Learned self-leadership?

Is it a contradiction to say that self-leadership can be learned?

With true self-leadership, shouldn't you already know what you want?

Maybe, but isn't it also possible to learn more about what you want and get better at making informed choices over time? In the same way you get better at most things if you make an effort to learn more about them?

[San Francisco, CA - see more at Saundra's Photostream here] ✪

In my view, self-leadership is important to career success but critical to meaningful, personal career success. What makes it worth learning is the richness of reward in your relationship with work. The potential for satisfaction and fulfilment in individual work/life.

Have a great weekend wherever you are!

All the best,

Paul

[✪ This is a great night shot of San Francisco. It spoke of waiting in line and following the person in front of you (an analogy for poor career management and the antithesis to making your own choices and finding your own way). The car crossing to the left also offers a wonderful feeling of speed and movement (possibly even freedom or progress). The driver could just be lucky that there is no traffic in his/her direction but she/he could just as easily know a better route to where they want to be! If you interpret the pic in a different way, let us know! All the best, Saundra & Paul]

Why we work

Successful people have a relationship with work that helps them in a number of ways. All of them positive.

It can be different for each person but success in your relationship with work can be found in elements like: the challenges of your job; the friendships within your team; opportunities to learn & develop; the feeling you are making a difference or the feeling of personal achievement.

Whatever the individual mix might be, successful people have a relationship with work that moves them and moves them forward.

[Is it still a temple if no one worships at it?]

But success isn't just about the good times rolling in. There are times when excitement, energy & inspiration can be obscured by doubt, tiredness or fear. These are the times when our relationship with work reminds us that we work for a reason.

Reminding us why we work during difficult times, our individual reasons give us what we need. For example: the resolve to dig deeper; the determination to keep going; the insight to make changes; the courage to face adversity and overcome major obstacles.

Understanding your relationship with work is critical to career success in a number of ways. All of them positive.

For more about understanding your individual relationship with work follow these links:

Know what you are doing

work/life: A long term relationship

Career Decision Making: The longer term view

One career, One conversation

Work, relationships & your career

In career choice, less always means more

When failure defines success

The trouble of thinking twice

For the to-do list or the don't call us pile?

All the best!

Paul

Managing career change

Career change comes with unique challenges but a great deal of lasting importance can be learned about our individual relationship with work when change is chosen or forced upon us. Moments of career change can also be the best time to apply career learning based on our hard-won, personal experiences.

Individuals who deal with career change well are able to do so because they understand their current situation as well as their preferred direction for the future. These best-in-class 'Opportunity Managers' understand the pros and cons of their current job, how it might be improved and where they would like it to take them.

When new opportunities come along, their relative merits can be assessed in the same context, allowing critical questions to be answered faster and with greater relevance. Questions like, How is this new job an improvement? How does it affect my current commitments? What additional experiences will I gain? How will it help my long-term objectives move forward?

With a clearer understanding of what is important to you, what you are good at and what you want more of in the future, career change can be managed within the context of personal success. For anyone new to this blog, personal success is the version of success that you define through your values, talents and goals.

Acquiring this knowledge, applying it to your current situation and referring to it in your ongoing career decision making, enables career change to be managed - along best-in-class lines - with your preferences in mind.

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Email or comment with your career change scenarios, questions or success stories to help the debate move forward. My thanks to everyone for reading, Paul.

work/life balance wobbles some more...

This post on The Times AlphaMummy blog - Work-life balance - Everybody wants it, nobody has a clue how to get it [specifically point 1 about work/life balance] - reminded me of the first set of posts that got this blog started. Back then this blog was about the career planning and decision making questions work/life balance was failing to answer.

The intention wasn't to start with a negative story. Work/life balance has been enormously useful to organisations and individuals since it was first coined as a term in the 1970s. Among other things it forced employers to think about the intrusion of work into the personal lives of their employees. It also gave individuals the chance to recognise the importance of their commitments and interests outside of work and how they might be protected.

