Marcus Buckingham On Gen-Z’s Fears About Work And Why Your Career Is Really A Scavenger Hunt

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arcus Buckingham is perhaps most known for his work on finding your strengths. He’s written at least three books on the subject—how to find what you’re good at, assess your strengths and then put them to work—and given countless high-profile talks on how to put them to work.

But when he spoke with Forbes to launch our latest subscriber series, “Conquering Career Obstacles,” Buckingham focused on something different: Fear. The role it plays in holding back our careers. Why too many people try to push it away. And how it can degrade into other emotions that hurt us far more than the very human emotion of feeling afraid.

“Fear isn't really the danger,” Buckingham said in the interview, which was aired live for registered subscribers April 21. “It's what fear metastasizes into when you shun it that really destroys things.”

“If you're fearful of taking on some new job, well, that turns into [doing] formulaic, standardized work, and that's what really kills you,” he said. “Instead, change your view of fear. What fear is really trying to share with you is something that you care really deeply about. Fear can be the first and best messenger of what you love.”

Listen to the audio version of the interview

Buckingham, whose new book Love + Work: How To Find What You Love, Love What You Do, and Do It for the Rest of Your Life, came out in early April, shared how in focus group research for the book, he spoke with many young “Gen-Z” employees on their biggest fears about their careers. For many, it wasn’t whether they’d get a job or get promoted. It was that they’d never find something they actually loved to do—or at least parts of their job they loved.

“Change your view of fear. What fear is really trying to share with you is something that you care really deeply about. Fear can be the first and best messenger of what you love.”

“They said ‘I look at all these people—even some of my peers—and they just seem to do what they love. They know what they love,” he says, but didn’t feel like they had found the same. “It's that whole cliché—which is actually kind of pressure—to find what you love and you never have to work a day in your life again.”

Asked about how managers can keep their teams from having cultures of fear, Buckingham pointed to the legendary management guru Peter Drucker. Buckingham said one of the most important takeaways from Drucker’s research is that “the first thing you do is drive out fear,” he says. “In that sense, what he’s talking about is [driving] out the lack of trust between a manager and [her] people. It’s not really fear. It’s the idea that my boss doesn’t have my back.”

Buckingham believes the metaphor we’ve long had about careers being ladders—or even lattices—is wrong, and that what we’re all really doing is going on a scavenger hunt, picking up the best pieces of different jobs, discovering the things we like to do, and then trying to move forward.

“Every single person, every one of us is trying to figure out how to take something that we love, some activity that we love to do, and turn it into contribution,” he says. “Everyone in every position is just scavenging. ... If that’s what you call imposter syndrome, just change the name. It's not imposter syndrome. It's being a human.”