I saw one of our students at lunch a couple of years ago and she clearly needed help in thinking about what to do. She was in the last week of our Global Executive MBA program which targets an older, international group of students and she had been working as a trader in a US bank for the last few years and I would guess she was in her mid thirties.
I asked how she was and she said that although she was terribly confused about what to do with her career she was afraid to come and see me because she knew I would ask her a simple question for which she had no answer.
The question is, of course, what do you want to do? I always ask and am always surprised by the way people react.
Many simply have no clue. Maybe they have been wrestling with the issue and maybe they have actually never thought about it.
Others answer in a way which is genuine but often not terribly useful in terms of job hunting. They might say I want to live in a specific city or find a better work life balance. Other answers have to do with finding the right kind of environment such as a small or large company with a certain kind of culture or style.
Many people have only figured out what they do not want to do which is at least a good start.
- Time to start paddling?
Listening to people’s stories about their careers I get the sense that many people allow their careers to develop without too much active guidance from themselves. It is as if they were going down a river in a raft and simply allowed the river to dictate what would happen next. When I say this to people they sometimes get a bit annoyed and start to explain how hard they worked to get where they are
Perhaps a young graduate was recruited to an interesting company after school. Promoted and sent to a specific Department or country. They were then headhunted to another organization based on their early success and had then progressed in that place due to a combination of hard work, opportunities presenting themselves and some good luck along the way.
What often strikes me is that the same person might have never imagined that they would become a Vice president in a logistics company or the managing Director of an Agricultural Chemical company.
The Talking Heads have a song in which a man asks “how did I get here?” and I think this happens to too many of us in the midpoint of our careers. The metaphor of the River is actually very powerful for many people and if you have ever been rafting then the following might strike a chord.
The most important thing about rafting is that you do not choose the direction you go in, the river does. If the river flows South, you go South. If it flows east, then that’s where you will go and if it wanders back and forth across geography then that’s where you will go. In many careers, there is a standard and predictable path that most people will follow simply by going “downstream”.
Sometimes a river will branch off and offer a choice. To make such a choice requires one to paddle and steer the raft towards the desired course and depending on the nature of the current, the rapids and your own strength it is sometimes possible and sometimes not.
Like a river, a professional trajectory might have exciting parts and dull slow parts. At times the rapids can be positively scary and the job so exciting that it requires complete focus in order to avoid capsizing. In my view this is often where we lose track of friends, children or spouses. We get so focused on what we are doing that we simply lose track of other things. Metaphorically there is the danger of things falling out of the boat!
What is clear is that if one finds him or herself on a river which is going in the wrong direction, that river will never take you closer to your goal! The only choice is to literally get off the water, carry your boat across the mountains and put it in a different river which is actually going in the desired direction. Rafters and canoeists call this “portage” and it is very difficult. It’s sometimes even hard just to get off the water and the mountain trails can be dangerous and difficult.
I was recently speaking to a group of students in their late thirties and forties and one woman remarked that the older you get, the more stuff you end up carrying around in the boat (husbands, children, mortgages, etc.) and the harder it is to carry it over the mountains.
When I ask people who have been successful allowing the course of events to guide their progress what they really want to do, they often have no idea. They have been on a particular river for so long that they barely remember why they started on it in the first place and have a hard time imagining anything else.
Sometimes getting fired or having to make an emergency career change for personal reasons can be the greatest thing that can happen to someone because it allows them for perhaps the first time in a long time to think about what they really want to do. In the metaphor it is like capsizing and we often need to have some outside jolt to force us to reexamine our lives.
Unfortunately we often lose things in the process but if this kind of thing happens soon enough it might be a blessing.
Many years ago, I was laid off from my job as an engineer in the offshore drilling industry and am sure today that it was the best thing that could have happened to me. I needed the “kick in the pants” to get on with my ideas of going to business school and pursuing an international career in management.
There are several writers who do a good job in encouraging people to explore their preferences and Mark Albion’s Making a Life and Making a Living played a major part in my own decision to leave consulting and dedicate myself full time to teaching.
My purpose here is not to paraphrase Mark or some other authors but only point out that career change is all about rejecting the “go with the flow” idea and to metaphorically pick a river and choose where you want to go.
- You have to choose
The most common response to the hardest question is “I am open to many things or even anything”. While this response may be true, my experience is that it often is not and even if it was, it is very difficult to help someone who does not know what they want.
If someone does not know what they are looking for it seems to me that they will probably never find it.
