Not Being Cut Out for Employment Is Not Personality but a Mismatch of Structure

In the morning, the moment you sit down, an unease you cannot put into words settles in. It is not that you dislike the work. There is no quarrel with colleagues. Even so, the sense that you do not belong in this workplace has stayed for years without going.

Look around and there are plenty of people managing without trouble in the same workplace. So the conclusion settles that this unease must be a problem in your own character.

That conclusion measures in the wrong place. This sense that you are not cut out for employment is not being measured inside your character. It arises in the relationship between you and the form called employment.

The answer prepared for this unease is clear. Change your working environment. Move department, move company, change how you work. And the answer does work. Plenty of people have had that vague unease at the office — and the sense of not being cut out for employment — go away after a transfer or a change of company. In those cases the cause did sit on the side of that workplace.

The answer carries one premise, though. That the cause of the mismatch lies in the part which differs from company to company. If the cause is something that changing your company or department resolves, a transfer or a change of company settles the problem on its own. But if the cause is something that changing company or department does not resolve, you return to the same place however many times you move. And the more such returns accumulate, the more strongly they read as a cause in your own character.

Something does in fact remain after you change company or department. The form called employment itself. That there is a starting hour, that the scope of your work is set, that whether the work is good is not decided by you. These come attached wherever you move. However far you move between companies and departments to change your environment, what is tied to the form called employment does not change while you remain employed.

So whether the unease goes is not solely a matter of a person’s adaptability. What separates how readily it goes is the content of the mismatch that weighed most heavily on that person. Was it the kind of mismatch a transfer or a change of company resolves, or the kind that comes attached to the form of employment itself? Results diverge across the same number of moves because this differs. And awkwardly, the unease itself carries no clue as to which of the two kinds it came from. The distress wears the same face either way. What can be told apart is not the sense but the mismatch that actually applies.

What follows divides the causes of feeling not cut out for employment into four. Time, judgement, the measure of evaluation, and connection. The contract of employment works by moving these four from the working side to the company side, and which weighs most differs from person to person. Of the four, time and connection stand a good chance of being resolved by a transfer or a change of company; judgement and the measure of evaluation are, as a rule, not resolved. On that basis it looks at how these four move when you go independent, and at what keeps judgement, the measure of evaluation, and connection in place.

What the Lists of “Signs You Are Not Cut Out for Employment” Are Setting Out

Search for not cut out for employment and lists of signs come up. No sense of cooperation. Poor at building relationships. Constraint of time and place is painful. Dislikes being instructed. Routine is dull. Roughly these five sit at the centre, and the difference between articles is often little more than the order.

The conclusions line up too. In most cases it is a fixed idea, and the true cause lies in the culture or the environment of the present company. So before quitting and going independent, the wise course is to try a transfer, a change of employer, or work on the side. That is how it gets summed up.

The conclusion is not wrong. Cases where the sense went away once the environment changed are not rare. In Japan’s Employment Trend Survey by the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare, the reasons given by job changers for leaving their previous post place relations at the workplace were not favourable and hours, holidays and other working conditions were poor near the top. People leaving for reasons specific to a particular workplace are in fact numerous.

Look again at the five signs, however, and something becomes noticeable. Three of them have nothing to do with company culture.

Cooperation, relationships, constraint, instruction, routine. Of these, what company culture can shift is relationships, and at most the manner in which cooperation is asked for. Constraint of time and place, the relation of following instruction, the form of repeating fixed work. These three remain however good the culture is. A good company still has a starting time, still has a superior, still has a scope assigned to you.

So the list is setting items that move with company culture and items that come attached to the form of employment itself in the same column. Set out that way, the response is prescribed to fit the former. The answer look for a company that suits you better does nothing whatever to the latter three.

What deserves confirming here is that this is not a matter of the writers being dishonest. That a publication dealing with job changes gives answers within the range that changing jobs can solve is only to be expected. Not answering about what lies outside that range is different from lying.

The problem lies rather with reading the list without knowing its range. Reading it and taking away perhaps this is a fixed idea, what was in fact a fixed idea was one or two of the five, and the rest were not. The list nevertheless pushes all of them together towards the side of the fixed idea.

