Make Proactive Career Decisions
27 May 2016
This article continues a series of articles that dig deeper into the process of career maintenance. Regular career maintenance keeps you on top of your career. To do career maintenance well take time to look at 4 key areas:
Know yourself really well
Know the environment that surrounds your career
Making proactive decisions about your career
Take action to keep your career developing
This article brings into focus some things you can do to ensure you are making proactive, future focused, big picture, confident decisions about your career.
An exercise I will often do with people when talking about their career is to get them to map the pathway of their careers - creating a picture of what their career has looked like to date. This is a fun exercise and the results are often colourful and insightful and always helpful in making the next big decision. Because this is what these maps are about, they are maps of the big decisions people have made in their careers. Decisions to study, leave jobs, take promotions, switch career paths.
Career decisions though are about more than the big turning points. The big decisions don’t occur unless people have made the small, often daily, decisions along the way that support them making the big ones. Daily decisions to go to a networking event rather than go home, to offer assistance to a colleague even though you are busy yourself, the decision to remain calm and do some planning when things are busy, the decision for every third book you read to be one on self development, the decision to reach out to a mentor. It is these small decisions that add up to put you in a situation where you have the bigger decisions to make. For example, without going to that networking event you wouldn’t have made contact with that person who down the track told you about the role you are currently in.
Career decisions then are the big turning point decisions and the little day-by-day decisions. So often though, we neglect to make any of these decisions. We go along day-by-day, month-by-month progressively languishing. I wrote previously about a tendency people have to make reactive rather than proactive career decisions. To wait till the tension and dissatisfaction felt in your current job gets to a break point and you have little choice but to seek a new job.
While we would like to think we make decisions in a logical, emotion free way, summing up the pros and cons and choosing the best possible outcome, in reality making decision, especially decisions about our own lives has, and must have, elements of emotion involved in the process. Our emotions are the way our mind has of helping us tap into the deep knowledge we have gained throughout our life that we cannot always express logically or in words. Our feelings are sent from our unconsciousness to aid our decision making. When making a big picture career decision fleeting feelings will arise which should be taken into account. Positive emotions are there to urge us on – excitement, anticipation, and wonder. Negative emotions are there to signal caution and a need to find out more - unease, fear, anxiety, and distrust. The negative emotions are there not to say STOP they are there to tell us to do some deeper investigation and apply some logical decision making processes.
Taking emotions into account as we make the big decisions about our careers is different to being driven by our feelings. Sometimes we don’t feel like doing something, and like petulant children, we allow our feelings to stop us doing what we know is in our best interests. For example you don’t have to feel like going to the gym, you know you just have to do it, or you don’t have to feel like going to work, you just have to go, you don't have to feel like approach someone to be your mentor, you just have to do it.
A good rule of thumb is to be cautious of, and sceptical of, your mild negative feelings in the short term, day by day decisions you make and then to listen very closely to them when making longer term career direction decisions. (Of course, a whole different things is safety. Listen to intense negative feelings in the moment that arise to keep you safe.)
Essentially all this comes together to underscore that making career decisions is not easy, yet for a flourishing career you need to be making the small ones daily and the bigger ones regularly. Making decisions isn't just about getting on with things. Making decisions is about shaping who you are - intentionally. The more decisions you make the more you assert the authentic you, the more your confidence and self-assurance grows, the better you get at making decisions and the more attractive you are to employers in the career market.
Making Decisions is the third step in the process of ongoing career maintenance. Developing habits that support you to make decisions is really useful. To help I have assembled below some tools that can come to your assistance.
For smaller, day by day, decisions
1 - Fuzzy Focus
Write down a vague, fuzzy idea about how you would like your career to develop over the next 5 to 10 years, making sure this fuzzy idea incorporates your thoughts about the type of person you want to be in the future. This 5 to 10 year focus needs to be fuzzy as life, and what we want out of it inevitably changes. Then bring the next 2 to 3 years into a little more focus, writing down what it would be good to see happen. Be aspirational here. People are always surprised by how much they achieve over a 2 to 3 year period. Finally bring sharp focus to the next 3 to 6 months writing down up to 3 specific goals. Remind yourself of these goals on a daily basis and make day by day decisions with them, playfully, in mind.
2 - 10:10:10
When you have a decision to make ask yourself how you will feel about it in 10 minutes. Then ask how you will feel about it in10 months. Finally ask yourself how you will feel about this decision in 10 years. This exercise really brings the decision into focus and helps overcome our petulant child who doesn’t feel like doing the things that are good for us.
3 - Plus, Minus, Interesting
The old deBono decision making tool is always insightful. Divide a piece of paper into 3 columns giving them the headings of Plus, Minus, Interesting. At the top of the page write the decision you need to make (e.g. Do I apply for the job). Then using a timer in the Plus column allow yourself 2 minutes to write down all the things that would be positive about making that decision. Then in the Minus column have 2 minutes writing all the things that would be negative about making that decision. Finally in the Interesting column have 2 minutes writing up those things that are neither positive or negative, but are just interesting. Then see what new insights emerge.
For Bigger Decisions
1 - Fuzzy Focus
Again have written down your short, medium and long term thoughts about your career.
2 - Your Career Criteria
During your next 6 monthly career maintenance session develop a list of the things you want as your career criteria. These are the things you use to make the next big decision about your career. Think carefully about what these criteria are. They will range from pre-existing limitations such as location and capacity to work outside ‘normal’ hours through to considerations about the potential for development you want, levels of autonomy you need, the skills you want to use and develop, the people you want to have around you, what you love doing, what you are good at and what the world needs. Your criteria are unique to you and your current circumstances. This list can become endless so it is good to limit yourself to between 10 and 15.
When you have your career criteria the next step is to test them out against real life opportunities. Do this by putting your criteria into a matrix with your criteria across the top and the opportunities down the side. Then give your criteria a score against a few different opportunities, giving each opportunity a total score. These don’t have to be opportunities you are seriously considering, and you can include ‘random and silly’ opportunities as these help you to further define your criteria. Over time you will develop a deeper understanding of what you career criteria mean to you.
Doing this provides you with objective data that is invaluable in making informed decisions. You get a chance to see things from a different perspective and to pressure test your career criteria. Sometimes the score a particular opportunity gets is higher than or lower than you want it to be. This can sometimes point out weaknesses in the career criteria you are using.
3 – The Reporter Test
Imagine you are at the end of your career and a reporter has asked to interview you. They want to include your story in a piece they are writing for young people just staring out in their career. They ask you to recount the best decisions you made in your career and the impact these had. Then they ask you to recount the decision you failed to make and the impact these had. Take some time to journal against these two questions when you have a big decision to make.
4 – Map Your Career
At the beginning of this article I outlined a mapping process people can do to reflect on their career. You can support future career decisions by continuing this map into the future.
5 – Some Online Videos
Finally here are a couple of my favorite online TED talks on decision making:
Barry Swartz on the paradox of choice
Ruth Chang on how to make hard choices
Your career will shift and change, that is inevitable. Be someone who is consciously making decisions about your career. If you are not the one making these conscious decisions it is certain decisions are still being made - sometimes unconsciously by you, often by others who don’t always have what is best for you in the forefront of their minds.