Your Next Career Move: Are You Confusing Means and Ends?

What if the way you define your potential next career choices actually stood in the way of your success?

If you confuse means and ends in how you view your possible career moves, it can either paralyze your action or make you waste your efforts and resources focusing on the wrong problem. This article is about the dangers of ill-defining your possible career moves and solutions that help avoid confusion.

Confusing means and ends

One of the recent guests in my Wednesday lunchtime consulting sessions was a talented graphic designer. She successfully changed her career to graphic design several years ago and since then has been mostly focusing on private clients. I loved her credo: "help Clients solve the problems that need graphic solutions". She impressed me not only with her portfolio but also with the clarity and precision of her self-knowledge and creative aspirations, collectively amounting to an "ideal" working environment.

However, things became blurrier when we started talking about possible options to explore next. There were six. The first option was to keep the status quo, however, she had already realized its limits. After all, we are not seeking a job or career change when we are happy with the status quo. Two more possible options were about going online - via her own online boutique or a platform like 99designs, while still focusing on private clients. She seemed to have sufficient clarity on how to implement both options. However, most of her current aspirations - more communication and interactions with different teams, more collaboration, possibilities to be a part of something bigger, for example, a brand whose values she respected - all these options seem to point towards working with corporate clients.

She laid out the remaining three options in the following way:

• Applying for an in-house graphic designer job

• Working through an agency

• Registering her own private limited company in Singapore.

And she could not make her choice among these three options. As she was explaining to me her hesitations, describing relative advantages and difficulties related to each of the "paths", it dawned on me that there were in fact no real options. Rather, they were technical, administrative means for the same end: working with corporate clients. Who were these clients? What were their needs? When we started digging deeper, it became obvious that my guest did not have clear answers to these questions yet.

This case to me is a classical example of confusion between means and ends. Ends are what we want, means is how we get there. If you confuse means and ends, you jump into solutions without having properly defined the REAL problem. 

It's easy to confuse means with ends. Means are on the surface, they are near and obvious, they cry for our attention. We confuse means with ends not only when we think about our career decisions, but also in our personal life: for example, we can express disappointment with our spouse for his/her late working hours or travel and have an argument about reducing them, however, the real end is that we need more time together as a couple. And there is more than one solution to get to this end. As Jennifer Petriglieri says in her book "Couples That Work", it's always deeper than practicalities. 

Dangers of confusing means and ends

A problem well-defined is half-solved. As Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner write in "Think Like a Freak", 

whatever problem you're trying to solve, make sure you're not just attacking the noisy part of the problem that happens to capture your attention. Before spending all your time and resources, it's incredibly important to properly define the problem - or, better yet, redefine the problem.

Two things can happen when we confuse means and ends in our career decisions:

(1) Confusing means and ends paralyzes or delays our action

My guest, absorbed by comparing the relative advantages of the three “options” that were in fact administrative solutions to a real problem - exploring if and how she could fulfill her aspirations by working with corporate clients - was unable to choose between them. For many months. And it obscured the fact that she had yet to explore the needs of the corporate clients, and possibly define her niche to serve them.

Another example: we can be paralyzed by the choice of an executive education program, without having fully reflected WHAT is the real problem we are trying to solve by getting the executive education in the first place, and if getting executive education is the only means to revamp/reshape our career. 

(2) Confusing means and ends can result in a significant waste of time and resources

Our time and resources are finite. If we throw them en masse to a solution without having properly defined and explored the problem, the waste can be massive. People do that. Companies do that too. One example that comes to mind is Webvan that developed huge high-tech distribution facilities in the late 1990s-early 2000s and went bust in 2001 because somehow it managed to ignore the needs, habits, and preferences of its potential customers.

What are the solutions?

There are two ways that can help avoid confusing means and ends in career decisions.

(1) Make sure to address your own REAL problem

When we consider our next career move, we must make sure we understand WHY we want the change. Are we clear about our aspirations, things that we have been missing in our previous roles? Are we addressing a real problem or technical solutions to a problem? 

In the case of my guest, the problem was that in her work she was missing more interactions and collaboration opportunities with larger groups of people, as well as a feeling to be part of something bigger than herself, like a brand whose value she would share. Working with corporate clients could solve this problem; whatever the administrative solution to structure her work for them. Working with corporate clients could potentially solve this problem. And what if there were other options that could?

(2) Make sure to address the market reality - if your work can solve someone else’s problem.

Your work is always a means for someone else's end, it solves someone else's problem. Besides considering what problem we are trying to solve for ourselves, we need to understand what problem(s) our potential Clients have and if we are able to solve them.

When we consider our next career move, we are effectively in a start-up mode, with the start-up being us. And to succeed, we need to have a competitive advantage. I like the idea from "The Start-Up of You" by Reid Hoffman & Ben Casnocha: 

Your competitive advantage is formed by the interplay of three different, ever-changing forces: your assets, your aspirations/values and the market realities. The pieces need to fit together.

The interplay of the three sources to your competitive advantage

Assets is what you have right now. Soft assets are intangible contributors to career success: the knowledge and information in your brain; professional connections and the trust you've built up with them; skills you've mastered; your reputation and personal brand; your strengths (things that come easily to you). Hard assets are what you'd typically list on a balance sheet… These matter because when you have an economic cushion, you can more aggressively make moves that entail downside financial risk.

Aspirations include your deepest wishes, ideas, goals, and vision of the future, regardless of the state of the external world or your existing asset mix. You may not be able to achieve all your aspirations or build a life that incorporates all your values. And they will change over time. But you should at least orient yourself in the direction of a pole star, even if it changes. Your aspirations shape what you do. But your aspirations are themselves shaped by your actions and experiences. You remake yourself as you grow and as the world changes. Your identity doesn't get found. It emerges.

Market realities is the final piece of the puzzle. Your skills, experiences, and other soft assets - no matter how special you think they are - won't give you an edge unless they meet the needs of a paying market. Markets that don't exist don't care how smart you are. It doesn’t matter how hard you've worked or how passionate you are about an aspiration: if someone won't pay you for your services in a career marketplace, it's going to be a very hard slog. You aren't entitled to anything.

Evaluate each piece of the puzzle in the context of the others. And do so regularly: the pieces of the puzzle change in shape and size over time.

For my guest, as the outcome of our session, it became clear that at this stage she needed to merge her last three "options" into one: explore the needs of the corporate clients. She could do it by making an initial list of companies she could target and start meeting their directors of brand & communications, their in-house designers, the agencies who worked with them, and understanding Clients' problems that need graphic design solutions. The list would evolve with time, and as the opportunities would become clearer, so would the relative advantages of the technical solutions on which she has been focusing so far.

Final word

Whatever the career choices you are facing, make sure that you are addressing your real problem and that there is at least one Client with a problem you understand and can solve who is willing to pay you for your work.

Good luck!

Illustration source: unsplash.com