And what is pushed there carries a side effect. For what has been called a fixed idea, there is no longer any way of responding. The prescription for a fixed idea can only be change how you think. Three of the five, however, are not matters of thinking, so trying to change how you think moves nothing. When nothing moves, a further failure accumulates: I cannot even change how I think.

One more thing about how the list is built. Articles on signs sometimes come with a self-diagnosis of the form the more that apply, the less you are cut out for it. This way of counting treats the five as equal in weight. Even if only one applies, if it is an item on the side of the form, it will not go for years. Even if four apply, if all of them are on the side of culture, a change of employer removes them. The number that apply does not indicate how hard they are to remove.

So what to look at when reading the list is not the total. Is the item that applied one that moves if the company changes, or one that comes attached to the form of employment? That sorting is the thing.

What the Word Aptitude Is Measuring

The phrase suited or unsuited carries one implicit premise: that whether you are suited is a property residing in the person.

Because of that premise, the response turns inwards. Acquire cooperativeness. Devise ways of not minding conversation. Change the meaning given to constraint so it stops mattering. Each of them takes the shape of measuring yourself and filling in what is short.

Research on fit in organisational psychology, however, does not adopt that premise. The framework used in the field is person–environment fit. The point is in the name. Fit is not an attribute of the individual; it is defined as a relation between two terms, the individual and the environment (Kristof, 1996, Personnel Psychology, 49(1), 1–49).

Put differently, the variable called fit holds no value from one side alone. The sentence this person’s fit is high does not acquire a determinate meaning until an environment is specified. It is the same as the sentence this key opens not standing without saying which lock.

This difference is not word-play. Change where the measuring is done and what becomes a candidate response changes.

Measure aptitude as a property of the individual, and the only thing movable is yourself. Change yourself, or accept yourself. No other options come out. In fact the answers offered by the sign-list articles tend to fit inside these two.

Measure fit as a relation, and there are two places to move. Your own side and the environment’s side. And the environment’s side has two further layers. The layer of which company, and the layer of the form of employment itself.

Changing employer moves only the first of these layers. Changing company is only part of changing environment, because it is a move to a different instance inside the same form.

So the advice look for a company that suits you is, precisely stated, conditional advice: if a company that suits you exists, it can be found. Where the condition holds it works, and it can hold. Where it does not — where the mismatch comes from the side of the form — the same sense returns however many times the change is made.

And it is precisely the experience of it returning each time that carries people to the conclusion so it is my problem after all. After two companies, three, with the same result, the only thing in common looks like yourself.

There is, however, one more thing in common. The form of employment. That does not change when the company does.

What a Company Draws In, Selects, and Leaves Behind

The environment has properties of its own. And those properties are not there by accident; they have a mechanism that generates them.

Organisational behaviour has an account known as the ASA framework. Presented by Schneider (1987, Personnel Psychology), the letters stand for attraction, selection and attrition. The claim is simple. An organisation draws in similar people, selects similar people, and those who do not fit leave of their own accord. As a result the people inside grow more homogeneous over time.

What this mechanism means is that the distribution of people currently inside the company is a biased sample to begin with. Those who did not fit are already not there.

This bears directly on the sense described at the outset. When you look around and feel that everyone is managing without trouble, what you are looking at is a population composed only of those who stayed. Not one person who felt the same thing and left is in that field of view.

The denominator of the comparison is missing from the start. And it is missing in a biased way. The more someone felt they did not fit, the higher the probability of their disappearing from view.

The correction does not stop there. Even among those who stayed, anyone holding the same sense without saying so looks, naturally, like someone managing without trouble. A sense does not necessarily show in the face.

So the observation only I do not fit has been corrected twice over. Corrected once by the invisibility of those who left, and again by the invisibility of those who keep quiet. Neither is an error of inference on your part. It is only that the view from that position is structurally built to look that way.

While these two corrections are operating, the information you hold goes on being biased in one direction. Only the information indicating that people with the same sense exist is systematically kept from arriving. And information that does not arrive cannot serve as material for inference. So the conclusion it is only me is a conclusion faithful to its material, reached with the material biased. Being no error of inference, it cannot be corrected from inside.

What could correct it is a way of counting the population outside the field of view. Look, for instance, at the turnover rate of that company. If three in ten leave within three years, the number who left comes to nearly half the number currently visible. Those who left may well include people who felt what you feel.