What was always beyond work/life balance however, was the ability to understand and rationalise the relationship between work and 'non-work' in individual cases. This blog set out to explore the subject further, test new solutions and support career planning and decision making for positive outcomes.

In thinking about what comes after work/life balance, employers and employees are authoring a new chapter in the story of work/life relationships and the most exciting progress is being made right now.

Oliver's story: Internal promotion

This is Oliver's description of managing a recent career development opportunity, told briefly in his own words: "I worked in the operations team but always wanted to work on the investment side. With help I was able to leverage my experience and gain the relevant experience without the title, to the point that I have now secured a role on the investment team."

So, what did Oliver do from a career management perspective? First, he objectified his intention to move from a support role to his employer's core business function. Once this goal was established, Oliver could interpret and manage situations for their ability to help him achieve this aim. This meant that when he was asked to take on additional workload and responsibility in a crisis, it was easier for him to see it as a proving ground for his talents. If he performed well it would be another qualifying step towards his goal of internal promotion.

Looking back on these events, on the subject of careers advice Oliver said: "I have used career services before and have generally been disappointed. I found that traditionally, such advice is focused purely on how to progress externally so it offered little help in my situation."

Oliver's experiences also prove how close opportunities for internal development can be. He was already in a position of trust within his employer's business. Demonstrating that he could be relied upon when the company needed him most confirmed his greater potential within the business and gave his managers the opportunity they needed to realise this too.

Career perspectives

Dictionary.com defines perspective as, 'the faculty of seeing all the relevant data in a meaningful relationship'. Perspective can also mean, 'the choice of a single point of view from which to sense, categorize, measure or codify experience' (Wiktionary.com). The Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary simply calls perspective, 'a particular way of considering something'.

Perspective in the context of career planning is essential to success and all of these definitions play a part. The ability to see all relevant data is important but almost impossible to achieve without outside help. For example, you may be convinced that you are the best candidate for a job but that conviction needs to be shared externally in order for you to be successful.

Perspective as a single point of view is vital to a healthy relationship with work. If you are not happy in your career it doesn't matter how many other people envy your position, your sense of fulfilment or ability to achieve personal success is greatly reduced.

Personal success is a particular way of considering success. Not better or worse in comparison to anyone else, just appropriate to your unique perspective.

Career Decision Making: The longer term view

In any decision making there are always essential, short-term priorities to be considered. For long-term plans to be successful, they must be able to interpret and adjust to everyday events. If they fail to do this, decision making begins to lose its relevance or, worse still, the long term plan becomes obsolete. Career decision making is a good example of planning that needs to be alive to the moment but also mindful of longer term aims.

For instance, you might be offered a promotion but you had planned on retiring in a few years time. Flexing your retirement plan to accept the promotion might be the decision that serves you best before and after you retire. Without the ability for your long-term plan to change, taking the promotion is out of the question and all of its positive effects are placed out of reach.

Good career planning should move us closer to what we want in the future by enabling better decision making in the present. A clearer understanding of our values, talents and goals can move us closer to personal success, one decision at a time.

work/life: A long term relationship

One advantage in working with the same people over time is that you get to know them very well. You learn to appreciate what people/colleagues/friends are good at, where they need help, what situations or tasks they would rather avoid. All the while they are learning the same about you. In the long run, good relationships are lasting while those that challenge without reward tend to fall away.

Relationships that last don't always do so through everyday contact. Sometimes there are prolonged gaps between encounters but you always recognise a good relationship because that call out of the blue or chance meeting can be uplifting for some time afterward. It can lead to more regular contact in the future as well.

There are similarities in the way we as individuals relate to work. Sometimes our relationship with work isn't easy and we don't feel rewarded. Occasionally there can be a separation we would like to avoid -- redundancy is a good example of this.

Through the good times and bad, our relationship with work is one we are tied to for the length of our career. For this reason alone, it helps us to work through the difficulties and learn what we can to make the relationship work.

