How I created my personal career vision for success
Beginning with the end in mind is key to inspire success.
Ever since I learned how to create my career vision, I have included it in my managerial duties for my team.
Why?
If you want your team to be self-organized (this means they can plot and execute work towards business goals without your micromanagement), you want them to own their careers as a first step.
I managed engineers who expected to be promoted based on what I told them to do on a task-to-task basis. I will expand on why this is a bad idea for everyone in a future post, but in short, it is not sustainable in the long run, as I had to manage around ten people across the UK and the US at the time of this writing.
It is to the individual contributor's benefit that they own their career.
I care about them enough to coach them on their personal career vision, but I may not always be their manager forever.
A career vision keeps everyone focused on what they want to achieve and not be derailed by distractions.
For example, I had an engineer who was too focused on coordinating and planning work instead of actual coding and execution. However, the same engineer wanted to be a subject matter expert and be relied upon as a lead.
The engineer's daily tasks contradicted his personal vision because his technical skills suffered, and he did more work as a technical program manager (TPM) than as an engineer.
It gives me room as a manager to calibrate his focus back to his career vision, and we know we can journey together regarding the team's business vision and goal.
I believe that when the individual contributors in my team align their personal career vision with the team's business goals and vision, the team's outcome and value will be greater than the sum of its parts because it gives the individual contributors an opportunity to express their talents and gifts with minimal supervision.
Thus, I began guiding my team to have their career vision so that they can hold themselves accountable and see for themselves if they are given the room and opportunity to realize their career vision within the team.
How did I craft my career vision?
A career vision is a personal headline to socialize or brand myself to others. It follows the three principles of crafting a career vision in my previous post:
Understand what a career vision is and what it isn't.
Anchor the reason for having your career vision.
Ignore the how when crafting your career vision.
Thus, I created this personal headline, borrowing a template from my career coach (Andrew LaCivita).
I'm a premier source of aid that helps companies create innovative teams so that through the team's products, they positively impact the community and be rewarded for their service.
In this template, there are three fundamentals in my headline:
Who are you?
A premier source of aid.
For whom do I do it?
For the company.
The team that I'm managing.
The community that we are serving.
How do others benefit?
Positive impact on the community, which meets the company's goals.
The team should be rewarded for their service.
Why did I craft this headline for my career vision?
We can only achieve long-lasting success as a team because every individual has a limit.
My late dad was diagnosed with a brain tumor a short while before I was promoted to be a manager in CBS Sports. After finishing up the NFL Google AI assistant for USD 1.7 million, I had to slow my work down and focus on the family.
It was then that I realized that I could not build everything from the ground up to create innovative products. Like everyone else, I have family obligations, health, and other matters in life that I have to focus on in their season.
For the NFL Google AI Assistant project, I had to build the technical parts alone. We were short on time, and I had to make my prototype ready for production in one month. I would have preferred to bring others on board to build the app with me.
Thus, I set my sights on building teams so that we can develop innovative products that benefit the community, which in turn should bring profits and rewards for the company and team.
I enjoy the adrenaline rush of creating and publishing a product for the masses, and thus, I look forward to this aspect of my career.
How did my career vision help me personally?
When I was ready to move on from CBS Sports, I came across a managerial job description from PlayStation that involved managing a team in web analytics.
The interview experience was great, but the interviewers kept hinting that I needed more years to match my managerial profile, even though I was already ten years in the industry.
They liked me enough to offer me a role. Still, they downsized the role into an individual contributor lead and promised to find a way to promote me once I accrued enough managerial experience.
It was tempting because we could negotiate the salary offer to what I wanted, but I had to consider whether I wanted to be an individual contributor.
And the answer was no.
There wasn't a need for me to rush, as I was doing well in CBS Sports and could afford to stay to boost my managerial experience. Although I felt I needed a change after being in the same company for ten years, it was not worth sacrificing my vision for a short-term gain that may or may not lead to the outcomes that I want.
Thus, I turned down the offer and resumed my job search.
A few months later, I applied for another managerial role at PlayStation from another team and at Nike. Both jobs eventually offered me the respective roles, and I ended up in PlayStation as a data analytics and engineering manager.
Had I taken the individual contributor route, I might have delayed my progression to managing and leading a team.
As a professional for over ten years, I have found that developing my skills in any tech field is easy, given time and effort. However, it is only possible to grow my management skills with a team to lead.
A career vision helps you to begin with the end in mind.
The last thing you want to do is to spend all that time climbing a tree, but you discover it is the wrong tree to climb.
There are other ways that a career vision has helped me, which I will detail in future posts, such as:
Using my career vision to shape the "how".
Discover the gaps from my current state to my career vision.
Create a plan of action to address the gaps in my growth toward my career vision.
I will also create data analysts, engineers, scientists, or other profiles in the data world so that you can begin with the end in mind. These profiles will answer the questions that include:
What kind of core skills would you need to succeed in any company?
How can you discover the gaps between your skills and experience and the above profiles?
In the future, I might offer one-to-one coaching on aligning your career vision with your job profile, but I'm strapped for time at the moment, so I will let you know through my newsletter.
Until then, you can look forward to my post on how I used my career vision to address my current needs and develop a strategy and plan of action for growth.
If this is helpful, please share this post with someone who is in need. It will benefit both of us.