by Jenny Blake
Asking whether a launch worked is a trick question. Launches work no matter what because they get you unstuck. Launches move you out of thinking and into action. They expose your strengths, your grit, your creativity, and when you might be veering off course. Launches reveal blind spots and new insight. Launches catapult you into the next phase of your life.
A launch works because, after making it through the rocky terrain of the Pivot stages that preceded it, you know you wouldn’t return to the starting point again even if you could.
Launch: Online Resources
Visit PivotMethod.com/launch for additional tools, templates, and book recommendations for this stage.
STAGE FIVE
LEAD
Create a Pivot-Friendly Culture
PLANT
SCAN
PILOT
LAUNCH
LEAD
LEAD OVERVIEW
YOU NOW HAVE A FIRM GRASP ON THE PIVOT METHOD. You clarified your one-year vision, scanned for new opportunities, and identified experiments rooted in your strengths to test your new direction. Pivot as a mindset? Check. Pivot as a process for figuring out what’s next? Check. But what about others you interact with on a daily basis?
Impacters rarely operate in a vacuum. You work with other people regularly, possibly even managing others. You might have two employees reporting to you or twenty. Perhaps you are a president or founder, charged with improving company culture for hundreds or thousands of people. Maybe you do not manage a team yet, but can envision growing into a leadership role. Or you want to create a ground-up movement from within your organization to improve communication and career development opportunities. Perhaps you enjoy coaching and mentoring others and want to learn new skills to formalize your process.
This final stage is for leaders—anyone who wants to apply the Pivot process to help others. The Pivot Method can become a shared language for having expansive career conversations. When used as a coaching framework, you can quickly help others brainstorm solutions to problems, set development goals, and identify ambitious yet achievable next steps. When rolled out on a regular basis, Pivot can create a culture of open communication. Talking about career aspirations can become a welcome experience for managers and employees, rather than something to avoid.
CHAPTER 12: ARE YOU LISTENING?
How Can You Facilitate Engaging Career Conversations?
You have done all this work to create a hiring process that will bring in all these awesome smart creatives, and how do they pay you back? By leaving!! That’s right. News flash: When you hire great people, some of them may come to realize that there is a world beyond yours. This isn’t a bad thing, in fact it’s an inevitable by-product of a healthy, innovative team. Still, fight like hell to keep them.
—Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg, How Google Works
THE CAREER CONVERSATION I REGRET MOST IS THE ONE I NEVER HAD.
I have given two weeks’ notice twice in my career. The first time was at the political polling start-up where I worked for two years while finishing my undergraduate degree. I remember walking into the founder’s office with a cup of coffee clutched tightly in my hands as I sat down. I had always been a bit intimidated by his brilliance and, at twenty-one years old, did not have much professional experience to draw upon for situations like these.
My voice wobbled. “I . . . I . . . I have loved working here, but I have accepted a job at Google. This is my two weeks’ notice.” The conversation lasted fifteen minutes, and he asked me to have my things packed up and taken care of by Friday.
I had been the first employee, and by the time I left, the company had grown to thirty people. I welcomed each new employee, developed vendor agreements, managed our office build-out, and helped recruit our online panel of survey respondents. I was the office manager, webmaster, and marketing assistant. I loved growing so quickly with the company, and our founder often joked that I was “hiding five Jennys” in my office. But as layers of the company were added, my future there got cloudier. Instead of progressing into managerial roles, I was taking direction from three different managers at one point. I was often torn between conflicting assignments, and started feeling frustrated and restless.
What I regret is that our first career conversation was also our last. I wish I had gone to the founder and had the courage to say, “I want to keep growing with the company. Help me map a course here where I can see my development continuing.” Or, “I would love to learn more about coding. Can I take classes and increase my responsibilities?” Or even just shooting straight: “I am getting bored, and having three managers is stifling. Is there anything we can do?”
Instead, I started taking phone interviews for Google in my car on lunch breaks. It was the only company I would leave the start-up for, and it was a long shot. I interviewed for four months with twelve different people, and gave a forty-five-minute mock presentation to the entire training team, all while I could have been trying to troubleshoot the job I already had.
After two years at Google, I started itching for change again when I was spending a significant part of my time preparing PowerPoint strategy decks, decidedly not my Zone of Genius. During my first stint as a manager at age twenty-four, I was charged with displacing several friends and colleagues who were older than me and had been there longer than I had. My manager and I had meetings to ask each of them to find another role on a different team or leave the company. This crushed me.
I was ready to quit, not knowing if I was cut out for corporate life much longer, when I ran into my good friend Becky Cotton, who I mentioned earlier, and she helped me transition onto the recently formed career development team. Thanks to Becky, the angel on the shoulder of many a Googler, I ended up staying with the company two and a half more years, working with her and a small team to create and launch the global Career Guru coaching program that is still thriving today.
