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After being side-tracked by my last B821: Financial Strategy assignment last week, and life in general, I’m back on the personal EBI case. Following  on from Drucker’s ideas for managing oneself better, I turned to Herminia Ibarra for further guidance on framing my career-after-MBA direction.

Ibarra and Lineback (2005) in their article “What’s your Story?” have interesting points to make about trying to link up your past career/life to the new direction you seek. They point out that many people struggle to explain what they want to do next and why a change makes sense. People fear looking flaky, incoherent and indecisive. Because of this, people stick to a factual career narrative which does not explain their long-term goals or aspirations well enough for others to “Buy-in” to their desired change.

This is why Ibarra and Lineback say it’s important to craft a good story for each of the career avenues you wish to pursue. By linking your present and future goals to your past career history, you can help others to understand how you got to the juncture you are at today and where you want to journey onto now. Being able to make sense of the turning point that led you to want to change your career direction is an important step to convincing ourselves, and others, that the career change is meaningful and not fleeting.  Your story must be coherent and persuasive, if you hope to redirect your career trajectory.

Thankfully, Ibarra and Lineback do provide some useful action points that they believe can help a professional change career direction, those being:

• Link your change reasons to your skillset e.g “I found that I was good at X…”
• Mention multiple reasons (personal & professional) for why you want change;
• Make sure you have reasons for why you didn’t pursue your current goals in your past;
• Reframe your past in light of your current/future goals;
• Choose a story form that lends itself to your tale of reinvention such as a maturing view of the world or learning from self-reflection/educational insight;

They also suggest that in the early stages of your career transition, it is important to identify and actively consider multiple career pathways. This is something that I’ve already started doing. I’m trying to map my career options with a list of known pros and cons for each pathway.

Furthermore, once you have settled on the career routes that you wish to pursue, it is important to discuss them with different types of audiences such as friends, family, co-workers or acquaintances. The more feedback you get, the more likely you are to settle on the right career path for you and the one that is the most achievable.

Reference:

Ibarra H, & Lineback K (2005). What’s your story? Harvard business review, 83 (1), 64-71 PMID: 15697114

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I experienced a great OU Res-School at Lane End Conference Centre, Buckinghamshire, over the weekend just gone. I caught-up with fellow B830 tutor group members and some previous module colleagues. I was a member of Richard’s tutor group and also a member of a randomly generated learning set group formed to work through all our EBI proposals.

This EBI bullet-proofing process required us to map who we perceived as main EBI stakeholders on our power-interest matrices, define our EBI with the key issues outlined, and explore potential areas of theory relevant to our chosen EBIs.

I have decided to focus on a personal and very individually-focused EBI. I feel that I need to analyse my skill set, family commitments and employment opportunities in detail and work out the best career pathway for me. The best way of doing this, I believe, is to audit my work experience and competencies with a career coach. I have already had one session with David at C2 Careers and I already have some action points to work on following the meeting.

At the moment, I feel a bit like Dorothy traversing the Yellow Brick road to the Emerald City in the Wizard of Oz. But instead of one road to Emerald City I have numerous choices and crossroads! I recognise that too much choice is a nice problem to have, but it complicates the process markedly. It doesn’t help when everyone has an opinion on the best way forward depending on their interest in my background and skillset.

Right now I feel that I need to follow a very divergent process in order to explore and narrow down my choices. I can see this process of self-discovery being extremely iterative as I work through my options and converge on a suitable pathway. I think I’m likely to follow the Buffalo 6-stage creative problem solving process during my EBI. I already feel that I am at stage two of the divergent fact-finding part: discovering suitable work structures and work opportunities for me following the completion of the OU MBA.

As part of my career audit I think that I can use the CV Plus method mentioned by Dealtry (2004) in his article The Savvy Learner. He believes that existing and prospective managers need to establish where they are in their learning-to-learn journey. He argues that CV Plus is a diagnostic self-appraisal tool that provides a framework of six core areas (Family, Location, Education, Work Experience, Social Activity, and Political Opinion) in order to help an individual work through their past learning experience and ideology. By mapping the learning progress from birth to adulthood, without thinking of a particular job or industry influencing the self-analysis, it is hoped that an individual can understand how they arrived at their present career path.

Dealtry believes it is important that an individual knows three main things about themselves in relation to their learning journey: their learning styles profile, learning diagnostics and team profile. He states that knowing the learning self leads to the recognition in differences in behaviour in those people we work with and live with. But this insight needs to be managed within the context of the influences that affect an individual’s learning development such as job context, culture, methods of learning etc and their own strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.

Fundamentally, Dealtry argues that an individual’s learning-to-learn journey is about managing all the stakeholders involved in the learning experience: the learner, the organisation, and also work colleagues, family and learning providers. We do not learn in a vacuum. Furthermore, how an individual shifts his/her world-view paradigm after discovering new ideas can markedly impact others and the way they are perceived by them. It’s important to recognise the changes in you and the positive or negative impact it may have on your personal or work relationships.

References:

Dealtry R. (2004) “Professional Practice: The Savvy Learner”, The Journal of Workplace Learning, Vol.16 no 1, Emerald Group Publishing, pp 101-109.

As theory-in-action forms a large part of the OU EBI there are a lot of academic papers to engage with. One I have just read is Argyris’ (1986) Reinforcing Organisational Defensive Routines. He defines Defensive Routines as any policies or  actions that prevent the organisation from experiencing pain or threat and simultaneously preventing learning how to correct the causes of the threat in the first place. These routines prevent effective implementation of any managerial function e.g. marketing, finance or HR. He believes that HR, despite not wanting to, generally end up designing programmes that reinforce these defensive mechanisms without realising it.

This entwined action causes line management to view HR professionals as weak; viewing the HR function as too primitive to change things effectively. This causes line executives to temper HR budgets and limit HR’s action in management development, organisational development and training initiatives. He concludes that defensive routines organise into self-reinforcing loops that can act to create problems such as the lack of effective line leadership.

To an extent, I would agree with this view. But I think it comes out of the different ways employees are incentivised and rewarded in different departments. For example, if your pay and bonuses are determined by the Director of the Department, HR diktats can be seen as “mixed messages” as they probably don’t help you get your day-to-day job done because of the power & politics you probably engage with at the department level. Managing people and their career development, rightly or wrongly can be seen as holding you back from your own career goals, particularly if your bonuses are related to how many sales you bring into the organisation.

Argyris points this out when he states that the problem from the line manager’s point of view is that such action (don’t rely on politics, surface bad decisions etc) do not make sense if line managers are to get their job done. This is particularly apparent when management messages are not seen as credible when top management act indecisively, play politics, and are risk averse.

No doubt other people in different industries may have a different view on the paper, but I think it is worth thinking about how pay and benefits systems incentivise employee behaviour, particularly in different functions and industries. I think it can contribute to a lot of negative outcomes, such as the misalignment of financial advisors paid commission by the  insurance agents rather than taking a fee from the client.