Warning: Not All Career Rules Are True

Corporations often dish up beliefs as truths and then manage you through that lens. I see it all the time in my coaching work. There’s an implicit set of assumptions that underpin the culture of a business. These are all well and good if they happen to jive with your values and beliefs, but crazy-making if they don’t.

Take Bob who was living in the grip of one such “truth” when I began working with him.

A young, talented and ambitious accountant, he’d recently been disappointed to find that he hadn’t even been nominated for the promotion process that would eventually allow him to apply for partnership. But the icing on the cake was the following advice dished out to him by his HR Director:

“You can’t have a career and a good work life balance,”

When I asked him to help me understand, he shared that he wanted to have a life, as much as he wanted to have a career. He was no slouch. He’d work the hours to finish audits on time, and he’d conduct after-hours client review meetings no problem. But when the pressure was off, he’d leave work at six and spend his evenings with his wife and two children, instead of doing the politically required thing of staying at his desk.

This went against the grain for his firm. So, if he wanted a career there he was going to have to choose between two parts of him that he did not want to experience as ever being in conflict.

Reframe The Belief

The first step in our coaching work was to challenge the assumption in the belief.

“Is it true that one cannot have a career and a rich life beyond it?” I asked.

As we talked it through, it became obvious that, while it was true of his company, he could think of lots of other people in his life and in the public eye who had good lives and good careers.

Take Back The Power

Next up was for Bob to consider whose picture of a professional life he was going to follow: his own or his firm’s.

In the former, Bob himself could set goals for himself and decide what was and wasn’t okay for him. In the latter, he’d hand over much of his power to his firm. They’d decide what was appropriate, and Bob would moderate himself to fit in.

He decided that constantly measuring himself against some external standard, as he had been until that point, was no longer for him. Deciding to put himself in the driving seat of his own career allowed him to feel much more confident and resourceful.

Can You Get What You Want Here?

He decided to test out his current firm by having a further conversation with the HRD about how much latitude there actually was on worklife issues. But he returned to me disappointed.

“The partnership is a club,” the HRD had said. “It may say it values worklife balance, but really it expects complete loyalty. Either you’re happy to play by the rules or you’re not.”

We looked at the kind of club this partnership actually was and whether it was one of which Bob really wanted to be a member. He reflected on the phenomenal professionalism on the one hand; on the other he spoke of the failed marriages, the confirmed singletons, the relationships that appeared to exist purely on convenience. He started to square up to the possibility that this was not a club to which he would willingly belong.

Where Can You Get It?

With my support, he then went off and began having tentative chats with people in his professional network. He was trying to get a feel for how life was in other accountancy and professional service firms. Many of them seemed to have similar cultures. But some of the mid-sized, more entrepreneurial ones appeared more open to the possibility that their people might want to have more in their lives than work.

Finally, he was offered and accepted a senior management role for a smaller firm, with a fast-track route to partnership based on how things mutually worked out.

The last time I spoke to him he’d just been promoted, and was delighted.

Bob’s is just one example of how career rules can work against individuals, and how it’s possible, by getting clear of what’s true for you, to find a better fit.

What career rules might you be unduly struggling against? How might using Bob’s example free you up?

photo credit: Aerokev

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