The "A Method" for a Fulfilling Career
Don’t think about what you want to be, think about what you want to do.
- Richard Feynman
Just as companies need good systems to solve their WHO problems, individuals need good systems to develop a fulfilling career.
“At the age of twenty-one, college diploma at hand I boarded an airplane for the first time in my life, destination California… I was seated next to a businessman who was probably in his early sixties. I suppose I looked like an odd duck with my serious demeanour, bad haircut, and cheap suit, clearly out of my element. He asked what my story was, and I filled him in. I asked what he did for a living and he told me he was a CEO of a company that made screws. Then he offered me some career advice. He said every time he got a new job, he immediately started looking for a better one. For him, job seeking was not something one did out of necessity. It was an ongoing process. This makes perfect sense if you do the math. Chances are the best job for you won’t become available at precisely the time you declare yourself ready. Your best bet, he explained, was to always be looking for a better deal. The better deal has its own schedule. I believe the way he explained it is that your job is not your job; you job is to find a better job.
This was my first exposure to the idea that one should have a system instead of a goal. The system was to continuously look for better options…”
I love this story from Scott Adams’ book “How to Lose at Almost Everything and Still Win Big”. We all need good systems for solving our WHO problems:
Businesses need it to attract and retain the A Players.
Individuals need it to enjoy a fulfilling career. What could this system be?
In the past few weeks, my key focus at work was on hiring: to expand and strengthen our teams and enable sustainable business growth. In a wonderful stroke of serendipity, just before we started one hiring process, I came across the book “WHO: the A Method for Hiring” by Geoff Smart and Randy Street. I read it in one go, and started using the Scorecard and the WHO Interview technique immediately. No I can say that it changed forever my hiring philosophy: I clearly saw how to make hiring systematic, intentional, confident and fun.
While I was busy interviewing and selecting candidates, I could not but think about the guests to my volunteering career coaching sessions and their struggles with job search experience. What could be a good system, the “A Method”, for a successful job search and for developing a fulfilling career? What if I flipped some parts of the “A Method for Hiring” and applied it to individuals?
This article is a sketch of what I’ve imagined as the “A Method” for developing a fulfilling career:
“The A Method for a Fulfilling Career” - adapted from “The WHO: The A Method for Hiring” by G. Smart and R. Street
The method would consist of 4 parts.
Scorecard.
This part is about knowing yourself, knowing your strengths and knowing what you want, what you like doing.
This knowledge is not some inner, pre-defined knowledge. It is dynamic, especially if you are at the start of your career and have relatively little experience and relatively little knowledge of the available options. Therefore, “discovering” may be a more appropriate word.
Just as with a scorecard for a job, a scorecard would start with a mission, a short and clear executive summary of how you see the purpose of your career now. How it ties to your values, to the impact you want to make, to the legacy you want to leave. Your mission is likely evolve as you advance through your career.
The next part would be about your talents: your signature strengths, the skills and competencies that make your edge. Needless to say, this is the part that is likely to evolve the most.
There can be individual skills where you are extraordinarily good at, like some rare technical knowledge that only few possess or a language skill that becomes critical in a particular context.
However, again inspired by Scott Adams’ ideas, I suggest you look at the unique combination of skills that can make you extraordinary. The success equation for skill stacking is “Good + Good > Excellent”.
Your skill stack is dynamic, and if you think which ones to add to your stack or develop further, focus on the following groups of skills:
clear thinking, creativity and decision making
impactful communication
reliability, resilience and following through on your commitments
The next part of the scorecard would be about your key accomplishments:
what it was about,
what were the challenges you needed to overcome,
what value it brought to the company,
what were the key learnings for you
how it aligns with your strengths or uncovers the need to develop further/different skills
The next part would be about your cultural preferences: the company and team culture that are the most appealing to you. Even if it’s obvious to you, it’s good to write it down. And if, on the other hand, you have difficulty describing the culture you prefer, think from the opposite: what is the no-go environment you would be suffering in.
It’s good to review & adjust your scorecard every once in a while, at least once a year, and every time when you
consider a job/career change
have accomplished an important project
have accomplished a significant educational effort
met a person / had an experience / AHA! moment that changed your outlook on what a fulfilling career means to you
2. Source
Just as need to view the recruitment as a continuous process and need a constant pipeline of A Players, individuals need a continuous flow of potential opportunities for job or career change: both external and within your current company.
Two key things contribute to a successful system of sourcing potential opportunities:
People, relationships. You need to continuously meet new people and deepen existing relationships to develop your knowledge about available options. Starting to network when you need a job is too late - not only a better option may not be available, but also you would be in a needy position, and it usually negatively influences the way you behave in networking interactions. Networking requires a system, and you can find on my blog some ideas for giving a boost to your network and acing your informational interview.
Experiences. To avoid chicken and egg problem - we need to have the right experience to be hired, but we need to be hired to have the right experience - we all need to seek, create and shape new experiences - on the job, or on the side - that give us the right exposure - either to discover whether we may like the activity, or to acquire and sharpen certain skills. “If you want a role, start behaving as if you are already in this role” - I don’t remember where I heard this advice, yet it has proven valid countless times.
3. Selling Your Story
Amos Tversky used to say that “interesting things happen to people who could weave them into interesting stories”. The next chapter of your career path could be directly dependent on how you think about your career story so far and how you present it to others.
Whether you are meeting new people, deepening your existing relationships or interviewing for a job, you need to tell your career story in a way that is relevant, consistent and memorable.
Relevant. This is about the alignment to the context of your relationship/of the role for which you interview, to the context of the conversation (formal/informal, time you have etc). And it is also about the alignment to your scorecard: to who you are and what you want.
Consistent. This is about your career trajectory. Even if your career path has been meandering, that’s fine - your task is to make obvious some underlying logic and forces that shaped your path in this way, to demonstrate consistency and open up possible future trajectory(ies).
Memorable. This is about the magic of storytelling - possibly the only way that could help you stand out from the crowd. Stories help paint the pictures in the mind of a listener, they can result in more engaged discussion and in being remembered/talked about afterwards. Stories enhance clarity and logic of certain career moves that can seem inconsistent or illogical on CV. In my volunteering “My Career Map” sessions, every time we draw from 3 main story types, the magic happens. More on the 3 story types that help make sense of a career path in an upcoming article.
4. Select
I like the 5 F’s framework from the “Who: The A Method for Hiring” book: it ties up 5 things we usually take into account when we make concrete career decisions and when we negotiate offers:
Fit ties together your goals, strengths and value with the company’s vision, needs, and culture. What will be your impact, your company impact? Does the mission and the values of the company feel right? Which of your strengths and values will help make real difference?
Family take into account your broader context. How will your decision impact the family? What things will you need to adapt? How your potential new employer/boss can help you do necessary adaptations?
Freedom is the autonomy you may have in relation to your time & decision making. While freedom is often a reverse function of your career capital, the freedom to to things on your terms is a non-negligible decision-making factor when you negotiate an offer.
Fortune reflects the overall financial upside and its certainty. What are your financial incentives? How well are they aligned to your objectives on the job? What are the company growth prospects? What are your growth prospects and the “NPV” of joining this company? Is the company ready to invest in your future growth - literally, by sponsoring your learning and development, or figuratively, by giving you more opportunities to develop yourself?
Fun describes the work environment and personal relationships you will make. The absolutely critical relationship is the one with your boss. Next come your team mates and various important stakeholders. The rest will be the function of your own internal networking efforts, remembering that you are “the average of the people you hang around with”. Fun also ties up with the company culture.
When you explore new opportunities and/or interview for concrete roles in the concrete companies, think about how the opportunity/role will score on each of the 5 F’s and holistically on all 5 of them? Which of the 5 F’s are the most important right now? How can you improve the offers on some of the 5F’s, not only on the financial upside?
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I hope it has been a helpful outline of what could be a good system for developing a successful career. I know this article is sketchy, and each part deserves a more detailed explanation and an actionable set of tools. Yet, this effort goes beyond a simple blog post - I personally look forward to testing some of these ideas and systematic approach with the guests to my volunteering sessions and transforming these ideas into an actionable set of tools.
For now, let me finish the article with another quote from Scott Adams.
“Throughout my career I’ve had my antennae up, looking for examples of people who use systems as opposed to goals. In most cases, as far as I can tell, the people who use systems do better…
To put it bluntly, goals are for losers. That’s literally true most of the time… Goal-oriented people exist in a state of nearly continuous failure that they hope will be temporary. That feeling wears on you. In time, it becomes heavy and uncomfortable. It might even drive you out of the game.
If you achieve your goal, you celebrate and feel terrific, but only until you realise you just lost the thing that gave you purpose and direction. Your options are to feel empty and useless, or set new goals and reenter the cycle of permanent pre-success failure…
A system, is something you do on a regular basis, that increases your odds of happiness in the long run.