Tag Archives: Career

How to Figure Out Your Next Move

So, assuming that you’re a good performer, and you’ve met your company’s requirements to be eligible for a mobility move, how does one go about figuring out what their  next move should be?

Here’s a framework I suggest to people:

1. Assess yourself.  Two categories of skills: capabilities and product/technical knowledge. Make a list of what you have in both these categories NOW. Capabilities are broad: people management skills, business requirements documenter, presentation skills. Product/technical is the deep detailed knowledge, like knowing a particular product. This is what you bring to the new job.

2. What do you love, what not so much? Write the elements down. If you don’t want to manage people, you need to write that down. This is what you want your future job to have.

3. Show your assessment to your manager and have a conversation to narrow down the options. If you don’t want to manage others, you’re not going to run a line. If you hate strategy, you’re not going to want to be in a planning function. The purpose of this is to narrow down all the options to the best few.

4. Once you’ve narrowed down the list of functions/areas, ask your manager for 3 names of people you can talk to. Often, the next move is about timing. You want to do your due diligence as well as make sure people have you in mind when an opening does come up.

5. When you interview for the role, there are 3 people you need to talk to: the hiring manager (but take it with a grain of salt since they’re selling you), your current manager (they probably know you the best, so their opinion is important), and someone who works for the hiring manager (“What are the 3 things you love about the job? What frustrates you?”) They’re most likely to be honest with you.

Lastly, be patient. It’s better to take longer to find the perfect next move, than move too fast and jump into the fire.

Optics

I use the term “optics” to describe when we don’t do something because of the way it looks. Not whether or not there’s a rule we’re in violation of. It goes above and beyond the written rules and is a higher standard.

There will never be a rule for everything. And situations change. But the ability to exercise good “optics” awareness is key in a career.

Good optics awareness requires you to ask yourself constantly, “Could this be construed negatively?” No one ever intentionally wants an optics problem. It’s almost always an unintended consequence.

It can be as big as auto makers flying on corporate jets while asking for a billion dollar bailout. It can be as small as a team going out for drinks three times a week, a manager appearing to favor one person over another, having a big party when the company just let people go.  No rules were technically broken…but it probably shouldn’t have happened.

Optics matter. If you’re not sure, ask someone you trust. It’s a 30 second conversation that can save you a lot of damage control cleanup.

 

 

It’s OK not to know what you want to be when you grow up

I can’t tell you how many people are relieved when I tell them this.

The impression I get is that people think senior people always knew what they wanted and how they were going to get there. That there was a plan.

Speaking for myself, there was NEVER a plan. I was a history major undergrad, and I thought I was going to be a lawyer. But I ended up working in banking, and decided to stay in financial services. I have held positions in marketing, operations, pricing, new product development, reengineering. I’ve worked in credit cards, private banking, corporate banking, retail brokerage, and high net worth asset management.

My point is that clearly I didn’t have a plan. But I did have two requirements: that my next job was always going to be challenging in some way because there were new things to learn, but I would also be able to contribute to the role immediately because of what I already knew.  That way, I wasn’t walking into a job where everything was new.

When you’re starting out in your career, it’s perfectly ok not to know what you want to be. Here’s the analogy I gave to someone recently:

Imagine a huge buffet with 300 different dishes. Knowing what you want to be when you grow up is like me asking you “What is the one dish you want to eat for the rest of your life?”  It’s reasonable for you to look at me and say “But I’ve only tasted this one dish!”

As you progress in your career, you’re going to try lots of different things. You’ll figure out what you like and what you don’t like, and hopefully, you find the dish you’ll want to eat for the rest of your life.

But in the meantime, relax. It’s ok not to know. Just make sure you’re doing what you need to do to eventually figure it out.