Ask most people why they did the first job that they did, and the answers will usually reveal the power of family messages. Middle class families often have direct role modelling – think of acting dynasties, or the generations of doctors, lawyers or teachers that are often found in one family.
For working class families the influences are often more aspirational: the desire to have a doctor, lawyer or teacher in the family. For both groups the story they have created is one that has often been given to them. It is only with increased distance and maturity that that such narratives begin to be questioned.
Often it is in the 20’s that the story begins to feel uncomfortable. A tension can emerge between doing what others want for you and your own growing sense of unease. Working with GPS I was struck by how often their story was one of following a career that gained considerable approval from others, only to find that the reality of living the role was not what they expected. Discovering that what you do does not meet your own needs, although it may meet others is a difficult place to be. Marcia B Baxter Magolda in her book Authoring a Life interviewed 35 adults over a 20 year period, and found that facing a career crossroad was a significant feature of her interviewees. At some point, individuals began to hear an inner voice which told them that their needs were different from what they had come to believe. That voice was often suppressed because it opened up fears of disapproval, but at some point the individual had to make a decision. Do I continue on this path that has been set for me, or do I start to risk listening to and trusting my inner voice? The process of building trust in that voice as a guide to taking action was not one of linear progression. Often the interviews reveal how people moved towards and then away from accepting their own values and beliefs over a number of years. Gradually and tentatively they came to recognise the strength of that inner voice. They moved towards what Magolda calls ’self authorship’. Becoming one’s own author provided a compass point for dealing with life’s challenges in both work and relationships. It was not that their lives were any easier because of developing that voice, but that they had something they could call on to get them through the vicissitudes of life, and to help in decision making on career issues.

A starting point for developing that voice is to examine your own career narrative.

Sit down and write your career story so far – not as a cv story, but in terms of the following questions:

Think of the role models you were presented with in childhood and early adulthood and how they influenced your decisions about work?

Has there been a point when you were challenged by something in life that changed your perspective on your career?

If you have passed over a career crossroad, which road did you take and why?

What has resulted from the road you chose?

If you are currently at a crossroad, what is the tension you are caught between?

How much of what you are doing now is guided by your own inner voice?

If you are on a journey towards developing that inner voice – then when is it at its strongest, and when does it get drowned out?

In a world where careers are constantly changing in response to global, economic, social and technological shifts, creating self authorship will become ever more important. A starting point is to take time to reflect on how well your career narrative is working for you, in order to check if a different story needs to be written.

What aspect of your career narrative

The first NHS Coaching Conference is being held in conjunction with the EMCC on 10th March in Manchester.
As part of the day, Carole Pemberton will be leading a workshop on career coaching for senior leaders. she will be sharing what she has learnt about becoming successful in an organisation that goes beyond doing a great job.

On 12th March, Carole Pemberton will be talking at the Association for Coaching Global Conference about the experience of developing Talent Coaches at RBS during a time of acute business turbulence.
In partnership with Debbie Liles Development Coach for RBS, they developed a programme which has delivered a development experience for the coaches that is being valued by coachees as a sign of the organisation’s commitment to them.
In this session which will also include input from Senior Manager Stuart Wilson, they will describe the context, the programme and its impact.