Just like good relationships created with colleagues and friends over time, a successful relationship with work can be achieved through an appreciation of what is important to you, where your strengths lie and what keeps you going. Values, talents and goals defining personal success.

Laura's story: Career Inspiration

Every now and then - almost without fail - a personal story about work comes along that is just plain inspiring. Such stories are hard to do justice when they are re-told because the person telling their own story brings it to life best. I hope the following story doesn't lose too much in translation. 

Laura's family had a successful restaurant business. She worked in the restaurants from an early age and loved the interaction with the customers and being part of the team. She was talented, hard-working and the natural choice to lead the business in the future. After leaving school everyone expected Laura to continue in the family business but to their surprise, she turned this down to pursue a career elsewhere.

After carving out a successful entrepreneurial career in property development, having a family, buying several houses at home and abroad - all without family assistance - Laura had reached a key moment in her career. After a lot of thought, she surprised everyone again, this time by choosing to join the family business.

This story has been simplified a great deal but although it misses the vibrancy of its original telling it can still inspire. This is because it demonstrates a number of attributes essential to a successful relationship with work: determination, commitment, self-sacrifice, humility, self-direction, clarity of thought, the list could go on. But, more than any of these, Laura's story demonstrates the value of exploring your relationship with work at a fundamental level.

Laura could have easily taken the job in her family's business and been very successful but she realised - at an earlier age than most - that success without personal meaning isn't enough. Laura wanted to prove to herself that she was the best candidate to lead the family business and that this career choice was relevant to her values, talents and goals once she understood them better. Laura's reward is the knowledge that a genuine connection did exist and that with it comes a greater chance of success with personal meaning and a far more rewarding relationship with work.

Failure: A label applied by mistake

Failure is inevitable in every career. Experiencing failure, and managing the events that can cause us to fail, is therefore critical to the overall success of every individual. Dealing with failure means looking hard at what we - ourselves and others - label as failures and applying this knowledge to better define our success in the future.

Failure, large or small, will occur in every career. Outcomes we would have liked to be different contain valuable lessons for us all. Not getting a promotion or being made redundant are good examples. Most of us plan for the alternative outcome. The person with the greatest chance of succeeding in the future however, is the one who looks into the 'failed' outcome or event, seeking to understand it further.

Events like this - 'failures' as we are programmed to call them - can teach us where we went wrong and why. Under closer examination, such events create opportunities for future successes based on empirical, practical lessons that are also highly personal to us. In short, failures can author and enable genuine progress and they do so with a level of personally relevant insight hard to find in general examples or generic 'How-to' career texts.

So what can any of us do when faced with uncertainty or facing up to failure in our careers? Initially, the aim should be to understand our situation: How did we get here? What were our previous aims? Do we feel different about them now?

Understanding these questions begins to focus on our relationship with work. Exploring our values, talents and goals (see earlier posts for more details on these) continues this and prepares us for the future independently. In time, this externally tested, individual preparation helps us manage opportunities in the immediate future and give our preferences a better chance of coming out on top in the longer term.

Failure is essentially the title we give to our mistakes. Learning from failure can be a fast-track to identifying and defining personal success. Through the failures and mistakes that are inevitable in all of our careers, an insight into lasting satisfaction and fulfilment can be achieved.

For the to-do list or the don't call us pile?

With all due apologies, today's post is more of a collection of thoughts than collected thought.

• Taking the time to study the career events and achievements you are most proud of, or have remained connected to over time, offers useful insight into your relationship with work
  
• Starting a career dialogue that is ongoing, inquisitive and challenging creates more meaning in your relationship with work and the overall direction of your career
• Setting out to find a vocation is a difficult task but gaining a better understanding of what is important to us in our work, what we are good at and what keeps up going, can help to define our vocation more clearly and move us steadily towards it
• Instead of being something to achieve in the distant future, with a greater insight into our values, talents and goals, personal success can become part of our working experience today

Have a great weekend!

Paul

An argument that holds water or just a bad analogy?

You may have struggled with your career in the past but have you ever thought about your relationship with work? Old-school career planning enters our thinking at specific times in our working lives or around specific events: when we leave school or college, when we are looking for a new job, if we are made redundant or when we start to think about retirement. The traditional career planning approach is like the office fire extinguisher: always there, most of the time ignored but in an emergency we all rush for it.

Your relationship with work is a new way to think about your career and, like most relationships, in order to be successful it needs regular thought and attention. This ongoing dialogue around your relationship with work has more in common with the office water cooler than the fire extinguisher: it's still there all the time but it's used everyday and you always feel better after a huddle around it.

Okay, so the water cooler and the fire extinguisher serve a different purpose but shouldn't you have access to something that serves a better purpose for your career too? Think about your relationship with work and how it could become a positive, ongoing dialogue. Something that can be with you for as long as you need it to be as a source of confidence, information and insight. Something that belongs to you alone that can be explored and understood to define and move you closer to personal success.

If your relationship with work sounds like an interesting subject, start by looking more closely at your values, talents and goals (this post might be useful here, Looking back, around and ahead). Alternatively, for more bad analogies keep visiting this blog!

The value of career conversations - Update!

New evidence continues to suggest that companies are realising the benefits of their involvement in the career conversation and how it can deliver value to employer and employee. This recent article from Personnel Today (Retention improved by talent management for seniors) is a great follow up to the post on this blog a few days earlier (KEEP Consulting: The value of career conversations...)

In this employer's example, focusing on the career conversation and clarifying the "goals and ambitions" of senior staff has meant, "they're motivated to join in with new opportunities, more productive, more likely to stay, and we get a bigger contribution from them."

Being critical of this article for a moment, it is written more for the employer than the employee but the positives described above do appear to be derived from the greater sense of purpose and reward experienced by individual employees following a conversation that targets their personal success.

Try not to be too put off by the fact that senior management are the immediate beneficiaries either. With the benefits a programme like this can deliver, it won't be too long for staff at other levels to be included.

What a pleasant change to read a positive headline too!

What would you like to be doing 5 years from now? - Revisited

A previous post on this blog (What would you like to be doing 5 years from now?) suggested that the most successful answers to this question place genuine career knowledge ahead of what might get you through an interview. For that reason, it is probably worth considering that the most successful answers have two main components:

1) Relevance to their audience (company, job, interviewer, etc.)

2) Relevance to the future of the individual's career

A great deal of effort is expended to ensure that our answers are relevant to their audience, particularly the interviewer. Of course the most successful answers do not forget this but they also do not forget the importance of the individual's career.

Understanding a preferred direction for the future of your career offers insight into both areas. With greater insight into what is important to you, what you are good at and what keeps you going, your answer begins to resonate with interviewers for its clarity and depth.

Whether you are interviewing for the role of a chief executive or an administrative assistant, an answer based on your values, talents and goals is arguably the best method of creating a link between this question and your personal success.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Learn how your answer to this question can evolve over time at exploreyourcareer.com

Where do you want to be in 5 years time?

Career planning: Handle with care

In his best-selling book Blink, the author, columnist and occasional blogger Malcolm Gladwell (gladwell.com), makes a strong case for decision making that leaves room for understanding in the moment. The cues that we take both consciously and sub-consciously from a situation are as valid as any pre-conceived intention or conditioning, in some cases more so. In other words, any plan or conditioning with little or no room for 'live' action and reaction can hinder rather than help.

For the same reasons, a successful career plan should not limit opportunities by being too prescriptive. It does need to answer questions convincingly on the subject of where we are heading and why but it should also be flexible enough to take into account the opportunities we encounter, need to process and manage every day.

Adopting the habits of successful people will get you so far but only so far as they apply to the situations you are in, or how much you agree with the role model you have chosen. A much stronger case presents itself for a career plan based around the core components of each individual's relationship with work. Only a plan that has been individually authored in this way has the ability to define a meaningful direction for the future and allow the freedom to act and interact in the moment.

I hope Mr Gladwell would approve.

Looking back, around and ahead

We all want something different from our careers. Some prize the creation of wealth above everything else, others are satisfied by the security that comes with a profession or trade. More still work for necessity or view their careers as a means to an end, whether that end is providing for their family or financing next year's holiday.

The individual aims for our careers are further complicated because for most of us they change with the changing circumstances of our lives. For example, when you got your first job you might have been single, after 10 years you might be in a relationship, possibly married. After 25 years at work, whatever your partnership status, your motivations and needs are likely to be different again. A multitude of events and factors, either at home or at work, contribute to this change. Change that every individual needs to respond to and manage if their career is to deliver personal success.

This blog started with a challenge to the way we manage our careers. The intention of that challenge wasn't to provide all of the answers, it was to try to understand if a better way existed to deliver success from our working lives. I'm not a professional writer and sometimes I don't think I have done this subject justice but I have continued the challenge, learning from my mistakes along the way.

Looking back over this blog (the other career related blogs and the opinions and experiences of the people I have encountered along the way) there is more evidence today to suggest that independent, forward-looking career leadership is not only possible, but also within the reach of more people now than any time previously. The moment anyone has a decision or choice related to work (e.g. Which company do I join? What skills should I learn? or What do I want from my next year at work?) they also have the opportunity to make that choice alongside a preference for where it might lead their future career.

The best and simplest method of ensuring that the decisions we make today are connected to what we would like from the future, lies with an understanding of our individual values, talents and goals. Asking three simple questions, "What is important to me?", "What am I good at?" and "What do I want more of?", brings values, talents and goals and our relationship with work into view. As this understanding develops, for the first time decisions can be made in a context that looks beyond immediate factors and needs. A connection between the decisions we make today the opportunity they create for our careers in the future.

Although supporting evidence has grown, this conversation needs to face new challenges today if it is to deliver value to anyone else in the future. Its future relies on the ability to make a difference to individual careers and that future was never in the hands of this blog. To use a personal example, a great deal has changed in my own career since this blog started but responding to this change and continuing in a direction that makes sense for my career is down to an understanding of my values, talents and goals and what they define as my personal success.

There is some risk to considering this conversation in your own career decision making but if this blog has achieved anything to date, it is demonstrating the rewards for doing so.

What outplacement did next

The next few years present outplacement consultancies with a once in a generation opportunity to respond to what some commentators have called once in a generation economic conditions.

Outplacement has an opportunity to deliver greater value to individual careers and contribute more positively to the health and success of their clients' organisations.

Working with individuals who have experienced outplacement at various levels illustrates the need for a new process that delivers career long benefits. Academic and customer satisfaction studies over the last few decades highlight this. For example, outplacement is challenged for focusing only on re-employment [Davenport, D. W. (1984). Outplacement counseling: Whither the counselor? Vocational Guidance Quarterly, 32, 185-190] and for having little or no interest in studying the results from the perspective of individual clients [Wooten, K. C. (1996). Predictors of client satisfaction in executive outplacement: Implications for service delivery. Journal of Employment Counseling, 33, 106-116].

More recent studies offer new insights but the example of the challenges above best illustrate the need for innovation in the aims, delivery, results and measurement of quality outplacement services. Why? Because the need for change highlighted in 1984 and 1996 has had enough time to sink in.

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Have you gone through an outplacement process as an individual? Has your company engaged an outplacement consultancy? What were your experiences? What were the results? What were the longer-term outcomes? If you have an opinion please comment here or email me at worklifefusion(at)googlemail(dot)com

Celebrating the decline of the job for life

New US Department of Labor statistics quoted in the previous post continue to reveal more about employee/employer relationships and the career long relationship between individuals and their work. Despite the job and direction changes they expose, it wasn’t too long ago that the phrase ‘a job for life’ was associated with many careers.

Employers and employees took a longer term view of their commitment and it was not uncommon for a 25 or 30 year career to be spent within the same organisation. So why is it now time to celebrate these statistics and welcome the decline of the job for life?

