What Got You Here Won’t Get You There

May 6

Earlier this year, a friend and former colleague published a terrific piece in The Hill called, Time to Get off the ‘Career Track,’ about how America’s educational institutions are not preparing young people for the future of work.

I highly recommend it!

Miller explained the urgent need for more career athleticism - developing muscles to:

build structure out of autonomy
lead through ambiguity
create a vocation (vs. find a job)

She is absolutely right, except young people are not the only ones who need to develop these leadership muscles. We all do.

If you are an educated, mid-career professional, unsure how to stand out in these uncertain times, you must stop preparing for leadership and start practicing it.

The Preparation Trap

If you have more than one degree to your name, you probably spent a lot of time preparing for your career: studying, organizing, planning, testing, interviewing, etc. Unfortunately, all your diligent preparation also left you vulnerable to 3 insidious effects:

Effect #1 Authority Bias

The tendency to defer to external authorities as “the experts” without checking their goals against yours

Why it's a trap

...rendering you less likely to acknowledge your own capabilities and take courageous responsibility for your career

Effect #2 Conflating Data and Certainty

The assumption that gathering more data points will bring more certainty to your decision-making.

Why it's a trap

...setting you up for information overload, while missing chances to experience work with your people

Effect #3 The Hamster Wheel Effect

The relentless pursuit of the next goal or achievement, rooted in how much you can deliver or produce

Why it's a trap

...keeping fulfillment out of reach, and burning through your capacity to design a better future

If you read these and cringed, thinking about all the times you:

secretly wished someone would just tell you what to do
got overwhelmed and lost track of the bigger picture
burned out trying to prove your worth

Please don't panic

…but please do consider this a challenge to practice a new game.

Start Practicing a New Game

I challenge you to start practicing a new game - your own game. Acknowledge that 'good student' conditioning that’s no longer serving you and start exercising your own leadership by: