How To Find A Fulfilling Career
Originally published by Forbes.
As a Career and Executive Coach, I often come across professionals who aren’t happy in their jobs or chosen career paths. In an executive coaching engagement, where the goal is to help an existing leader to be more successful in their current role or to develop them for the next level, the questions “Am I in the right role?” or “Am I at the right company?” invariably come up. For one CEO succession candidate I worked with to prepare him for the top post, the question was “Am I in the right career?” He ultimately came to the realization that he didn’t even remotely enjoy his work. One might ask, “ How does someone get to be that senior and not realize they don’t enjoy what they do? ”
It’s more common than you’d think. High achievers like to achieve. Being good at math, he majored in Engineering. His Engineering degree landed him a job at a technology company. He spent the majority of his career at one company and had just followed the path and rewards that good performance had paved for him, without ever thinking about if this was really the work that excited and energized him.
Other clients I’ve worked with in a career transition capacity — whether it was after a downsizing or just realizing they were unhappy and wanted something new — often take the opportunity to step back and think more broadly about what they really want in their career and life. According to a Gallup study, more than two-thirds of workers are disengaged, implying a lack of fulfillment with the work, the organization, or both. Like many people I work with who get to a point in their career where they feel a sense of apathy, you may echo the Talking Heads’ lyric, “Well how did I get here?” The more important question is “ How do you figure out where you want to go? ”
Start With Values
A study entitled “Work Values and Job Rewards” published in the American Psychological Review found that work values have a significant effect on job satisfaction, and that these values are greatly shaped by our life experiences and context. For anyone looking for greater fulfillment in their work, whether you on an outwardly successful but unsatisfying path, or looking for your next role in the same sector, or wanting something new altogether, the key is to start with values — values are the key to fulfillment. Full stop.
Herminia Ibarra, the author of Working Identity, asserts that we have many possible selves, meaning there are many things we could do in life that would be fulfilling and satisfying to us. This is true — there are many ways we can express our core values. For example, a value of adventure can be expressed in a professional context by working in an innovative field like self-driving cars, founding a start-up, opening new geographic markets for a growing company, or by bringing fresh drinking water to impoverished countries. The key is to first articulate what these values are.
How To Identify Core Values
There are a few ways to identify one’s core values. One way is to look at peak experiences in your life. Peak experiences are times when you felt like you were thriving and felt alive. You felt strong and competent and confident — things were great. This is what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls “Flow.” These experiences can be anytime in your life (one of mine was when I was 15). Peak experiences can be a moment in time, like crossing a finish line, or a period of time, like your college years. They can be personal or professional. Recalling a few peak experiences and discussing them with a friend or coach can help you identify your values more clearly. (Another person can often identify important values that you hadn’t articulated before). If one of your peak experiences was running a marathon, the values may be about challenge, support from peers, and pushing boundaries, among others. The punch line here is that the reason your peak experiences produced a such a great feeling — a feeling of being alive, thriving or being “in flow” — is that these were times that you were completely expressing your values and being completely who you are.
Another way to back into your values is to look at times when you were annoyed, angry or downright pissed off. These were times when someone was stepping on one of your values. If you get annoyed when someone micromanages you, the value may be about autonomy or freedom, or if you get angry when someone doesn’t share important information with you, the value might be about transparency or collaboration. If you’ve ever had a falling out with a friend, it’s more than likely there was a values conflict involved.
Force Rank Your Values
Once you’ve generated a robust list of values, force ranking them is a helpful and necessary exercise. Why? Because life is full of trade-offs and we need to know what the must-haves are, versus what is nice-to-have. While our values don’t typically change over our lives, the relative importance of these values can change. As a colleague once said to me, “Financial security was never that important to me, until I had kids.” Knowing the relative importance of your values is key to making the right choice at any given point in time. It can be a challenging exercise. When comparing any two values, just ask, “Which one of these would I be more miserable without?” and rank that one higher.
Translate Values Into Questions
Translating your values into questions can help guide your career exploration, job search or help you to assess new, internal opportunities at your current organization. For example, if you have a value of autonomy, asking the question, “To what extent would I be free to decide how to approach specific projects?” or “What decisions would you be looking to me to make, and which ones would you expect me to ask you for guidance?” Likewise, if you have a value of collaboration, asking questions like “What are some examples of where I would need to collaborate with others across the company in this job?” or “On a scale of 1-10, how much does this work lend itself to collaboration?” The purpose of asking these types of questions is so that you can collect the right information to make the best possible decision.
Rate Each Opportunity Against Your Values
Once you have identified a specific opportunity, you can rate that opportunity or career path by asking, for each of your top 10 values, “In this job/company/career, on a scale of 1-10, to what extent would I be able to express this value (where 10 means ‘I would be able to fully express this value’)? You will then have a quantitative (or visual, if you graph it) representation of how fulfilled or satisfied you can expect to be in that job, company or career path. Elements like compensation, title and benefits, while practical and important, ultimately translate to values — whether it’s about security, status, recognition, or something else. I’ve had more than one client come back from an interview saying, “I could never work there. Their offices are too ugly.” To some, it may sound shallow, but as it turned out, they had a highly ranked value of aesthetics, and working in that environment would make them miserable.
If you are fortunate enough to do so, you can also compare multiple opportunities to each other. Whenever my clients ask, “How will I decide what to do?” I always say, “Let’s go back to your values.”