The homogenisation in ASA is a tendency, not a law. The larger the organisation, and the wider the range of roles, the weaker the homogenisation. So the degree to which everyone around seems alike differs considerably between companies. And in an organisation where homogenisation is weak, the observation that you alone stand out can be the more accurate observation.

Even in that case, however, the conclusion faces the same way. It does not become an account in which standing out is explained by a defect in you. Standing out in an organisation where homogenisation is weak means the mismatch with the form is showing that much more plainly.

The Mismatch Arises in Time, Judgement, the Measure of Evaluation, or Connection

Granting that the mismatch comes from the side of the form, what exactly is it that does not fit? Without dividing here, the discussion ends at somehow it does not fit.

What the contract of employment asks for divides broadly into four.

First, handing over time. Pay is made not against output but against time held. Even where a performance-linked component exists, the base is time. So on a day when the work finishes early, the seat still has to be occupied until closing.

Second, handing over judgement. What is done, in what order, and how far, is ultimately not decided by you. Even in a workplace with wide discretion, it is not you who decides the extent of the discretion.

Third, handing over the measure of evaluation. Whether your work was good is decided by an evaluator and not by you. You may consider you did good work, and if the measure differs, it will not be recorded that way.

Fourth, handing over connection. Who you work with and which customers you deal with are decided by placement. Part of the complaint that relationships are painful likely comes from here. It is not that the other person is disliked; it is that the other person cannot be chosen that tells.

For the second of these there is an accumulation of measurement. The demand–control model, long used in research on job stress, organised the finding that the burden on mind and body is decided less by the load of the work itself than by the combination of load and discretion. Work that is high in demand but high in discretion is unlikely to become a burden; the burden concentrates in work that is high in demand and low in discretion (Karasek, 1979, Administrative Science Quarterly, 24(2), 285–308).

This result fits everyday observation well. With the same amount of busyness, a week in which you set your own order of work leaves a different kind of tiredness. Conversely, a week that amounts to little in volume but in which you cannot tell what will be handed to you or when is draining. What tells is not the volume but whether you can decide.

And discretion has a ceiling in principle under the contract of employment, because it is not you who decides its extent. Even someone granted wide discretion was granted that width by another, and the possibility of its narrowing tomorrow cannot be excluded. The character of this item is that discretion is not held but granted.

The four carry different weights from each other. Which is heaviest differs from person to person. That is the point.

For someone for whom the constraint of time is heaviest, remote working or flexitime lightens it greatly. For someone for whom connection is heaviest, a transfer can change things dramatically. Where these two are the main cause, a change of employer is the right answer.

For someone, on the other hand, for whom judgement and the measure of evaluation are heavy, almost nothing changes wherever they go. The contract of employment is constituted by handing those two over. An employment that does not hand them over does not exist by definition.

And someone in whom the sense of not being cut out for employment has not gone for years is more likely to be in the latter group. Time and relationships fluctuate between workplaces, so if a fluctuating item were the cause, there would at some point be an experience of its lightening. That it has stayed constant for years itself suggests that the cause is an item that does not fluctuate.

What the Phrase “Not Cut Out for Salaried Life” Points At

Some people express the same sense with the phrase not cut out for salaried life. The two expressions are used with almost the same meaning, and what they contain differs slightly.

Employee is the name of a contractual status. Salaried life carries an image of a way of living on top of it. Turn up on time, climb the ladder inside an organisation, stay until retirement. When not cut out for it is said against this image, what is being refused is not the duties but the use of time the image presupposes.

Concretely, the point is that the receipt of reward is deferred. In the early years you receive less than what you worked for, and as service lengthens you receive more. This distribution only balances on the premise of long service. Labour economics has long noted that this shape functions as a mechanism encouraging continued service (Lazear, 1979, Journal of Political Economy, 87(6), 1261–1284).

So the image of salaried life contains a structure in which the return for what is handed over now lies in the distant future. And whether that future can be believed in decides whether the image can be ridden.

Some who feel not cut out for it are not short of ability; they cannot take on the deferral. The reasons vary. No confidence that the company will exist in the same form by then. No image of themselves being in the same place by then. Or simply the sense that the gap between what is handed over now and what is received now does not pay.

