Part 2 - Determining the Next(Career)Step
Throughout the last six years, I’ve done some reflection and exercises to determine what I want to do short-term and long-term. This was highlighted by my visit to the PhD Project Conference in November 2019, kicking the tires on the idea of being a business school professor in Management and Organizations focusing on teams and talent identification and selection. But as I transitioned out of my last role, one of my mentors challenged me to think differently about what I wanted to do next. He asked “Where were you at your best? What were you doing at those times?”
He forced me to truly sit back and think about those times when I was “in the zone.” For those not familiar, “in the zone” describes a state (typically used in sports but not restricted to that) when you are so focused and in tune that things seem to move slower, what you are doing feels effortless, and everything you do feels aligned. The best example from the sports world I remember is Michael Jordan. Arguably the greatest basketball player of all-time, Jordan wasn’t known for his 3-point shooting (27% for the 91–92 season when a good percentage was 33% or better) taking and making 6 3-pointers against the Portland Trailblazers in the first half of Game 2 of the 1992 NBA Finals, and turning to the commentators and shrugging after the last one like “I can’t explain it either.”
So my mentor’s advice was to take the following steps:
Sit down, identify, and list the “zone” times during your career (at work and/or outside of work, ex. volunteering)
2. Once all of them are listed, next to each of them write down what you were doing that made that experience great, and list the attributes/adjectives of that experience, and the environment
With that probing, my own analytical nature decided to take it a bit further and I did some additional steps:
I charted all the experiences in the first column and then put the attributes at the top of each other column allowing me to chart what experiences had what attribute. This allowed me to determine how frequently certain attributes appeared across all of these experiences. I then used these as the focus of the “what I’m doing” part of my next role.
The results created a focused way to evaluate what my next role should include, with clarity.
If you would like me to send you my zone-time matrix as an example, please share your contact information here,
After completing this exercise, the goal was to find and/or confirm my desired industry. My tool of choice was CareerLeader (hyperlink here). There are a number of tools out there to work through this type of exercise but I had used CareerLeader when I first started business school and thought using it again would be helpful. And it was — I completed the questionnaire and it confirmed that people-oriented work (HR) and strategy were far and away the areas where I had been in “the zone.”.
Next Step: Getting educated about the industry! So there are a number of ways to get up to speed on an area that you may not know much about or as much as you would like to in order to feel comfortable networking and interviewing for a new role. After the reflection, introspection, and exercises I talked about earlier, I decided that I wanted a people-oriented (HR/People Operations) role with a diversity lens to it within a large technology organization. My challenge was that I had not been in a HR/People Operations role in the private sector previously, so I didn’t know what I didn’t know. But I did have extensive experience in diversity in my career and I had a network to tap into.
So I decided to tap into my network to have “Silly Question” conversations. Silly Question conversations are conversations where you can ask the blatant obvious things you would never ask a recruiter or someone who has the influence to make a decision on you if you would be hired. Quickly, I reached out to three friends who were all in HR to have these conversations.
We talked about the type of work I wanted to be doing, what that looked like on a day-to-day basis, what type of role did that work and the typical job titles for that role, and what organizations would or would not have that role. Because I had already narrowed down the type of work I wanted to do and the type of organization, it was very easy for my friends to suggest organizations I should and should not consider in doing that work, and they were open with me about what things to look for, what to ask about, and if there were individuals at those organizations they were willing to connect me to. I’m very thankful for my friends’ help, and these “Silly Question” conversations set me up very well for…
The next post, “The Job Search” where I share the method I used to select the organizations I wanted to target and network to get on the path to the role I wanted.
Until the next post!
Thanks for reading,
Willie