The publicity given to Lord Browne’s autobiography ‘Beyond Business’ has focussed on how different he is from the ‘Sun King’ figure who once led BP. His very public resignation caused by revelations about his personal life, led to a period of public withdrawal, but now he is back. What is noticeable in his interviews is his recognition of the value of having faced difficulty and learned from it. He talks now of being happier than he has ever been and of his recognition that the person he had become was arrogant, and was hiding his loneliness in his work. Steve Jobs talking to Stanford graduates in 2005 made a similar admission when he spoke of the learning that came from being sacked from Apple: the company he had founded. While his instinct was to run away as a very public failure, he slowly began to realise that the most important thing was what he loved doing, and so he began again. From that new beginning emerged Pixar, which in turn was eventually purchased by Apple. He came back to where he had started. Except of course he didn’t. The person who re-entered was changed. As he said, “Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith”.
Among all the books that are written on careers, the attention is primarily on the skills for success – find your strengths, hone your brand. Very little is given to the importance of facing and learning from hardship. That hardship comes in many forms: career disappointment, challenging life events, burnout.
We create a career narrative for ourselves which drives the choices we make, the amount of ourselves we invest in work -so what do we do when that narrative is disrupted. We discover we give all we can but it does not deliver what we expect, we focus on work to the detriment of everything else in our lives and find we are overlooked, or we end up with our hours filled but a life that is empty.
When someone is able to face and acknowledge the narrative that has been created, and then can be helped to create one that is more connected to who they are, then career takes on a whole new meaning that is embedded into the person, rather than being a cloak which they wear.
Tim Casserley and David Megginson’s excellent book “Learning From Burnout” makes this argument powerfully in relation to young highflyers that soar and then crash, but I believe the same need exists in all of us at some time.
Career coaching at its best is as much about helping individuals to look at the story they have created and its limitations, as in supporting the creation of success.

The shelves of career planning books in the self help section of bookshops, present a paradox.  Most successful people I have coached would claim that they have never planned their career.  Those who claim that they planned their career, then point to some disjuncture which threw the plan off course. Or even worse, they say that following the plan stopped them assessing whether they wanted what they were creating.  They achieved their goal and than asked themselves ‘Is that it?’.  Yet at the same time, we are encouraged to believe that planning is the key to success. 

 Planning is logical, but the world is not.  If individuals were predictable, if rational thought was the only basis on which we made decisions, if performance was the only predictor of success, if organisations were in complete control of their own destiny then planning would make perfect sense – but none of the above are true.  So those who are successful in achieving careers which are satisfying and which engage their skills and motivations, and which attract the rewards which matter to them, are not in my experience career planners, but they are skilled career managers.

What is the difference?  It is not mere semantics.  To manage is according to dictionary definitions, the ability to guide, conduct, treat with care.  To manage is to have a sense of ownership for something which you treat with respect, because you want to make the best use of it. In career terms, it means that you may not be able to predict the eventual outcome, but you can navigate the journey with  care, so that wherever it takes you you will land well.

My experience of those who have careers which deliver what they want, is that they have navigated their journey with skill, and they have done this by being able to hold multiple perspectives simultaneously in considering their career.  By doing so they display a degree of career intelligence that is often missing from those who adopt the ‘In five years time, I will be . . ‘

approach.  As Charles Handy, once said of the ten year career plan that he should head up a company division in an African country, presented to him by Shell as a young trainee.  ‘Ten years on, the role did not exist, the division did not exist, and the country did not exist’.  The danger of the career plan is that it exists carved in stone, unconnected to what is changing both around and within the individual.

So what are these multiple perspectives that allow individuals to have careers that flourish regardless of the unpredictability of the external world.  I believe there are four key abilities that some are born with, and some learn along the way.  They are:

• Scenario Awareness
• Skills Currency
• Self Management
• Magnetic Marketing 

Scenario Awareness
Scenario awareness is the ability to lift your thinking beyond the immediate demands of your role, and the current state of play in your organisation, and to look ahead to see what is coming into view that could impact on how your organisation operates.  It demands an openness to look not just at the current business climate, but to consider what broader trends could impact on how your business operates, and what that could mean for opportunities.  It is the difference between seeing the future as an incremental advance on the present, where it is the success of your current strategy which will shape your career opportunities, and a willingness to consider ‘What if . . .?  By posing the ‘what if . . .? question, both the unlikelihood of the future being a mere extension of the past, and the possibility of new career options opens up.

Skills Currency
A follow on from scenario awareness is an openness to looking at the currency of your skill set against the emerging environment.  It is obvious that change has removed many roles which once provided paid employment.  From the disappearance of the bus conductor to the death of the tea lady; but we are often less attuned to the shifts in business focus or the demands of a new role which mean that our currency exchange rate is re-evaluated.  We become attached to particular skills because they bring personal satisfaction, but risk losing sight of when their value is declining in our particular context.  Those who are skilled career navigators regularly assess their currency rate, and if it is decline, they either look for another place where those skills are still needed, or they are willing to shed skills and acquire those which have greater currency. 

