8 Big Ideas For Managing Your Career
Career Development Advice For Increasing Your Influence and Impact
Over the course of my own career, I’ve been on the hunt for the top ideas and frameworks for thinking about developing your career. If there’s a book or podcast on careers, I’ve probably read it or listened to it, and I’ve tried to find the best of what’s out there so I could apply it to my own career growth.
To that end, I’ve come across a handful of ideas and frameworks recently that I thought were interesting, and wanted to share some of them in case they were helpful and inspiring to helping all of you think about your careers. Additionally, I’ll also include one of my own, which I have been working on and testing over the past year.
PS - After you read these, I’d love to know what you think, so feel free to leave a copy or shoot me an email (alex.dea at gmail.com)
#1 ) The “7C’s” of Career Growth (Julie Winkle Giulioni)
Many organizations still operate under the premise that career development = promotions and promotions = career development. That is outdated, and a surefire way to lose good talent.
But while promotions are still important, the good news is that career development means more than just a promotion.
In her book Promotions Are So Yesterday, Julie Winkle Giulioni, shares her own research around what employees want out of their development and growth from their manager and their organization.
And while people still do want to be paid fairly and get promoted, her research found there are numerous ways in which employees look to their own managers and companies for help when it comes to career growth. Gulioni points to “7C’s” of Development, as alternate ways to help people grow, outside of promotions
They are:
Contribution
Competence
Confidence
Connection
Challenge
Contentment
Choice
Many employees want to develop and grow, and want to take ownership of their careers. Unfortunately, they don’t always know where to start, or how to talk about it. This is a good framing and language for having a discussion around how an employee can think about their career development.
Furthermore, while employees struggle with their individual development, many managers never get proper training on how to coach and develop their people. This framework can be a great starting point.
My Take: I like Julie’s framework because it provides managers with a language and a framework they can use with employees to help them grow their careers. Sometimes having the right words (and then conversation) is the hardest part.
#2) Career Athleticism
In an Op-Ed for The Hill, Blair Miller writes about how the future of work is changing in a way that means that the traditional corporate career ladder will become more and more outdated. Unfortunately, she cautions that while work is changing, our approach to career tracks is not.
“We are preparing our kids for a future dictated by the path” she says, and calls on educators and companies to teach students from a young age how to use human skills and self-directed learning to navigate and explore vocational pursuits. This ability to pivot and explore is what she dubbs “career athleticism.
She writes:
“Let’s start by teaching our kids about career athleticism. We want them to build muscles and agility that can be translated in multiple settings and environments. This means developing capabilities like building structure out of autonomy, leading through ambiguity, and creating a vocation (vs. finding a job).
The school that incorporates this learning would have mandatory study abroad programs, counselors who help students find their “why” not their “now,” they would allow students to learn from the best educators around the world and they would recognize peer-led learning, preparing students for the diverse, flat marketplace they are about to enter.”
And again:
“Careers are going to look more like the vast Netflix movie offerings rather than the limited blockbuster shelves. But to help our students, we have to build sophisticated tools that input skills, psychometric data, experience, and job market analysis to help students navigate their unique vocational pursuits.”
My Take: I think this is a good concept especially for younger students to help them understand they don’t need to have it all figured out. Sure, there will be some students who know they want to be a doctor, lawyer, etc, but that is the exception, not the rule.
#3) Own Your Career (Andy Storch)
In his book Own Your Career, Own Your Life, Andy Storch, a consultant, speaker and author makes the case that great careers don’t happen by chance, and that to truly drive a desired outcome, you need to be intentional about setting career goals, and taking steps to achieve them.
He Writes:
When I say, "own your career" or "own your life," that means taking full responsibility and being intentional with your actions. It means having an idea of where you want to go, making a plan, and then taking steps to get there. It means that you don't wait for others to tell you what to do or where to go.
Yes, there will be things that happen outside of your control, but owning your career means you focus most of your energy on what's in your control and keep moving forward.”
My Take: I am a fan of Andy’s work, because it expresses the sentiment I myself have always thought about when it comes to career development. While you cannot do it alone, it starts with yourself. Furthermore, the idea that you need to be proactive about it is also a great point. Career is not a “once a year” kind of thing, its ongoing and continuous.
#4) The Portfolio Career (April Rinne)
April Rinne has been in a constant evolution and flux since the beginning of her career. Even when many of her accomplished peers were excited about climbing the corporate ladder, April often found the urge to reinvent herself and make a transition once every few years, as she recalls, to deviate from the traditional “scripts.”
At the time, she often felt left out, but fast forward to today, where pivoting, evolving and learning are critical aspects to thriving in a world of constant change. In this world of flux, April urges us to consider shifting from pursuing a career path, to pursuing a career portfolio.
In an HBR article titled “Why You Should Build a Portfolio Career,” Rinne writes:
“A career portfolio is different in that it is not a physical entity or system. It’s a new way to think about, talk about, and — most importantly – craft your professional future in order to navigate our ever-changing world of work with purpose, clarity, and flexibility.
Whereas a career path tends to be a singular pursuit (climb the ladder in one direction and focus on what is straight ahead), a career portfolio is a never-ending source of discovery and fulfillment. It represents your vast and diverse professional journey, including the various twists and turns, whether made by choice or by circumstance.”
