-jawed husband, and their five children, as they eat, read, sing and dance. My neighbor opens her curtains a little wider – she wants me to watch her. Soon she starts showing me products she uses so that, I too, can purchase this fantasy existence and be just like her.

I don’t spy on my neighbors. (I would be arrested.) But I’ve spent hours doing a completely legal equivalent: trailing fellow mothers online. Madison Fisher provides footage of everything, from the monumental (the birth of her twins) to the mundane (meal prep), to millions of followers on YouTube and Instagram. She is one of thousands of mothers on social media – dubbed ‘momfluencers’ – who open up their lives for my consumption.

Instagram gained popularity as a clever way to add filters to your spring break photos. When sponsored posts were launched, following the company’s sale to Facebook in 2012, it transformed into something else entirely: a giant shopping mall. In 2021, 3.8 million Instagram posts were marked worldwide with the hashtag #ad, a 27 percent jump from the year before. Instagram runs on sex, for sure: scantily clad women sell lipstick, handbags, and dietary supplements. It also runs on what happens nine months later: babies.

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The crowd along Sixth Avenue was losing its mind. It was Sunday, June 25, 1972, and Dr. Benjamin Spock was walking uptown with the Christopher Street Liberation Day March, the scrappier, more revolutionary precursor to the New York City Pride Parade. Although he had risen to fame as a pediatrician, Spock was almost as well known for his support of left-wing causes—from legalizing abortion to ending the Vietnam War—as he was for “The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care,” which had already sold more than ten million copies. Still, even by his standards, joining the Christopher Street crowd was a radical act. Two years earlier, when the march was held for the first time, its organizers had worried that no one would come. Those who did were so hopped up on adrenaline and fear that the fifty-block route, from the West Village to Central Park, took them half as long as anticipated; afterward, they jokingly called it the Christopher Street Liberation Day Run. Now here was Dr. Spock, one of the most influential figures in America, joining their ranks. As he passed by, the people lining the streets whistled and clapped and screamed themselves hoarse.

But all this hullabaloo was not, as it turned out, for the famous doctor; it was for a diminutive middle-aged woman marching just in front of him. She was not famous at all—not the author of any books, not the leader of any movement, not self-evidently a radical of any kind. With her jacket and brooch and plaid skirt and spectacles, she had the part-prim, part-warm demeanor of an old-fashioned elementary-school teacher, which she was. She was carrying a piece of orange poster board with a message hand-lettered in black marker: “PARENTS of GAYS: UNITE in SUPPORT fOR OUR CHILDREN.” She had no idea that the crowd was cheering for her until total strangers started running up to thank her. They asked if they could kiss her; they asked if she would talk to their parents; they told her that they couldn’t imagine their own mothers and fathers supporting them so publicly, or supporting them at all.

The woman’s name was Jeanne Manford, and she was marching alongside her twenty-one-year-old gay son, Morty. Moved by the outpouring of emotion, the two of them discussed it all along the route. By the time they reached Central Park, they had also reached a decision: if so many people wished that someone like Jeanne could talk to their parents, why not make that possible? The organization they dreamed up that day, which started as a single support group in Manhattan, was initially called Parents of Gays; later, it was renamed Parents FLAG, for Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays; nowadays, it is known only as PFLAG. Just a handful of people attended its first meeting, held fifty years ago this spring. Today, it has four hundred chapters and well north of a quarter of a million members.

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Susan,* a client of Luis’ and a mentee of Kristin’s, managed her team with a fundamental belief that it was her job to “protect” them. Her belief was grounded in good intentions. She wanted her team to be happy and successful in a highly demanding and fast-moving organization. However, her approach constantly put her in the position of intercepting challenges, wanting to become a shield for her team.

Perhaps this behavior endeared Susan to her team initially, but it had other unintended consequences, especially as the team’s scope of responsibilities grew. Her peers and cross-functional colleagues didn’t see her as collaborative, partly because she was often perceived as a blocker. Her behavior led her team to adopt a disempowered stance, and they became dependent on her to fight their battles. Worse, it put a lot of pressure on her to be present in all major decisions. As her overwhelm mounted, her performance slipped, both in terms of her ability to stay on top of key projects and to show up at meetings with a calm, clear perspective. Ultimately, the behavior caused senior leadership to view her as volatile and not in control.

We call leaders who engage in this kind of behavior “umbrella managers”: well-intentioned leaders who want to protect their teams from all inclement organizational weather. But this type of leadership comes with a heavy price for the manager, the team, and the organization:

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Every career is made up of choices. But sometimes, even when we know we made the right decision, we find ourselves longing for a forgone role or career path. How does this sort of dwelling on the road not taken affect us in the workplace? And what can employees, managers, and organizations do to help workers who may be experiencing some internal conflict with respect to their chosen careers?

To explore these questions, my colleagues Jason Colquitt, Erin Long, and I surveyed more than 300 U.S.-based workers and their coworkers across a wide range of professions and seniority levels. We asked the workers how satisfied they were with their current jobs, how often they thought about other paths they could have taken, and the extent to which they felt able to determine the trajectories of their lives and shape their work. We then asked their coworkers how often these employees engaged in helpful, collaborative behaviors, and how often they exhibited behaviors that suggested a withdrawal from work, such as showing up late or distracting others.

Through these surveys, we found that many workers spend a significant amount of time dwelling on alternative professional paths they could have taken — even years after the decision is made. In fact, just 6% of the participants in our study reported never or almost never thinking about other paths they could have taken, and 21% reported thinking about these questions often or even almost always.

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[Image: courtesy of LinkedIn]

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Photo illustration by Derek Brahney

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