Individuals and Organizations: Similar Career Decision-making Needs
Many years in the career industry taught me a very valuable lesson – one that transcends the individual to include organizations.
The lesson is simple. People do not know how to do what Steven Covey tells us is such a critical starting place when attempting to move in a new direction – start with the end in mind.
After working with thousands of young people to help them set their next career development move, it became abundantly clear that my attempts to guide them were stymied from the get-go by their lack of clarity about where they were headed. The results always felt like we were in a gerbil wheel together – running in a continuous circle instead of gaining any forward movement.
Hounding them to share their insights about where they were headed in their career clearly wasn’t the thing to do; it only caused a look of fear and self-doubt to appear on their faces. That left only one solution – help them by teaching them how to identify their ‘end goal’.
This proved to be a real challenge because a methodology for accomplishing this goal did not exist in the career industry. A brand new kind of ‘how to’ process had to be developed. Once this was available, a bit of a miracle happened. When each young person went through the process and could identify what turned out to be a number of different but related end goals, they would suddenly go into action. Furthermore, they stayed focused and on track whenever they hit a challenge, and often got into some very exciting career steps that were way beyond anything the two of us could ever have imagined when working together. It turns out that Steven Covey was right on target; start with the end in mind and look what can be accomplished!
The process of realizing the missing piece for individuals, developing a program to close that gap, and consequently observing the increased engagement, excitement and dedication to the journey, opened my eyes to a similar situation in organizations.
Was it not true that every organization, be it private, government or non-profit, was dealing with the same dilemma? Did they not have to continually figure out ‘next steps’ on their career journeys because of the constant changes generated by rapid technological advances, expanding markets and competitors? Did that not then require an organization to develop that same clarity about where it is headed – to start with the end in mind? Did they already have that by setting their visions, values, mandates and mission statements?
A careful examination of what each of these variables consisted of, and more importantly how they were viewed and utilized within an organization, made it very clear that the end goal was often missing. An end goal is exactly that – where I (or the organization) want to get to way, way down the road. It is not a vision of what needs to be accomplished over the next 3-5 years, as is often the case with organizational vision statement. It is not a list of the major areas of work that an organization wants to ‘be the best’ at, which is often what you find in mission statements. It is an end goal that an organization continuously strives to achieve. In metaphoric terms, this end goal is a constant north star that guides every decision and every change.
Without that end goal, every career step (or change) an organization makes is a bit like a high school student thinking that their end goal is to choose the post-secondary institution they want to attend and the program they want to take. They problem they encounter is that, very soon after they get started on this new step, they realize they have to start on the process of setting their next career step – what to do after they finish their program. With no clear ‘how to decide’ process, they end up in exactly the same frustrated and anxious state that they dealt with in high school.
Isn’t that very similar to what organizations and their employees face every time a new change comes through the door? Don’t leaders and employees feel that same sense of frustration and anxiety each time? However, in organizations there is the added problem of multiple people experiencing these feelings – complicated by the fact that, unlike individuals making their own decisions, employees have no input into what changes come through the door. The result is many of them getting frustrated, anxious, discouraged, and they begin to disconnect from the change process in varying ways and degrees.
If organizations are facing the same need to make multiple career (change) decisions, and if it is leaders who are responsible for those decisions, is it possible that they also need a process available to them that they can use to identify the organization’s end goal(s)? Are they also experiencing the fear of not knowing how to decide?
With that in mind, my next career step became clear – to develop an organizational career decision-making process that leaders could use to set the organization’s end goal(s), and map backwards from there to determine exactly what needs to be done to move the organization toward that goal(s). That process is now ready to implement. Leaders, however, are another matter. Just like individuals when the process was first developed to help them determine their end goals and back map to identify their next career step, leaders find it hard to believe that it is possible to achieve this kind of long term clarity for the organization.
The time is here to recognize the similar needs of individuals and organizations to have a clear, concrete process to use to clarify their career journeys. The processes are in place; individuals are using their process with great success. It is only a matter of time before leaders are able to comfortably say that they too need this kind of clarity.