We all had that experience - you reach into your bag looking for your earphones, turns out you took out a messy knot of earphone line mixing with your charging cable. Now, I challenge you to untie it by only holding onto only your earphone lines, without touching anything else entangled with it. How possible is that?
That's what we do in career development conversations, how fascinating.
In such conversations, your manager, sometimes HR, focuses on what you do in the job, how well you are performing, and how your next step looks like in the organization. Somehow the conversation managed to miss other aspects of your life - changes in family, your social network, or the community.
Not only is this common in the corporate world, somehow it is also observed in the organizational behavior academia that career is not conceptualized in the individual's broader life context.
In the recent decade, researchers combined career development theories and life course theories in the attempt to look at career development from a wholistic life context's perspective.
In their qualitative research, Mary D Lee and her team theorized that career lives could be studied in 3 dimensions. The first would be how much the focus of the career journey is on the individual. For example, lots of organizations are going through drastic changes under the current circumstances. Individuals going through disruptions because of this may put the organization as the focal point of the career change. Secondly, whether the individual thinks that he/she is playing an assertive role, or letting the environment act upon them. The third dimension would be how salient external events in the society, organization or family impact the individual.
Through the above approach, a more thorough analysis of external factors that influence a person's career could be made possible, which provides valuable insights in the individual's career development.
Another example would be Jeffrey H Greenhaus and Ellen E Kossek's proposal of a work-home perspective on career, recognizing the interdependence between work and home lives. Using the lens of work-home perspective, career management could be broadened to ensure alignment with home life. For instance, career goal setting could be broadened to achieve a balance between different life roles apart from work roles; career exploration could involve discussion on what such options would mean for the family and how family value is aligned; mentoring relationships could take into account what career success means for the protege's home life.
Untangling the diverse perspectives of your life journey’s impact on career could be challenging, but is necessary in order to have an effective career planning. An effective developmental relationship would certainly help you in the process.
In a recent article of Harvard Business Review, the CMO of Slack was quoted to be having a videoconference when her daughters popped right in. This is the moment of truth when everybody knows that career is entangled with home life, now more than ever.
Project Timeout provides coaching services on career and professional development. We aim at providing you a meaningful pause from your daily routines, a pause that helps you re-prioritize, a pause that matters.
Please contact me to explore how we could add value to your career, and life.
Reference
Butterfield, S. (2020). The CEO of Slack on Adapting in Response to a Global Crisis. Harvard Business Review, 98(4), 30-35
Greenhaus, J. H., & Kossek, E. E. (2014). The contemporary career: A work–home perspective. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavavior, 1(1), 361-388.
Lee, M. D., Kossek, E. E., Hall, D. T., & Litrico, J. B. (2011). Entangled strands: A process perspective on the evolution of careers in the context of personal, family, work, and community life. human relations, 64(12), 1531-1553.
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