In the first example, I was green. I did not know how to have a career conversation and admit that I had hit a ceiling, and did not know where to go from there. I did not ask for input from the founder. Instead, I avoided the tough conversation and made plans to leave.
In the second scenario, I was able to parlay my strengths and interests into a new role within the company. I confided in an advocate, Becky—who is still working at Google on career development programs after ten years—who helped me navigate the internal job transition process.
I wanted to know, the second time around, that I had given Google every chance to fit before leaving. I was able to have transparent conversations with my manager about what mattered to me. I demonstrated strong performance in my role, and had developed unique skills by attending coach training on nights and weekends. I got approval to dedicate 10 percent time to a drop-in coaching pilot project, Career Guru. It later turned into a full-time role as the company’s growth exploded and retention became a bigger focus, allowing me to pivot internally.
“Beckys” are crucial to your organization. Imagine if managers and senior leadership in your company reacted the way Becky did. How many great people could you keep, or at least have open conversations with? How would it enable you to create a coaching culture in which impacters like Becky, who love supporting others, can also thrive? How could you provide resources that allow employees to brainstorm solutions to their hairiest career questions without judgment or fear?
YOUR INTEREST MATTERS MORE THAN YOU THINK
These days, it is likely that an employee who does not feel heard will start looking elsewhere. Money is no longer the only currency for career or life success. High net growth individuals want to feel challenged, collaborative, and like they are able to make a positive impact within their organizations and outside of them.
Jason Shen, from Chapter 3, was working at a start-up when he pivoted internally from content marketing to product management. His primary driver was not money, recognition, or even climbing the ladder. J
ason’s framework for determining how long to stay in a role and at a company reflects that of many impacters I speak with: “Am I learning? Am I growing? Are these skills, experiences, and connections going to be valuable in the future? Is this making me a better person, and do I enjoy the people I work with?”
When impacters hit a career plateau, leaving is often not their first impulse. Many want to stay with the company, ideally expanding their role by pursuing new opportunities. It is when they feel these conversations become a dead end that they start to look elsewhere. If you hire impacters for their entrepreneurial fire and creativity, do not be surprised if they get antsy when they become stymied navigating too many layers of bureaucracy.
That was the case with Courtney John-Reader. CJ felt stuck in her job as a digital communications coordinator at an architectural firm. She was excited about her projects at work, but felt the company she worked for was resistant to change and did not value her efforts.
“They seemed to place such a low priority on what I did that no matter how hard I worked, I felt like I wasn’t accomplishing anything,” she said. “After three years, I felt like I had no value and it led me to having daily panic attacks at work, and finally having to take a health leave for a few weeks.”
When CJ realized she was sacrificing her health for her job, in addition to not feeling seen or appreciated, she knew she needed to “choose herself.” This was not a rash decision, or one made lightly. “I hesitated to leave work for years because I had this feeling I would be letting people down if I skipped off,” she said. “I was totally invested in the company. But they weren’t invested in me.”
Are you creating an environment where people feel comfortable sharing their best ideas and career aspirations with you? If your impacters have a growing interest in an innovative field, are you willing to support them in running small pilots to experiment and prove the market? When people express how they would like to grow within your organization, do you provide support, guidance, and internal programs to encourage those goals? Or do you or your managers turn a deaf ear?
Too often, organizations and their managers treat coaching and career development as an afterthought. For some leaders, these are lip service HR terms that have nothing to do with the bottom line, quarterly earnings, or growth reports. But you know better.
In an Inc. survey of five hundred CEOs from the fastest-growing private companies, 41 percent of leaders identified “recruiting talent” as the biggest contributor to their company’s ability to innovate. Fifty percent said “attracting and retaining skilled employees” is the biggest challenge facing leaders today. It is likely that you have worked hard to find great employees; now it is time to apply equal effort toward keeping them.
Workers whose managers hold regular meetings are three times more likely to be engaged and to feel involved in and enthusiastic about their work. One Gallup study revealed that just 12 percent of workers strongly agreed that “their manager helps set work priorities.” This is an issue, given that this cohort tends to be much happier at work than those who scored managers’ goal-setting guidance at the lower end of the scale.
Ronnie Mae Weiss, director of MIT’s Work-Life Center, has spent twenty-five years working with organizations on employee retention and work-life benefits, and says that managers play a critical role in helping impacters do their best work. She says organizations do best with “managers who see their role as supporting their direct reports stretching, trying new things, taking some risks, and letting go a little bit, allowing them to explore intriguing opportunities.”
