Developing a Mindset For Career Growth
Reimagining and transforming our language and thinking about career development
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Business Has Changed, So too Must Career Development
Much of the ways that we do business today have evolved and changed as the world, market, and people have changed. Unfortunately, our understanding of careers, and how we develop ourselves and our employees have not kept up with the pace of change. Many organizations are using the same processes and approaches that were created decades ago.
In today’s fast-moving business landscape, companies would prefer to not use a technology or process that was designed for business decades ago, so why do we think it’s okay to do this for our approach to careers?
To be sure, over the past decade, we’ve begun to see progress in the workplace and society that has shifted part of the dialogue and discourse around careers.
Here’s a few examples:
Modes of Work: There are more ways to “work” (freelance businesses, gig work, talent platforms, side hustles, blockchain enabled talent marketplaces, DAOs/web3 projects solo employment)
Where to work: remote work opens up more opportunities for more people
New Career Paths - tracks for non-managers, internal mobility, fractional and advisory work for senior + experienced executives, relaunch programs for mid-career professionals
Career Changes - Easier to change jobs and careers careers through more resources like job search platforms, career communities, upskilling, career coaching, workforce development programs and job transition support
As a result we’ve expanded our language and imagination around what a career can be for an individual. We’ve begun to hear phrases like “the career ladder is dead” (it is certainly less common, but probably not true for all) and the emergence of new ideas such as:
Lattice/Jungle Gym - Ability to move upwards, downwards, across, diagonal within and outside the organization
Portfolio Careers - Treating your career as an investment portfolio with diverse “bets”
Anti-Work - A whole community and movement designed to protest commonly held views about labor and careers (also, see the lie flat movement)
These are important additions to the dialogue and discourse around developing your career. The workforce and population is diverse and each individual is unique. Having more ideas around how to intentionally design and grow a career within the context of life gives people more options for how to find work and jobs that best suits their interests and life.
Given the complex and ever changing nature of today’s world of work, it’s more critical than ever to teach employees the mindset along with the behaviors for how one can manage their career.
But what’s missing from the conversation around how we give language and talk to individuals about career growth and development is very similar to what’s missing when companies who want to go through some organizational change often miss: the mindset and behaviors to accompany it.
After working on numerous digital transformation projects with Fortune 500 companies, I’ve had my fair share of projects that did not meet expectations. We were brought in, for our expertise and tried and true frameworks for architecting change. Reflecting back on this, I can very much tell you with certainty that the reason the project struggled or failed was generally not because the framework or plan was wrong or that it was outdated, but rather, we didn’t accurately work with the leaders of the organization to define and get their to buy into the mindset of why we were doing this and how they could best approach what we were going to do, and then provide a list of purported and specific behaviors that (with the help of the framework/roadmap) would allow us to achieve the desired goal.
I think this is also true when we think about how we talk about and encourage people to develop careers. We often skip to looking at the rubric or framework before we examine and get buy in on the right approach and mindset.
Career Pathways, Roadmaps and Plans
Over the past 6 months, I’ve been conducting career development workshops with hundreds of employees. When I ask them to tell me what they think would be helpful to them for their career development I often hear things like “career pathways” “leveling guides,” “roadmaps” etc.
These are all other forms of rubrics that are helpful in showing us what good looks like. They also are familiar in that for many of us, these are what helped us be successful in our early years in school. We wouldn’t be where we are without them.
These things show employees “what good looks like” and give them guidance to take ownership of their career. They also are helpful to drive a set of behaviors that achieve outcomes. But along the way, it’s also limited our ideas around what our career could be, individually, for each of us. In his article in HBR Magazine “Designing Work That People Love” Marcus Buckingham writes,
“Brain science reveals that there are more synaptic connections in each human brain than there are stars in 5,000 Milky Ways, resulting in endless variations in how we all think and feel. It shouldn’t be surprising, therefore, that people in the same job love and do their work very differently.
If all of us index exactly to what good looks like, we’ll all end up indexing and prioritizing the same exact thing. In some cases this is good for both the company and the individual. If all of your sales people are indexing to revenue, or all of your accountants are flagging potential variances in reporting, you’re probably going to need that to run a good business. But there is nuance in this thinking when it comes to approaching our careers that our career development language and frameworks miss.
This is something that I’ve seen time and time again, when someone works incredibly hard to achieve a goal they thought they needed to achieve because that was “what good looked like” but didn’t end up being what they actually wanted.
Just as Buckingham states, our brains are wired to be unique and different, and so are the interests and desires we have about our work and careers. So while expanding the language around the multitude of different ways to grow your career (ex: the ladder, the lattice and the portfolio) are important and necessary, so is the importance of teaching people how they can use these frameworks combined with understanding their own uniqueness.
Whether it’s the Great Resignation, or continuous series of events (COVID-19, social and racial justice, mental health crisis) that have impacted our world of work for the past few years, or just simply the evolution of time, this is a ripe moment to re-think how we teach people about careers. The world of work has changed, and we need to update our approach to career growth - the way to do that, is by teaching the fundamentals of the career mindset.
The Career Operating System: Your Career Growth Mindset
Finding the right approach, pathway, or roadmap is helpful for your career success, but it’s very much like a question on the SAT: necessary but insufficient. Employees must have their own intrinsic motivations for how they want to architect their career to fuel opportunities that align to their internal interests and desires.
They need to activate what I call their Career Operating System (COS) - The Career Operating System is a mindset which consists of attitudes and behaviors that empower employees to design their careers in the ever-evolving world of work.
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.
The good news, is that much like how every mobile device or every windows laptop has an operating system that helps it run, every person has a career operating system to help run their career. But it takes work to activate, and that starts with understanding the 8 main attitudes and practices of your Career Operating System:
#1: Intentional Career Planning: Proactively and intentionally creating a career vision or goal with intention and taking steps to work towards the vision
#2: Lifelong Learning: Using curiosity, a growth mindset, and self-motivation to learn and acquire knowledge
#3: Managing Your Performance: Understanding the performance evaluation process, and manage the components of the process to put your best self forward
#4: Storytelling: Conveying who you are, what you do, and the impact you make to a diverse group of audiences within or outside of your company
#5: Skills Acquisition: Identifying specific competencies and skills you want to acquire and build and then to use internal and external resources, projects and experiences to develop those skills
#6: Internal Marketing: Documenting, capturing and sharing your deliverables, outputs and insights to internal teams for personal brand building and knowledge sharing
#7: Relationship Building: Building meaningful, impactful and beneficial relationships with your peers in order to achieve goals and personally develop
#8: Organizational Acumen: Understanding the company org chart and the incentives and processes that align to people.
How to Develop Your Career Operating System (COS)
In a world of work that is constantly changing, so too will our ideas of frameworks for our careers, which is also why spending the time developing the mindset through the COS is critical to growth and evolution in your life and career.
Assess Where You Are - Taking the time now to assess yourself against some of the attitudes of the COS is a great place to start. Which of these are you practicing today, and where are your blind spots?
Practice Reflection - Another way to start developing your mindset is to make internal reflection a consistent and common practice. Regardless of what direction you want to go in, treating a career as a mindset allows you to consistently practice thought and reflection, and allow you to sense and respond to ideas, opportunities, and directions in real-time.
According to research from PWC, 82% of people say that career development is their own personal responsibility but 42% felt that they were the biggest barrier in the way of their own career development.
Taking time to develop and activate your career operating system and to use the tools you have at your disposal can help you intentionally plan and design your way to an engaging job and meaningful career, and help you find your own unique path to success in this ever changing world of work.
Does this concept resonate with you? How are you developing your career operating system? Let me know as I’d love to hear what you think.
Al