None of these is something explained as a matter of personality. They are matters of how conditions are read. Whether to take on a deferred contract is decided by how the likelihood of the future is estimated. Someone whose estimate is low declining to take it on is a rational judgement.

And here is the reason the sign-list articles cannot handle it. This judgement is a different kind of thing altogether from signs such as cooperativeness or communication. It is not a sign but an evaluation of contractual terms.

The difference shows directly in the direction of the response. For a sign, it is train it or accept it. For an evaluation of terms, it is reread the terms or change the terms. Rereading can genuinely work. Where the return on the deferral had been underestimated — where, for instance, the experience and the relationships obtainable in that organisation had been overlooked as to where they would later tell — the evaluation changes.

What rereading changes, however, is only the estimate. The structure of deferral itself remains. And several of the conditions making the deferral hard to take on lie outside the individual’s estimate. The likelihood of the same company continuing in the same form is not something that moves with your attitude.

So the phrase not cut out for salaried life is frequently accurate. What is not suited is not the duties but the way this distribution is received. And the distribution is a property held by the form of employment, not a property of you.

Even After Going Independent, Judgement, the Measure of Evaluation, and Connection Can Remain

If the mismatch can come from the side of the form, the natural conclusion follows: leave the form — go independent.

There is one pitfall here. What the word independent changes is only one of the four.

Consider the case of leaving the company and taking on work as an individual. The contract changes from a contract of employment to a contract for services.

The constraint of time does loosen at this point. It does not matter what time you start, nor where you work. The first of the four items moves greatly.

What of the remaining three?

Handing over judgement. The content of the job is decided by the commissioning side. What is done and how far is settled in the specification, and it is basically the other party who settles it. It readily becomes a configuration in which the superior of employed days has simply been replaced by a client.

Handing over the measure of evaluation. Whether the delivered work was good is again decided by the other party. If a request for revision comes, it is revised. The measure sits on their side.

Handing over connection. Here, at first sight, freedom appears to have arrived, because work can be chosen. In practice, however, the range that can be chosen from is limited to among the enquiries that came in. Where the route by which enquiries arrive has not been designed by you — where it depends on referral, a listing service, or search ranking — who you work with is being decided by that route.

So what the choice of independence reliably changes is discretion over time and place. For the other three, the party handed to moves from a superior to a client, and the relation of handing over itself remains.

This is why someone who felt not cut out for employment and went independent may say, some years later, that in the end little changed. This is not the independence having failed. It is that only one variable was moved.

Even one is a large change. Discretion over time and place stands on its own as sufficient reason to go independent. It should not be treated lightly. But where all four were expected to change, the difference comes out smaller than expected.

The same form turns up in the measurements. In the survey of freelance workers published by Japan’s Cabinet Secretariat in 2020, satisfaction divided clearly by item. On items concerning the working environment and discretion over how one works the proportion satisfied was high; on items concerning income it was low. Where the choice of independence reliably told, and where it told with difficulty, appear directly in the figures.

It can be read as unstable income is the natural price of independence. That is in fact how it is usually explained. One thing remains unexplained by that account, however. Even as the years accumulate, this item alone is hard to move. Skill rises year on year, the record grows, the rate goes up. Even so, the stability of income alone can stall beyond a certain level.

The reason is that stability is not a function of skill. What decides stability is on whose side the origin of the income sits. As long as the origin sits on the other party’s side, income moves when their budget or their circumstances move. Rising skill raises the rate, and the position of the origin does not move.

Seen from here, the point that three of the four remain and the point that satisfaction rises on everything but income are the same thing viewed from two sides. A form in which judgement, evaluation and connection are handed to the other party is also, as it stands, a form in which income moves with the other party’s circumstances.

There Is Another Form of Income That Returns Judgement, the Measure of Evaluation, and Connection

What, then, is needed to move the remaining three?

The answer lies not on the side of the type of contract but on the side of where the income arises from.

Where an order stands first, the other party’s judgement is interposed on each occasion of handing over. The judgement of what to make, the judgement of good or bad, the judgement of who to work with, all hang from that order as the origin. As long as the origin sits on the other party’s side, the three stay on their side.

In the form of making something first and leaving it in place, the order is reversed. What to make is decided by you. The first-order judgement of good or bad is made by you. And the people who receive it are not chosen by you; they gather towards what has been placed.

