Their journeys have meandered a bit too. From an initial interest in law to history and education (David), teaching to theatre and performance (Andrew), a determined jazz trumpeter who plays many genres and leads others in music (Patrick), and combining occupational therapy and student well-being (Katie).
Even my husband Robert veered from his PhD in chemistry to being CEO for industry, professional associations and regulatory bodies, none of which required a chemistry qualification.
The lesson for all of us is to study what you are passionate about as it is likely that you will succeed in that area—or it might be a great base for something else entirely. You never know where it might take you.
This book is about finding your passion and your purpose, focusing on what you are good at, and making considered decisions about risks and rewards. It will introduce you to the passions of others and how they shaped those into careers with meaning—careers that appear to have meandered but where the professional passion evolved along with the individual’s personal journey.
We are each people with many different facets to our lives, or many ‘faces’, but how do we integrate those so that we thrive with the decisions that we make? Knowing ourselves well is important to being able to lead others well. We need to be able to build trust, through sharing some of our vulnerabilities, so that others will then trust us. It helps if we are continuous learners, with a good level of curiosity, who are able to glean insights from others.
The Agile Executive is in three parts: The first part of the book is about how we grow our careers through a series of decisions, rather than a pre-determined plan. The second part of the book is about how we lead others through change, and draws more on the professional work we do. We each have much to learn from others and the third part of the book brings together the learnings and insights from over twenty female executives and managers.
Part 1
Lead yourself with purpose
The first part of the book is about how we grow our careers through a series of decisions, rather than a pre-determined plan. It draws on many of my own experiences, along with those of others with whom I have worked. We each have our comfort zones and inflection points, and we each seek different types of risks and rewards. We have to understand our strengths, use them well, and build our resilience along the way. There are always trade-offs and, having made a decision, we should not look back and feel guilty about what might have been. Sometimes, too, we engage in activities that reinforce our sense of guilt to others—we might not even realise it, but we need to stop doing it. We need to own our achievements and know our own story, and that particularly applies to women. We should know how to ‘get noticed’ in a good way, and glean a few tips from a search consultant.
1
Risks, Inflections Points and Learning
Career starting point are just that—starting points
There are no longer careers for life. There is not one set pathway to success. Professions that might once have offered structured progression, like law or accounting, are under threat. Teachers and tertiary sector educators are dealing with different student expectations and the potential commodification of some parts of their knowledge base. Much repetitive work is being, and will be, replaced by automation and artificial intelligence.
At the same time, we have great opportunities to use technology developments creatively. In the performance area, whole sets of new capabilities are being employed. In the health sector, many of us are benefitting from terrific developments, as we combine discoveries and new ways of doing things by linking the human and technology sides of health care.
It is this innovative thinking that is the key to success. Your career is now driven by your ability to understand your capabilities, your strengths, any important developmental needs, and what you really enjoy doing.
A friend of mine is a keen sailor. He always talks about having some kind of destination in mind, but the way you get there will vary according to the conditions.
It is not a straight path. You need to use the tiller to provide some direction. Sometimes you have to tack and put up different sails depending on the wind, the swell, and the obstacles along the way. And then you need to adjust and trim the sails as the wind changes direction and strengths.
Sometimes just travelling in a big circle around San Francisco Bay or Sydney Harbour is fine, if that is what you enjoy. Your career can be a bit like that. Careers grow through tacking, using the tiller, and sometimes trimming the sails—choices are made based on the circumstances at the time.
With the trajectory of change now around us, we should expect to have multiple careers throughout our working life. For those of us with opportunities, or who are able to make opportunities, continuing to grow and evolve might take us in quite different directions.
Take some examples: one of Disney’s international technology executives started her career as a public relations consultant, a leading Ombudsman started her career as a pharmacist, one of Australia’s Vice Chancellors was a research assistant in a commercial laboratory, a medical practitioner from rural India is now CEO of a large disability services organisation, a chemical engineer moved into banking and now uses her combined skills and experience to chair company boards, and a law and Asian languages graduate is a global health technology entrepreneur.
Each of these executives used their initial education and experience to build a varied and satisfying career, ending up in roles that they may never have seen themselves in, but their careers emerged from their passions, desires, self-knowledge and growth.
So, the first thing you need to ask yourself is: Where do you get real satisfaction and what type of growth do you want?
In questioning people about their careers, we often ask about their inflection points—what were the decisions you made, the big risks you took, or the career opportunity that really challenged you? Where did you take a career risk and how did it turn out?
Certainly, we won’t always have the choices we want, or be able to choose between options. What will matter increasingly though is our ability and willingness to take risks—considered risks—to gain new or different capabilities and experiences that will give us some future options.
Once upon a time, I had a career plan. But my actual career took a very different path—or many different paths, in fact. It involved taking risks—most of which worked out, but some not as well as I might have wanted at the time.
This chapter will provide some insights into HOW I made many career decisions and what I saw as the risks at time.
These decisions are my key inflection points. They involved some use of the tiller, some tacking and some shifting of the sails.
The plan I had at the start of my career journey…
I am a bit of a planner and a list-maker. I had always planned to meet the right guy when I was about twenty-six, which was a ‘mature’ age to do that forty years ago. This would happen after I completed my university degree, qualified as a teacher, travelled the world and then established my career. Children might or might not happen at some stage. (Due to some minor medical issues, I was not convinced that I could have children, anyway.)
Well, that was not quite how it turned out. I met that guy when I was nineteen, became engaged just after my twentieth birthday, married before I was twenty-one, and got pregnant on our honeymoon. Another three children came along in the next eight years or so, some planned, some not so planned. (Fertility clearly was not my problem, and, if anything, I came to realise that I had the reverse issue.) We did agree to have four, although my husband has no recollection of this (he would have been happy with a few more). I was one of seven and he was the eldest of eight, so four seemed like a good compromise at the time.
When we married, Robert was in the early stages of his studies for a PhD in Chemistry, so of course he was still