Commentary: Killing it at work but still worried? You might be an ‘anxious overachiever’

SELF-WORTH ON THE LINE

“There is a sense that anxious achievers will deliver because they feel like their self-worth is on the line,” adds Morra Aarons-Mele, author of The Anxious Achiever. That can spur incredible results.

But anxiety can also sometimes get in their way, Aarons-Mele says, driving them to a level of perfectionism that results in fuzzy priorities and missed deadlines. “Sometimes anxious achievers can trip themselves up,” she says. “And I speak from experience.”

If you fall into this camp, you may already be recognising yourself. Maybe you get glowing performance ratings yet worry you’re about to be fired. Maybe you think your family’s affection or approval hinges on your success. Maybe you feel the need to overdeliver to justify how much you bill for each six-minute increment. Maybe people tell you to “lower your standards” or “remember what’s most important”. And maybe burnout is starting to feel like a way of life.

But even if this sounds familiar, says Svenja Weber, a professor at INSEAD business school, it’s a mistake to put the focus only on employees, rather than workplace dynamics; stress and anxiety can spread like weeds in companies with up-or-out policies and hard-to-measure outcomes.

“If the only results that matter are tomorrow’s, and if you are only as valuable as clients and colleagues judge you to be, then being an insecure overachiever is not a pathology,” she writes in an article coauthored with colleague Gianpiero Petriglieri. “It is a necessity.”

Freeing oneself isn’t as easy as quitting. Too often, insecure overachievers replicate the conditions they fled – something Empson admits happened to her when she left investment banking and strategy consulting for academia. It’s the only way they know to be successful.

“If we really want to look at change, we need to understand our complicity in the status quo,” says Weber.