Employers have benefited for some time from more fluidity in the labour market but the advantages to employees are only just beginning to be fully understood. With the ability to exercise choice throughout their career, the average worker has the chance to apply the lessons learned through direct, practical experience in their career decision making. 

This degree of insight into any individual relationship with work is invaluable. For example, a career decision made at 18 years of age might still be relevant at age 35 but if it is not, a more informed choice can be based on the understanding created through 20 years in work.

Interpreting an individual’s values, talents and goals enables such informed choices to be made. Decisions are based on what an individual has learned through their full range of experiences at work, what this qualifies them to do and what they are motivated to do in the future.

The decline of the job for life has created the opportunity for more individuals to pursue personal success. This in turn can create a greater number of successful and meaningful relationships with work. A reason to celebrate indeed.

One career, One conversation

According to new statistics from the US Department of Labor, individuals born between 1957 and 1964 held an average of 10.8 jobs from ages 18 to 42. Similar studies have revealed that the average US worker experiences 3 to 5 trade/professional changes over the lifetime of their career.

This report and statistics like the above are a fantastic insight into the nature of careers, job searching, recruitment, redundancy and a host of other aspects that influence individual success but for me the most interesting question it provides insight into is: How should we prepare for the life of our career?

In the 3 to 5 direction changes and 10.8 jobs, the average worker will interview, meet recruiters, work alongside new colleagues, experience new bosses and work with a variety of customers and clients. Jobs, surroundings, locations, pay and satisfaction are all variables but one remaining constant is the individual's relationship with work. This in turn suggests a dialogue focusing on our relationship with work, adaptable to the changing nature of our careers, as the best preparation for any individual.

A long-term dialogue based on the pursuit of personal success, founded on rigourously tested values, talents and goals, prepares for the changes all individual careers will encounter. Not only does this understanding allow different jobs and direction changes to be dealt with, it also goes further to ensure that changes are made in a direction that delivers improvement to the individual with every step.

Of course, not every change will be a promotion (change for example, could mean redundancy) but each change can be experienced, even managed, with the application of past learning in present decision making. In addition, guidelines from the fundamental elements that continue to shape our relationship with work (e.g. values, talents and goals) provide insight into a preferred direction going forward.

Studies like the above create opportunities for those of us in work today (and those beginning their careers) to learn from the practical experiences of others. Opportunities that can positively influence individual relationships with work and personal success.

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I am currently researching similar statistics for the UK and other nations. If you know of any relevant, recently released studies outside of the US your input would be most welcome. If you have any comments or emails regarding the above, please send them along or post them here. Enjoy the weekend ahead, With Thanks, Paul 

Making network connections

At a recent networking event I met with an entrepreneur and we talked about her new venture. It was soon clear that the business concept was a sound one. The individual energy, passion and expertise were all in place. The profile of the business had grown beyond all expectation but at the same time something was missing.

Continuing our conversation we agreed on an important point, in this case the need for a professional marketing opinion. We also agreed that neither of us were experts in this field. The good news was that between us we had worked closely with professional marketers in the past. Between us we could make a connection and an introduction with the potential to move this entrepreneurial business one additional step forward.

Considering this encounter a few days after the event, there are parallels with the networking activity that forms an integral part of successful career management and job searching. Most networking conversations and introductions will not create immediate opportunity but they are great opportunities for understanding and gaining new perspectives. What can you learn about the other person, their career or business? What are their priorities, trends in their market or expectations from the future? How does your perspective differ and importantly, as in the earlier example, what opportunities do your combined networks create?

Understanding in such situations creates opportunities on both sides. The people in your network (old and new alike) can easily be the greatest asset in your pursuit of personal success but becoming so depends on their success too. Creating opportunities, regardless of whether they appear to benefit you immediately or not, enables success in the future. A narrow focus for your network discussions also contrasts with the aims of a successful career management plan and what it can help you achieve.