These two forms are not a difference of trade. Both live inside the same skill. A skill in writing can be used to take commissions, and the same skill can be used to hold a publication of your own. A skill in design can take individual jobs, and the same skill can make a template and leave it in place.

Why the three return in the latter, taken in order.

Judgement returns because the origin of starting is you. In the form of waiting for a commission, what is taken up is decided by the commission. In the form of making first, it begins from deciding what to make. This point alone changes how the daily hours get used.

The measure of evaluation returns because the judgement of good or bad becomes single-stage. In commissioned work, your judgement is followed by theirs, and the latter takes precedence. In the form of making first, it goes out on your judgement, and what comes afterwards is not a judgement but a response. A response is not a measure. Whether to take it in is decided on your side.

Connection returns because the manner of gathering is inverted. In the form where enquiries arrive, you choose from among those who came. In the form of leaving something in place, those who came having seen it gather. In the former they choose first; in the latter what you made stands first. The right to decide who you deal with rides on this difference of order.

And what matters is that the two are not exclusive. Rather than stopping one and moving to the other, one can be carried on while the other is laid over it. In fact few can begin with the latter alone. The very period of carrying on the former makes the material for the latter. If the same thing is being explained repeatedly, that also means people needing it are appearing repeatedly.

The shape of the opening question has changed here. It is no longer am I cut out for employment but in which of the two forms does my income currently arise.

The former is a question without an answer. Fit is a relation and not an attribute, so it holds no value until an environment is specified. The latter is a question that can be checked right now.

One Question Is Enough to Check Which Form Your Income Arises In

The judgement is simple. If you had stopped work last month, what would last month’s income have been?

If it would have been exactly the same, income is not tied to hours worked. If it would have fallen, it is tied. Many are in the latter case, and all of it would have gone is not an unusual answer.

This question contains no contractual status. An employee and a sole trader can answer it the same way. And the answer does not correlate with status. There are employees holding income that is not tied, and there are people years into independence still wholly tied.

So this question measures something different from the sense of not being cut out for employment. The sense measures which of the four items is heavy. This question measures the form of income that is producing those four.

For someone in whom the sense has not gone for years, it is the latter that carries meaning. The sense is unlikely to go unless the form changes. And the form does not change by changing company, nor by changing the type of contract, on its own.

So does the sense go once the form changes? Not the following month. Before it goes, what the sense was pointing at becomes legible. At that point the sense stops being an evaluation of yourself. It turns into a description of a situation.

I am not cut out for employment is a sentence about yourself. My income arises in a form that requires my time on each occasion of handing it over is a sentence about a situation. The latter has written into it what to check next. The former does not.

Plenty of people around managing without trouble, and only you pulling back. That observation was accurate. Confined to the visible range, counting again returns the same result. Counting again returns the same result and yet the conclusion alone goes wrong, because the line drawn from it — so it must be a problem on my own side — leaves what lies outside the visible range out of the reckoning. The people who felt the same thing have already moved somewhere outside the visible range.

The same reading works on the answer of changing the environment. What lies between those for whom the sense went after moving and those for whom it did not is not a difference of opinion. The item that weighed was different, that is all. One stood inside the range that answer reaches and the other stood outside it. What the ones outside had been receiving was not wrong advice but advice addressed elsewhere. Once the address is known, the same advice divides into occasions where it serves and occasions where it does not.

What moves the remaining two is not reselecting a company but the side of where the income arises. Does income remain in a month where you stop? This one question is answerable from where you already stand. Once the answer is out, whether the next thing to look at is the company or the income is settled.

Why these four items necessarily come attached to the form of employment, and what changing the form of income concretely means in terms of what you hold, are handled as a whole in Getting out of the labour-intensive form; how the relation of handing over judgement and the measure of evaluation persists after independence, seen from the side of the figure, is in Before you negotiate a higher rate, look at who is setting the figure; and why time does not open up even though its constraint has loosened is in Why raising your hourly rate does not make you free. Where the same sense is held in the words I do not want to be employed, Restating the reason for not wanting to be employed from the structure divides the substance of the refusal more finely, and the state of being unable to move towards the choice of independence itself is in Being unable to move towards independence is not a matter of resolve.