005 - Active Career Management and Being Your Own CEO (Welcome to 2022!)
Your Personal Vision, Bold & Safe Bets, and Personal Board.
Welcome to 2022! As we begin the year (and many people start setting goals for 2022), I wanted to share my thoughts on what I call Active Career Management. This is not a comprehensive issue covering every aspect of this, it’s the starting point.
Tl;dr - You are your own CEO. You are the CEO of your career, what you do within it, and how you do it. That starts with having a vision for yourself, a point of view on the bets you’ll make to achieve the vision, and a trusted group of people who can help counsel you along the way. But while you pursue this journey, be willing to adjust your goals, give yourself grace, and find ways to hold yourself accountable.
Back around 2008, there was this big push for Mass Career Customization. A very senior executive at Deloitte named Cathy Benko (now a board member of Nike) penned a book that, among other points, promoted a world where employees would be able to customize their careers. I loved the idea.
I wanted to take this idea further though… It felt like something was still missing. I get the notion of trying to customize your career, but the very act — no, endeavor — of customizing one’s career isn’t so simple.
As I toiled on planes 2x per week, oftentimes working until 1am on projects that I liked but didn’t necessarily love, I decided to take more control of my career.
“If i’m going to regularly lose sleep, be away from friends and family, and constantly feel under pressure from demanding clients and unrealistic timelines, I damned well better love who I’m working with and what I’m working on” is what I wrote to myself in my journal while my plane rocketed through a horrific winter storm from Pennsylvania to Atlanta.
Here’s what I built for myself that night (leveraging concepts that I think I came up with myself, but that weren’t necessarily so novel as to be completely original…*shrugs*).
Active Career Management — A Framework to Have Greater Influence Over Your Career, because life is too short and precious to be passive about what we spend so much time doing: working.
Component 1: Your Personal Vision — it’s what you want to achieve in the world. When you look 3 years into the future, what does your life look like? What about six years?
Example: “I want to increase the rate at which renewable energy sources are utilized in x population group.”
Example: “I want to build a business unit that in ten years is the cornerstone of my company’s revenue base”
Example: “I want to have curious, kind, and resilient children who demonstrate exceptional empathy in a world that is increasingly self-oriented” (wow, maybe I need to keep this one around for when we have kids??)
Component 2: Your Bold & Safe Bets — what steps do you need to take now, soon, and sometime later to make this personal vision a reality? Do you need to meet certain types of people? Do you need to work to address developmental feedback you’ve received? Whatever it is, write it down, plan it out with actual milestones in your calendar over time, and review it at a regular interval
Example: “I need to work on my public speaking and sales skills, because these skills are going to be paramount to me launching my own law firm”
Example: “I’m going to invest 2% of my net pay into learning how to develop applications on the Ethereum blockchain”
Example: “I need to leave my job in the next 16 months in order to allow myself the opportunity to explore a new sector or culture”
Example: “I need to meet three senior leaders in X industry within Z geography by the end of 2022”
Component 3: Your Personal Board (of directors) — the small group of people who you talk to on a regular basis, who you can be utterly transparent and vulnerable with, and who also have your best interests at heart. They will challenge you, and empower you as you achieve your goals. For me, this is a group of about 5-8 people I connect with every few months. It’s a two-way support relationship, where we feel comfortable bringing very raw ideas, challenges, and usually questions. This group should have some diversity, including:
Stage of career (find people who are a bit younger than you, around the same age/level, and a couple to several steps ahead)
Type of Experience (some people work in the arts, some in law, some in venture capital, some in global health, some are already retired)
Tone (don’t just go to people who are going to positively reinforce everything you do and say — find people who are willing to actually challenge you)
Organization (ideally you have mentors within your organization and outside of it. Do not make the mistake of only having mentors at your current job. This is NOT a good way to get a truly broad set of perspectives).
Plenty of other criteria that you can tailor to your needs
So we have: (1) Personal Vision, (2) Bold & Safe Bets, and (3) Your Personal Board. Feels simple enough, right?
Not necessarily. There are a whole host of things that aren’t covered in the above, but can still impact your state of mind as you pursue your career vision. I’ll call these “wraparound factors.”
Some Wraparound Factors to Consider:
Your goals will change. Embrace this reality and give yourself grace when your learnings about the world and yourself prompt a reconsideration of what you’re doing
Your mindset is everything. Keeping it healthy requires giving yourself grace and space to celebrate your wins. Have you counted all of the things you’ve accomplished? Go ahead, do it. Count the friends you’ve helped, the skills you’ve honed, the lessons you’ve learned, the things you’ve built. Do it. Celebrate that, and give yourself some grace when you fall short of a previously-set goal.
Life will hit you with the unexpected, regularly. It’s OK if you have a period of time in your life where you need to take care of other priorities! I have had sick family members, some health issues, etc. come up, and those things are foundational. Your family and your health are foundational, and your goals should ideally be compatible with these goals.
Note: for some people these things are secondary. Fine for them. Just not my personal way of being, and not something that I’ve seen produce empathetic leaders (read: not managers. Leaders and Managers are absolutely not always the same thing)
Your personal management system is what will keep you accountable. However you do it, find a way to track your goals. It doesn’t have to be software (e.g., Notion). It can be a white board or a notepad where you draw things out. Whatever you utilize, the most important thing is scheduling time with yourself to review your goals. No, it doesn’t need to be weekly. Reviews should happen at intervals that make sense for you
In the past, I’ve had periods of time where my goals are ultra tactical and weekly reviews are what I need to stay on track. At other times, I’ve reviewed goals once every quarter. Just depends on where you are in your life, and how focused you are on career
The point of checking in regularly is to learn from both wins and setbacks. If you’re learning, you’re getting closer to your goals. Simply reprimanding yourself for not achieving something is the lazy path. Finding the nuggets of wisdom in what has just occurred takes more energy, but also produces more insight for you to take into the future with you
Welcome to 2022, everyone. Hope you all have a wonderful year full of learning, fulfillment, and joy, and that you can take away one thing from the above to try implementing in your life.
MD