18

Taking Control of Your Career

Finally, nothing requires more resilience than navigating a career that can span decades—and must weather the storm of countless setbacks, obstacles, challenges, and outright roadblocks. This chapter looks at the long term and provides sound strategies for creating habits that, if begun now, can ensure smooth sailing as you navigate your career and your journey from competence to confidence.

Planning for Potential

I think that very often, women don’t necessarily plan their careers. We have a penchant to feel lucky if we get a job, let alone a promotion, and simply “wing it” from opportunity to opportunity until we find ourselves in some position that wasn’t necessarily achieved by some grand design.

Case in point: Recently, I was talking to a client who wanted to be the chief HR officer for her company. Rather than just want it, she had actually studied the career trajectories, duties, and success habits of other chief HROs to become clear on what she’d need to be successful in that role. I was impressed by her “background investigation” into her dream job and immediately thought to myself that this person would get there because she had her career road map carefully and thoroughly planned out.

On the other hand, my transition into HR was by default. I ended up getting into the HR industry because at the beginning of my career, someone in leadership at the company I was working for asked if anyone had read the employee handbook.

Now, as someone who’d gone to Catholic school, I had been trained to read manuals when they were given to me. Therefore, I had in fact read the employee handbook! So my new career trajectory began the moment I told my boss “Yes, I’ve read it.”

Suddenly, just because I raised my hand and said “yes,” I was given an opportunity to work in the HR department of a major organization, which went on for a little while. I enjoyed HR, but it wasn’t until later in my career that I began to form specific goals for myself.

Now, I never wanted to be the COO/CEO of a large corporation, but I knew that one day I wanted to have my own business that specialized in leadership for women. So I built a network, worked diligently, and positioned myself as I moved into the space I currently occupy.

That said, I personally challenge future leaders to know what their long-term plans are. Notice I said “their” long-term plans, not the plans that the team or friends or family or spouses think are appropriate. Know yourself, know your goals, know your desires and passion, and make that the target of your goals and plans moving forward. It doesn’t have to be the “top.” It’s okay to say you want to be a VP or senior VP as opposed to the CEO of a large corporation. Whatever the ultimate goal, know what will be expected of you in that position. Just like my client who thoroughly researched the job description and unwritten expectations of being head of HR, know the ins and outs of what you’re shooting for to make sure that you’re fully equipped once your goal is met.

Five Steps for Setting Quality Career Goals

Setting goals is one thing, but reaching them is another. To ensure that you are sufficiently prepared to successfully navigate the career you actually want, here are five steps for setting quality career goals:

1. Have a strategy, not just a plan. The more strategically you can plan, the more proficiently you can prepare. For instance, today’s companies want their leaders to have more global experience. Knowing this ahead of time, you can tailor your activities, opportunities, and credentials by casting a wider net and taking any and all international opportunities that arise in your current and future positions. Barring those, you can seek mentorship opportunities or take classes or seminars to increase the amount of globalization in your professional portfolio.

2. Keep learning—stay curious. Knowing the requirements of your “dream job,” you can better ascertain if you have the right credentials to get it. Ask yourself: “Do I have the right degree, training, and experience for what I want to do?” If not, what should you do? Take training and courses to get the skills you’ll need? Figure this out ahead of time and your goals will be easier to obtain.

3. Invest in yourself. As I suggested in the previous tip, sometimes you need to be willing to invest in yourself in the form of classwork, training, magazine and web subscriptions, books and seminars, online learning, etc. (You may also need to invest in appropriate business attire.) All this may involve you asking for development, training, and even certification in certain courses and taking advantage of a tuition reimbursement plan if your employer offers one. If not, pace yourself and make the financial investment on your own.

4. Chart your progress. Be sure to measure your progress so that you know where you are on your career trajectory. When we have a plan in place, it’s critical to continually measure and reassess to ensure that our goals are current. You may be ahead of your timeline, or behind it. You may have achieved certain goals and forgotten to mark or measure them. By continually “checking in” to mark your progress, you can assess where you’ve been, where you are … and where you need to be.

5. Bounce! We learned in an earlier chapter how to bounce when challenges, setbacks, or obstacles litter our path. On that note, don’t be afraid to change course, even midstream, if the right opportunity presents itself. Leadership changes, our priorities change, teams dissolve or members are reassigned, and we often find ourselves at a point far afield from where we thought we wanted to be. You may learn more about the role you thought you wanted and realize, halfway there, that what you actually want is just a little bit closer to another place or direction. That’s fine. We call that growth, evolution, and progress, and it’s what resilience—and this chapter—is all about.

In addition to those five steps, here is an important thing to remember about navigating your career: Time will pass whether or not you do anything about your career.

There is a great story of a woman who graduated from law school when she was 85 years old. After her story appeared in the press, people came up and said to her, “Oh my God, who is going to hire you at 85?” She replied that it did not matter because she was going to be 85 anyway but now she had a law degree.

The truth is that time passes. Yesterday has passed, today will pass, and, if we’re lucky, tomorrow will pass, too. What matters is how you use that time strategically to make or break you as a leader.

We must be conscious of the passing of time and use it, thoughtfully, to our advantage. Too many of us take time for granted. We never move forward, only side-to-side—or even backward. If you let life push you around with no action plan for moving forward in a strategic, thoughtful, or purposeful way, you’ll never get to your desired destination.

One thing I have observed from women over 40 is that, suddenly, they begin to wonder how they got where they are. I often hear them say, “This is not the life I had planned for myself.” But I wonder: Did they have any plan at all? I tend to think that we are not as intentional about our lives and where we are going as we think we are, or ought to be. And so this is an invitation to create that intention—a place to create a road map for your life.

The Takeaway

Remember, it’s your journey from competence to confidence. It’s your career. Your career is your responsibility, not your company’s and not anyone else’s. It’s important to concentrate your energy on what you want and not what anybody else can provide for you.

We take control of our careers by setting goals, focusing on a particular direction, taking feedback, and being open to that feedback. Charting, and changing, your course means that you may need to shift some of your behaviors and be willing to learn new ways of doing things you thought you had already covered.

Navigating your career from competence to confidence is as much about changing directions as it is about following a straight, linear path. Being willing to develop yourself as you progress in your company sends a strong signal about your potential for leadership. Just because your company won’t pay to develop you doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t take a course here or there anyway. Take accountability for yourself and your own actions!

Investing in yourself doesn’t have to break the bank. For just $25 you can attend a professional association meeting where you’ll get to hear a great speaker who may actively change your life. I am so inspired by others that I never miss an opportunity to hear someone new speak, because I know that, at the very least, I’m going to hear a new perspective on some aspect of my career that I might be taking for granted.

I could go on, but the point here is this: You are the CEO of your own career, and the kinds of things that we do in terms of preparing ourselves for that make all the difference, not only in how we lead but for which organization.