| With the end of the year on the horizon, many of you are probably thinking about what the next step of your career will be: Should you ask for a promotion? Should you look for another job? Should you consider a career switch? Some of these questions may be harder to answer than they seem, so I sat down with Harvard professor Ethan Bernstein to talk about what motivates us, intrinsically, to take the next step in our careers—a key point in his new book Job Moves, out today. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Ethan, it sounds like at the crux of your book (and advice) is this idea that we should approach job interviews as if you’re also hiring the company as an employer. Why is that mindset switch so hard to do?
It’s a great question because, for more than two decades we’ve been saying it’s fabulous that we’re no longer in the world of picking different prototypes of a leader and instead are in a “chart your own path” type of leadership and self-development. But we, as academics, haven’t done a good enough job of explaining to people how they’re supposed to do that. People really didn’t get the idea of “hiring your next job.” That’s not because people didn’t understand that that’s what they’re doing. It’s just not helpful to frame it that way. We have to give people the process, the framework, the [inner, personal] data necessary to do so. If you say to somebody: “What do you wanna do next?” That’s really hard to answer. But if I tell you there are 30 pushes and pulls that we know typically drive a job move, which of these do you think are operating for you? Now, you have a menu, it’s easier. Without that data and process, I think people were lost and so were we.
The book centers on about nine steps and four quests. Can you give us a quick overview as to what those are and how you thought through them?
The steps are like shoots and ladders that ask you to think through questions. Step one, for example, is about understanding the pushes and pulls in a particular environment, which comes from a validated protocol built by Bob Moesta, one of my coauthors. So this is a more backwards-looking step, and helps you understand why you may have switched a job in the past. Step two is then looking at what are your drains and drivers. The energy drivers and drains are strong for us because what we’re really trying to get people away from is what they want to be and towards what they want to do. So it’s experiences, not features. A student of mine once said that an increased title has a great return on ego, but that won’t last long. An experience, as opposed to a feature, will give you a return on progress, which is more meaningful. There are more, like looking at your strengths and weaknesses as if they were part of a balance sheet with assets and liabilities, etc. Quests are the patterns and stages of your career growth––get out, regain control, regain alignment and take the next step. The truth is most careers zig and zag, they don’t follow a path. The world is designed for people who are closer to the “Take the next step” quest. That’s the way organizations are built hierarchically. But most of us are going to find at some point that we’re not taking the next step because we’re at different stages of our career, or are in different quests.
Really interesting! So how do I put these into action as a puzzled job seeker?
Honestly, the steps don’t have to go in order. So some people are gonna skip to step four to locate their quest and then understand what that actually means—you can plug and play. For example, if you are trying to just build on both your capabilities and your energy drivers and drains, then great, you know what you want and you’re just trying to take the next step. That’s the best option. But if you’re trying to reset both and were trying to get out, that’s harder. If you actually love what you’re being asked to do—the “what” of what you’re being asked to do every day—but you don’t like the how, now you’re trying to regain control. And it can happen because of a number of things: Maybe something in your personal life changed, so the slope is too steep or too shallow; maybe you don’t like how you are managed by your manager; maybe you don’t like commuting anymore because it’s two hours lost driving. Whatever it is, when the “how” changes, now you’re trying to regain control. When the “what” changes we’re trying to regain alignment. And when both are trying to change, you’re trying to get out. It’s good to have someone else to talk these through and make sure that you’re in the right quest, that you can then go back and to some extent redo step one with the future-looking view, for one. It’s much harder to describe into words, but it’s why we have all these activities online on the book’s website.
What do you hope people get out of this book?
Some people may find their dream job, which is fabulous. But our book is about trade offs and not about dream jobs. And that’s actually more helpful because as soon as you think you have your dream job, there’s something that makes you think you don’t. So you make trade offs wisely over time, and then once you have a sense of what trade offs you’re happy making, then it’s time to go from a supply side to a demand side. If I want this, then I have to look for what’s out there. This book is not the comprehensive guide to how to get a job, it’s the comprehensive guide to how to specify what you’re trying to get, and then give you some advice for getting there. |
