The A, B and C of Career Decision Making
Last time I wrote to you about getting stuck in mid-career and invited you to reflect and rethink your measures of career success. I continue with a focus on factors to consider in career decision-making.
The metaphor of climbing the corporate ladder is still a surprisingly strong and influential image for many people, despite their being fewer opportunities for hierarchal advancement than in our modern organisations. There are also less clearly defined career paths, and in this context most of us want to craft a uniquely meaningful career. So today, I want to invite you to think more kaleidoscope and less ladder when it comes to defining career success and decision making; and here is why.
It will put you in the driver’s seat of your career and give you three factors to blend to help you find more fulfilment and satisfaction. So why a kaleidoscope, you might ask?
When we look through the lens of a kaleidoscope, we see a colourful pattern that changes when we turn the mechanism. The same colours mingle differently to create a new pattern. In career decision making, we often have key criteria (the colours) that we consider in relation to our circumstances. We create a career pattern that blends these dimensions in a unique way to meet our needs. When we make career changes at various career decision points, the prominence of the criteria we use to make choices may shift too, creating a new career pattern.
Research has identified three central patterns for career decision making and developed the Career Kaleidoscope Model to reflect these patterns. According to this model, we evaluate our choices and options through the lens of a kaleidoscope to determine the best fit among our multiple relationships, constraints, and opportunities. The dimensions, or primary colours, of the kaleidoscope model are easily remembered as A, B, C.
So here are the three ‘primary colours’ the research identified as important and what they mean. You may want to look at which factors you have considered when making career decisions in the past. If you are at career crossroads or are looking for more career satisfaction, this is an opportunity to look at your career decisions through the lens of the kaleidoscope.
1. Need for Authenticity:
By being able to add value to both the task and relationships by having latitude to bring our unique contribution and seeing that we are making a difference.
Work as an enabler for life: work as a way of funding personal dreams and hobbies.
2. Need for Balance:
What kind of balance we need is unique depending on our personal drive and ambition, the nature of the job, its flexibility, our personal circumstances, financial situation, and partner support.
Some people are happy to blur edges and have work and life co-exist, whilst others prefer a clear separation between work and life. Whether we like it or not, there is spill over between our worlds, and it is the emotional spill over that is harder on us than the task spill over. We all know the impact of, for example, worry over a sick partner or child, the pressure to provide or the extent to which job satisfaction or relationships influences our mood at home for better or worse.
Your career stage, according to research, influences this dimension. We often work longer hours to establish ourselves in early career which is a longer-term view where we defer benefits and are willing to sacrifice short term for perceived long-term benefit of increased seniority and the maturity to say no.
3. Need for Challenge:
There is always room to grow in responsibility, skills or to get better in a new area of work. We may be proficient today, but tomorrow there is always new stuff to learn.
This dimension speaks to how much opportunity you have, to turn problems into opportunities and to achieve the goals you have set for yourself whatever these may be.
So, if you are asking so what, here are some thoughts to consider:
These three primary dimensions are a useful lens for you to look at your current blend of these criteria, and to what extent this pattern fits for your current circumstances
If you are feeling somewhat dissatisfied with your career, perhaps these three dimensions of the kaleidoscope model need to be tweaked and shifted to reform and create a more aligned arrangement for this stage of your life. You may be inadvertently over-indexing on objective measures of success (climbing the ladder) without having spent enough time evaluating how to blend these dimensions now.
If you are facing a career decision or crossroads, you might want to dig a bit deeper. What is your current career stage and what contribution do you want to make in the next stage? What would you like the blend of these dimensions to look like? Then define for yourself on a scale of 1-10 (where 10 is ideal and 1 is the opposite) what 10 looks like for you on Authenticity, Balance, and Challenge? As you process the choices you are facing, pass them through the lens of your own uniquely defined A, B, C
Hopefully, this model offers you a way to do a more personal inner interpretation of success that will equip you to make deliberate decisions that take account of your stage of your life and what is important to you and so not fall prey to comparing yourself to others and making decisions based on what society thinks is important.