Career Management Lession 1/6 - Chart Your Career Path

Chart Your Career Path

Don’t wait for someone else to decide the direction of your career. When it comes to managing your career, you are in charge.

Take charge of your career

If you’re like most people, you spend more waking hours at work than anywhere else. So your career should be a positive part of your identity.

For your career to be fulfilling, it’s important to actively manage it. Too often, people assume if they work hard, their career will unfold the way they hope. But that’s not true. Your career requires action and attention from you. Think of it as 99% your responsibility—and only 1% your company’s.

You need to actively manage your career because:

1. Your manager juggles multiple responsibilities and priorities, and may discuss your career aspirations only at an annual performance review.
2. You are the best advocate for your own interests.
3. Your manager will appreciate your proactive willingness to set goals, keep your expertise current, and ask for growth opportunities.

Career management differs from a job search. You might actively look for a new job at different junctures of your life, but career management is an ongoing process.

As you manage your career, you:

1. Discover your interests and values
2. Cultivate new skills in light of what your organization and industry will need in the future
3. Set goals and track your accomplishments
4. Forge relationships within your company and industry
5. Develop a “personal brand”

A career lattice

Because of the fast pace of global innovation and change, workers must update their skills and broaden their abilities more frequently than ever before. For most people, the idea of a “lifetime career” is passé.

Imagine, instead, your career unfolding on a lattice, not a ladder. A lattice is a broad, flexible structure that allows for multiple routes to many destinations, versus the simple “up” imperative of a ladder.

Consider what a lattice looks like compared with a ladder

A lattice, because it is wide and accessible at many points, reflects today’s reality. The lattice helps:

• Diversify your skills. When you consider multiple career paths and prepare accordingly, you cultivate a broader variety of skills. This makes you more valuable to your current employer, and to the market as a whole.

• Improve work/life fit. On a ladder, you move up only when the position above you is free. In contrast, a lattice has flexibility. You can determine how fast you’ll move, which direction you move, and when you move. With a lattice, you and your manager can discuss several possible paths, acknowledge trade-offs, and devise creative approaches.

• Redefine success. Rather than measuring yourself by your title, salary, or seniority, the career lattice allows you to define meaningful, satisfying work.

A dual career?

Do you know people who refer to themselves in two ways—as in, “I’m a website developer and a weaver” or “I’m a store manager and a trialthlete ”? These kinds of identifications are increasingly common, as people take a more integrated view of work and life.

In the past, managers may have viewed employees’ outside passions as unwelcome distractions. They worried that workers who pursued supplemental careers wouldn’t be committed to their regular jobs. However, experts believe that the opposite may be true—that a strong commitment to a secondary interest may make you better at your regular job too.

Do you have an interest you might pursue as a dual career? Or do you supervise an employee in this situation?

Here are few benefits of dual careers:

1. Help retain talent. When managers work with employees to develop a work schedule that makes room for both careers, employee loyalty increases. People who have dual careers tend to be dynamic, entrepreneurial, and curious—all ideal workplace qualities.
2. Protect against burnout. Supplemental careers are typically very different from day jobs. Like an exercise regimen for the brain, these secondary roles provide different stimulation that may help prevent boredom and burnout.
3. Develop diverse capabilities and skills. Employees will likely be able to apply knowledge or insight from their other passions to their regular work. For instance, a website designer develops a new way to layer program codes thanks to insights she picked up in her work as a weaver. Or a retail manager who competes in triathlons may learn lessons about resilience that he can use to inspire his store team.

Success redefined

Your career doesn’t exist in isolation from the rest of your life. Rather, your strongest career choices will resonate positively across all aspects of your life—self, home, and community. And the opposite is true too. When you can satisfy your most important priorities outside the office, you’ll be happier and more engaged at work.

As you manage your career, keep these questions in mind:

1. Does this career goal allow me to develop the skills that are most interesting and important to me?
2. What career goals would be the most costly—in personal regrets and missed opportunities—if I didn’t pursue them?
3. Have I chosen career goals that would be viewed positively by the people who matter most to me?
4. How am I feeling in each domain of my life: work, home, community, and self? Are there discrepancies between what is important to me, and how I’m spending my time and energy?
5. What, if any, fears hold me back—such as the fear of failing, losing the comforts of my current role, or seeming too aggressive or ambitious? How can I address these?

The Art of Career Development

“What am I really good at?’ “What’s the purpose of my work?” I’m sure you ask yourself those kinds of questions from time to time. We all do. Except that three or four decades ago, we used to struggle with those questions once or twice in our life—when we chose our line of work, when we decided to break away from the expectations of our family.

Today we encounter them again, and again, and again. Not just when we’re struggling, but, paradoxically, when we’re succeeding. That’s because the better you do, the broader the range of opportunities you have. You no longer just get to move up, you get to move around. You get to look for work that feeds your passion and that allows you to express yourself, to serve a broader cause.

Today’s careers are less like ladders, they’re more like works of art. This is why in my research and in my work helping leaders develop, I advise people to think of their careers very much like that. Like artists.

First, artists build on a foundation of expertise. You cannot be Picasso if you’re not handy with brushes. You don’t need to be the expert in your field. But you need knowledge of your function, of the industry you’re trying to get into. You need the ability to communicate, to motivate your team, to build a network of supporters around your initiative.

Skills are necessary, but they’re not enough. Artists use their skills to express something that’s both deeply personal and resonates with an audience. They don’t really make pictures, or sculptures, or music. They make meaning.

In business, that means being able to know and show why what you do matters. To you and to others—what difference it makes. And of course, putting yourself out there can be scary. This is why, like every artist, you need courage.

Expertise, meaning, and courage are things that are a lot harder to build and hold onto on your own. This is why artists congregate: to teach and inspire and support each other. And that’s the last thing you can learn about career management from artists: the importance of having what I call an “identity work space”; that is, a community which helps you bring what you do closer together with what you are. It may be a community within an established institution, like your company, or a profession, like medicine or the law. But it might be a less formal community, like a volunteer group, an event you attend regularly, a group of classmates you stay connected to as you move around.

And if you’re a manager, ask yourself, is your team or your organization an identity workspace for the people who work there? Do you encourage people to find their voice and defy convention? Because if you do, they won’t just be more satisfied and creative and productive. They will also think twice before leaving, because they will know that they can’t grow as fast and express themselves as fully elsewhere.