Self Management
Self management is about understanding your self, and in particular understanding your own strengths.  Those who are successful in their careers are able to identify what it is that they do particularly well, and even more important they know where to focus that strength.  They are able to differentiate between what they can do – which may be many things, and what they do that makes the most impact.  They think more widely than organisational competences to identify what is their ‘core competence’ ie those things which differentiate them.  It may be being able to keep people motivated when the going is tough. It could be giving staff a sense of self belief that enables them to do more than they believe possible.  It may be being ‘bloody minded’ and able to keep pushing once they believe in an outcome.  Whatever it is, it probably doesn’t appear in a competency profile.  Once individuals know what their real strengths are, they are able to find those situations in which their strengths are essential to success.

Magnetic Marketing
Knowing that self marketing is an aspect of creating a career does not make it any more comfortable for many people.  They hold in their head an image of self promoters who network furiously, manage upwards and claim credit for anything they can put their name to.  This push model of self marketing has successes, but it equally evokes resistance.  A look at those who are skilled career managers is that their marketing is based on pulling people towards them, so that they want to buy what they have to offer.  How they do that is by listening closely to what the other person needs and wants, and by showing what they have to offer that is relevant to their need, rather than by shouting their own virtues.  They create a positive word of mouth that does their marketing for them, rather than having to expend energy on selling the message.  What they do spend their energy on is building meaningful relationships with people, and in doing good work.

So if you are reading this as someone who wants to manage their own career more effectively – ask yourself these questions: 
Scenario Awareness
What scenarios can I imagine for the sector/organisation I am part of (or want to be part of)
What could that mean for career opportunities going forward?

Skills Currency
How strong is my currency right now?
What would add to my   currency strength?

Self Management
What with no due modesty are my real strengths?

What situations are they right for?

Magnetic Marketing  
Who do I want to market myself
How can I better understand their needs, so that I can signal what I have to offer?

The term talent management has become an HR hot phrase. The idea of being able to both identify and then manage the performance and motivation of the most business critical is alluring – but it is also fraught with dangers. It suggests that talent only resides with some individuals – which has implications for the motivation of the majority who are not identified talent. The common practice of identifying talent on a regular basis, allows for talent one year becoming untalented the next. It has the feel of reality show winners, whose short period in the spotlight is followed by a rapid disappearance into anonymity. Conversely, talent in whatever area: music, sport, film or business resists being managed. Knowing the value of one’s talent also means seeing it as something which they own and control. It is why Andy Murray discards tennis coaches with regularity, and musicians often engage in acrimonious battles with record companies who look to take control of their talent for business profit. Talent cannot be owned by an organisation, but organisations have an investment in ensuring that the talent it has access to has the conditions it requires to deliver the business performance it wants.

The UK CIPD has defined performance as ability + motivation + opportunity. This definition highlights the importance of organisations recognising ability, providing opportunities for its application. Equally, it highlights the value in understanding and working with individual motivations. Jane Yarnall in her book ‘Strategic Career Management: Developing Your Talent’ (Butterworth Heinemann) has identified that the in the management of talent, there has been a pendulum swing in the last 20 years. It has swung from organisational control as exemplified in planned fast track development programmes; to individual control as embodied in the Me plc manage your own career model. The need she argues is to allow the pendulum to settle at a point where there is a partnership approach.

A partnership approach means that the high identification of high potential, high performing individuals is not enough. The 9 box model which has become the common starting point of talent identification, too often becomes its end point. The organisation now knows who it views as having most potential (though the individuals may be unaware of their status), but what happens next has often been given scant attention. This is the point at which individuals need to be actively involved in discussing what this means both for them and for the organisation. Releasing talent for business benefit requires organisations to understand individuals in their totality (or as much of that as they want to bring to work), as much as it requires identifying potential successors for business critical roles.

If the term ‘talent management’ is not to be quickly consigned to Room 101 of management fads, it requires a parallel focus on the ‘how’ of managing ability, alongside the ‘what’ of designing a process to identify future leaders.