What people who want to make a change and MBA graduates often believe is that by not choosing a course they keep their options open. In my experience most people are reluctant to choose but this reluctance has different causes.
There are a small number of people who are genuinely open to different types of work, different industries and even living in different parts of the world. They are kind of like the people who shop for last minute holidays and literally go the airport not knowing where they will end up. While some might call such people free spirited or adventurous and I like the attitude when applied to a vacation, in dealing with one’s own career, I find it to be somewhat irresponsible.
What is much more common are people who say that they are open to a number of ideas (or any idea idea) but aren’t really. One very large group of people simply need a job which will pay sufficiently well for them to maintain their lifestyle, sense of pride or accomplishment, or maybe pay a mortgage or a student loan. What these people are really saying is that I need a job more than I need to determine what type of career to develop. The essential logic is that by not choosing they will increase their chances of finding gainful employment.
In my experience this idea is mistaken for three reasons.
One reason it does not work is that nobody wants to hire anybody who has little interest in the job, industry or mission of the company or organization in question. My first job after University was in the oil drilling business and I once asked the man who hired me why he picked me over the other undergraduates and graduate students who had applied. His answer was simply that “you wanted the job” and ever since then I have seen this basic truth again and again.
People like to hire people who are motivated, interested, and even passionate about whatever is the essential nature of the position whether it’s developing advanced technology, building market share for a specific product, crunching numbers, or saving the planet.
True interest is hard to fake and the other thing about people who manage large numbers of people or the Human Resources executives who often manage the process and headhunters who are sometimes involved is that all of them develop a fine sense for listening to people and spotting anything that does not ring true. If something sounds false, then your candidacy will be rejected. It’s that simple.
Another reason that keeping one’s options open does not work is that people divide their efforts amongst different directions and rarely manage their search in a particular industry very well. Time, contacts, and degree of commitment are all somewhat finite resources and in my experience it is a bad idea to spread them out too thin.Good homework, for example, on an opportunity is very time consuming and it is not likely that someone who is literally all over the place will do a very good job in researching a specific company, market or sector. Candidates demonstrate their interest by doing their homework and again, it is hard to fake.
While the subject of networking will be further explored in another posting, one can not ask the same person for help in clearly different directions. They will (correctly) think you do not know what you want to do and will be more reluctant to help.
Finally, commitment can be a powerful tool and it only works when it is real. Hernan Cortes burnt his own ships after arriving in what was later called Mexico so that his troops would have no choice but to press on to total victory. “Burning ones ships” is the equivalent of publicly committing oneself to a limited set of choices and then having to do the hard work to make it happen.
A third group of people secretly know what they would love to do but have given up on it as unrealistic. They then shut down what is in their hearts and start looking for “a job”. As this issue will be deeply discussed in Chapter VII, let me just question the probability of success if one is pursuing a course which goes against his or her personal desires and ambitions. It does not sound like a winning plan to me!
The last group of people truly does not know what they want to do and have trouble choosing between wide varieties of seemingly interesting options. What is usually missing in this mindset is a little reality. I do believe that most of us are capable of doing virtually anything but also feel strongly that we can not do everything at once and that potential employers will be reluctant to give people a chance to something they have never done before and for which they have no significant qualifications or interest.
- What to do?
To help all the types of people discussed above with the question about what they want to do, I use a simple framework which seems to work well for the people I have a chance to help. The framework is shownin fig. 1 and combines three elements which I have found to be the most critical, the CV, Constraints and Passion. Its purpose is simply to force people to think beyond their normal responses and generate concrete ideas about what to do next.
Essentially the idea is to look deeply into each of the three concepts and use them to choose one or maybe two concrete ideas for specific jobs in specific industries and markets.
The Curriculum is what a person has actually done. Where do they come from? What languages do they speak and with which cultures are they familiar?
Constraints have to do with family commitments, money requirements, and other personal situations which will honestly limit someone’s choices.
Passion is what really makes people excited. It might be a product, a service, a way of interacting with others. It might be a specific sport or type of travel. In my experience everyone is passionate about something and the challenge sometimes is to actually articulate what that really is.
The black dot inthe middle of the diagram represents the step that very few people actually make. What actual job might exist in the world where a potential employer will value my experience; where I will be able to fulfill my commitments to my friends, family, and banker; and where I will actually have a chance to do something for which I can be passionate about. This step is both analytical and creative in that one needs to think through the issues involved and dream up a story which actually makes sense.
Additional posts will develop theseideas further.