My Take: I think this is a helpful model to reframe how to find ways to pursue your strengths, interests and curiosities, and a much more fluid way of thinking about your career development. By breaking down some of the traditional walls, you can find more flexible ways to find things you enjoy doing that can fuel impact, meaning, and success.
Whether that means you embrace the full on freelancer life, work a full-time job and have a “side hustle,” have a meaningful volunteer opportunity outside of your day job, or pursue multiple projects at once that “make up” your work and career there is a lot of flexibility here. This is something that I am actually embracing right now as an entrepreneur.
#5) Career Agility (Marti Konstant)
In today’s workplace, the idea of agile is everywhere, ranging to how companies develop software, to how they respond to organizational changes. So if companies and software developers can think about their organizations and products in an agile way, why can’t we think about using agility in our careers?
In her book, Activate Your Agile Career, Marti Konstant writes about the concept of career agility.
She writes:
An agile career is a self reflective, incremental career path, guided by response to change, evolving job roles, and designed to optimize creativity, growth, and happiness.
My Take: I think this is a great idea, especially as we think about how fast the world of work can change. Being able to grow means taking advantage of opportunities in the moment which requires an agile mindset. Furthermore, this also hopefully removes some of the pressure, of trying to have your career “all figured out.” Instead of trying to do a “big bang” its a much more iterative approach.
#6) Recalculating (Lindsey Pollak)
In her most recent book Recalculating: Navigate Your Career Through a Changing World of Work, Lindsey Pollak encourages all of us to embrace setbacks, unexpected twists and turns and challenges as “features” and not bugs. Inspired by the numerous challenges we all faced as a result of an unexpected global pandemic, Pollak urges us to consider acting like a GPS when you take a wrong turn and “recalculate.”
She writes:
“My greatest goal is to ensure that you will never, ever miss out on a career opportunity you want because you didn't try for it. When you embrace the art of recalculating, you accept the knowledge that your career path will not be a clear, straight line forward. You seek out change and challenge and discomfort, rather than avoiding it.
The sooner you learn how to handle false starts, detours, and disappointments — and even plan for them in advance — the smoother and more satisfying and more successful your journey will be. And sometimes you'll find that winding paths can take you in unexpected directions that are even better than you imagined.”
My Take: It’s easy to look at successful people and think that they only had success and never had failure. Furthermore, it’s easy in moments of struggle or challenge in your career to think that you’ll never recover. And how many times have we all struggled to take a risk on something for the fear of failure? The idea of recalculating is something we should normalize more in our conversations and dialogue around career.
Career is not just an “up and to the right” kind of thing, and our details, false starts, and disappointments are features not bugs. I think this is a great mindset to champion, especially for those who are in roles or fields they didn’t imagine they’d be in, or whose expectations weren’t necessarily met, to give them the confidence to find their interests or desires and to pursue them, and to give them the permission and confidence to go do that.
#7) The Startup of You - Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha
In their book The Startup of You (written in 2012, but recently revised in May 2022) Reid Hoffman (Founder of LinkedIn) and Ben Casnocha make the case that we can take the lessons and learnings that startup founders learn and apply to thrive in competitive, ever-changing and fast moving markets, and apply them to how we think about advancing and growing our careers.
By managing your career like a startup founder, managers are startup, you can weather change, spot emergent opportunities, develop your competitive advantage and take intelligent risk. They write:
“Your aspirations shape what you do. But your aspirations are themselves shaped by your actions and experiences. You remake yourself as you grow and as the world changes. Your identity doesn’t get found. It emerges.”
My Take: I think there’s a lot to be learned and studied from entrepreneurs and startup founders who bet on themselves, take intelligent risk, and figure out how to iterate, pivot and evolve. Furthermore, while I don’t think we should glamorize failure, I do think it's important for us to have an honest conversation about it within the context of what it means for our careers.
This is especially true, when it comes to risk-taking and figuring out how and when to take an intelligent risk. Startups are inherently risky, and while they are not for everyone, how founders evaluate risk can be a good lesson for how all of us can think about the intelligent risks we want to take in our careers.
#8) Why You Need a Career Operating System - (Me, Al Dea)
For the past 10 years, I’ve been teaching employees how to be more influential and impactful in their current roles and while helping them build the mindsets and behaviors to consistently and proactively develop and grow their career. I’ve noticed that the people who are most successful and content with their career development approach in a uniquely different way - they have a mindset and way of thinking and working.
They’ve activated what i call their Career Operating System (or COS) - For this high performers, managing their career or working towards goals and aspirations is not an activity they do once a year, or a thing they think about every now and then, but it’s something rather, a mindset that manifests itself through consistent practices and habits on a consistent basis.
The big milestones that you see, are just a bunch of consistent habits practiced over a period of time.
Just like an operating system helps lay the foundation for all of your computer’s apps and software to run effectively, a career operating system ensures all of your apps (ex: skills, capabilities and experiences) can be used effectively to achieve a career goal.
It acknowledges that while there is an external world out there (namely, the company, market or industry you are in), charting a path toward individual career success requires a set of attitudes and behaviors that align your desired ambition with your actions.
When practiced, this fuels opportunities for the individual to use their talents to drive growth, impact, and outcomes, for themselves and their organizations, and to use their career as a means to living a meaningful life.
Which ideas resonated with you? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments or via email (alex.dea at gmail . com)