As the saying goes, “People leave managers, not companies.” According to Gallup, among 7,200 adults, 50 percent left a job “to get away from their manager.” So why, given the data, don’t managers have these conversations more often? Moreover, why don’t employees express their dissatisfaction before seeking opportunities outside of the organization? One major factor: fear.
Dismantle Manager Roadblocks
Managers hesitate to have career conversations for a variety of reasons, including work pressure and lack of time, uncertainty about how to best facilitate these conversations, fear of not having the answers to an employee’s career questions or goals, and fear of losing their best talent.
According to Julie Clow, senior vice president of people development for Chanel, one of the biggest roadblocks is managers’ fear of making promises they cannot keep. Managers often do not feel comfortable guaranteeing a role, and it can be easy for individuals to misinterpret the intent of these discussions. Career conversations that focus on five or ten years out are difficult.
“Individuals have a hard time foreseeing where they will be, either vastly underestimating their ability to progress or overestimating where they should be, and managers feel uncomfortable projecting ahead to think about possible roles,” Julie says. “The best strategy is to focus on what’s next, a much easier conversation for all involved.”
Julie says next could involve a timeline of next month or even a few years ahead. If managers fear making promises, they can focus on helping their employees find smaller career steps, experiments, and opportunities. Managers can promise things like help finding side projects, approving spending 10 percent of an employee’s time with another team, or reimbursing tuition for a class to build up a work-related skill set.
Jennifer Grayeb, talent development manager at Aetna, believes that managers are afraid of losing their best talent by having career conversations, but in fact, this “training people up and out” makes them even more desirable to work for.
“The best managers I know are those who not only have those conversations, but help their directs create a plan to get there,” Jennifer says. “Their reputation is shared across the organization and attracts other high performing individuals to want to work for them.”
Career Conversations Are a Two-way Street
No matter how much managers take increased responsibility for initiating these career conversations, they are still a two-way street, and should be owned by individuals. Impacters know themselves best, and shouldn’t expect others to read their mind or wait to be asked.
“I do believe it is part of the manager’s responsibility to support career development, because it means you have a more engaged, productive, happy employee who is thinking of solutions and ways to solve problems all the time, not just in the office,” Ronnie Mae at MIT says. “But it is equally important for every one of us to be looking at our career and going after what we need. Both asking our managers for that, and asking other people in the organization.”
Jennifer Grayeb suggests that individuals ask their managers about their personal career journey, and the choices they had to make along the way.
She also says one of the biggest lessons for younger impacters is balancing their desire for stretch projects and meaningful work with rolling up their sleeves and getting things done. If impacters want to create a growth culture, they should also take the lead in helping others. “For every opportunity you get, help open a door for someone else.”
Laura Grose, HR business partner at one of Silicon Valley’s fastest-growing start-ups, advocates that impacters keep a realistic and patient view of what roles may be available. She found that many impacters who enjoy the building phase may feel limited when their roles require more process and maintenance.
“In high-growth start-ups, it’s common for early employees to wear many hats. But sometimes it takes a different person and more specialization as the company matures. Rock stars at doing everything in the beginning may find themselves less interested over time,” Laura said. “Sometimes your company goes through a growth spurt or a decline and it is no longer the right fit for your skills. You might need to figure out at what stage you add the most value and start seeking out those opportunities.”
Laura says that when impacters get impatient about getting promoted quickly, they should remember: “The
question is not only about are you ready, but is the job available to you? There is only one CEO.”
One of the most untapped tools for pivoters is proposing a business case for why they would be valuable somewhere else within the company. “You don’t always have to go up, you can go across,” Laura said. “Make your case: I have knowledge A, if I apply that to business B, here is how I can transfer my skills to add enormous value. It is one of the least known and most effective ways to get new opportunities within an organization.”
HOW TO USE THE PIVOT METHOD WITHIN ORGANIZATIONS
Although it is beneficial for individuals in transition, Pivot is also a simple way to hold career conversations with members of your team, helping them expand within their role and pivot internally when they are ready for development opportunities, instead of looking for outside work.
Many coaching and management models are obscured from the person sitting across from you, whereas Pivot is a simple framework that you can discuss and work through with employees. It encourages people to be transparent about the ways they want to grow within the organization. It also empowers employees to devise small career experiments that would increase their skills and benefit the company, without waiting for a promotion or a lateral move—neither of which will always be available options. Pivot points and plateaus don’t have to be a problem, nor something employees have to hide in conversation; you will both be equipped with language to articulate these moments. Working through the Pivot Method enables you both to explore career options before creating more detailed development plans.
There are several ways to create a strong culture that emphasizes openness and engagement.