Crafting a Sustainable Career

Delivered at the Women in Construction USA Conference in San Francisco, CA (September 18, 2019)

Introduction

I started my career in construction management 19 years ago. It’s often hard for me to believe that it has been so long — I still feel very young! However, something that reminds me of how long it has been — in a good way — is that these days I find myself asked to coffee or lunch quite often to provide career advice. Over the years, as my thinking about my own career has evolved and deepened, I hope that the quality of advice that I have been able to give others has improved. And I’ve noticed that regardless of the specifics of the individual’s situation, on a conceptual level the advice I give seems to always be about how to craft a sustainable career.

What is a sustainable career? Probably something different for every one of us.

To me, a sustainable career is one that gives both satisfaction today and opportunities to grow into the career I want in the future. It is dynamic and flexible, with lots of space for continuous learning, creativity, and productivity in an environment where my contributions are useful and valued by others.

You might describe your sustainable career in a different way. Regardless of how you define it, however, the keys to crafting a sustainable career are the same: believing that you can have the career that you want, trying things that you’ve never tried before, and persuading others why what you want to do matters.

Believing

The first stage in crafting a sustainable career is mental — it is about getting in the right frame of mind. There are a lot of different ways to do this, but I want to talk about two that have been particularly important to me.

The first is empowerment. A lot of people don’t think of it this way, but empowerment is something you claim for yourself — all it requires is that you internalize the idea that you are entirely up to you. I know entrepreneurial people who think this way naturally, but this mindset didn’t come naturally to me. When I started my career, I had spent my entire life as a high-achieving perfectionist, looking to authority figures to tell me what I should be doing and to validate that I had done it well. In the context of my career, this meant that I jumped right onto the traditional project management ladder as a project engineer, with my sole ambition being to do my job well and be promoted to the next rung of the ladder. For a good ten years, the thrill of my own climb up this ladder was more than enough to keep me motivated. But as I entered the second decade of my career, it began to dawn on me that I might have other options than the traditional, prescribed career path that I was on — and that it was up to me to seek them out.

At first, this was a terrifying notion. It meant that I couldn’t expect my employer to tell me where to go or what to do next in my career. It was all up to me.

And then — it became exhilarating! It was all up to me! And suddenly everywhere I looked, I saw opportunities. New ideas. Things that had never been done before in our industry. A whole world of learning and knowledge just outside my office door, just waiting for me to explore it.

Embrace the idea that you have the power in your development. No one else has direct access to your ambitions, interests, and values, and no one is going to take you by the hand and lead you to a fulfilling career. Even the best and most supportive bosses out there don’t usually have the bandwidth to focus on your career the way that you can, nor the insight to truly understand what’s going to make you happy. But you do. Empower yourself. It’s all up to you.

Another part of the mental stage for me was learning to learn again. Somehow, early on I had internalized the myth that learning is for young people, that the peak learning period is in college and the first few years after. But as the adage says, “It’s what you learn after you know it all that counts.” The mid-career years are great, great learning years — and when I get to my late-career years, I hope I’ll still be learning.

The things you learn in maturity aren’t as simple as acquiring information and skills. You learn by growing older, by suffering, by loving, by bearing with the things you can’t change, by taking risks. You learn by accepting the commitments of life, by playing the roles that life hands you (not necessarily the roles you would have chosen). You learn that most people are neither for you nor against you; they are thinking about themselves. You learn that no matter how hard you work, some people are not going to appreciate you. You learn to understand your impact on others, and you learn how to come to terms with yourself.

John W. Gardner, who wrote a beautiful book on this subject called Self-Renewal, said this:

Understanding these potentialities is almost impossible early in life — it takes experience, sometimes a lot of experience, before you can understand. As Gardner put it, “There are some things you can’t learn from others. You have to pass through the fire.” Or as one of my mentors put it, “Unfortunately it takes 20 years to get 20 years of experience.” But actually, time and experience alone are not enough — they must be combined with the ability to learn. These three things must coexist in order to achieve growth.

Trying

The next stage in crafting a sustainable career is action. The mental part has to come first, so that the actions you take are intentional and productive. But that does not mean that at this stage you need to have a concrete plan in place, with each of your goals defined and road mapped. To the contrary, I would advocate almost the opposite.

One of the enemies of lifelong motivation is this conception we have of a discrete, measurable goal toward which all of our efforts drive us. We want to believe that there is a point at which we will have arrived. So we race along as fast as we can to reach what we thought was the goal — but when we get there, we may feel a bit empty. We may wonder if it was even the right goal in the first place. But we were so focused on the finish line, we forgot to look around on our way.

This idea that is so important, it underpins every other lesson I’m talking about here today, and many more: you don’t need to know where you’re going — you have to just start trying.

Explore! Try lots of different things! The world out there is amazing, filled with brilliant people doing incredible work. And we’re so lucky that today we have unprecedented access to ideas and knowledge, to people and organizations, to all kinds of resources. Read articles and blogs and books. Take a class — take a bunch of classes. Go to Meetups and conferences. Listen to podcasts. Get on Twitter and LinkedIn and Medium and find people who are talking about things that spark your interest. Connect with them. Become one of them.

I thought about going to graduate school from the time I was a senior in college. I loved being a student and knew that my education wasn’t done. I decided to get a few years of work experience first — and I found out that I loved working too. I also found that field experience was far more valued in our industry than advanced degrees — and though I looked, I never found a graduate program that really excited me.

But in 2017 I attended the ENR FutureTech conference here in San Francisco, and a lightbulb went on in my head. There were all of these great thinkers in our industry, speaking about a wide variety of ideas that they had about our future. The common thread between almost all of them was data. This led me to wonder, “How can somebody become an expert in data?” And so I learned about data science, a new field that combines computer science, statistics, and analysis. I had never heard of it before — but next year, I will complete my master’s degree in data science at UC Berkeley.

Data science has grown exponentially in the last few years, but it is still little known and even less understood in construction. Like the smart people I met at FutureTech, I believe that data-driven decision-making is the future of construction — but that certainly doesn’t mean I have it all figured out. What I am doing is trying something new — something that not only have I never done before, but that very few in our industry have. I don’t know where it will lead. But I really like the possibilities.

Failure

The hardest thing about trying is that you won’t always succeed. In construction, we are way less open to failure than in other industries, like tech. My theory is that this is because historically in construction, failures have cost human lives, which is unacceptable. But by denying ourselves lower-stakes opportunities to fail, we miss out on so much.

Everyone fails. The question isn’t did you fail — but did you pick yourself up and move forward? And what did you learn?

It has always been hard for me to risk failing. And for a while, the more established I became professionally, the harder it became to contemplate trying new things. It was terrifying for me even to apply to grad school. What if I didn’t get in? What if I got in but I didn’t do well? What if I did well but nobody thought my new degree was valuable? What if I wasted all that time and money and effort?

This kind of thinking is insanity — this is how you collaborate in your own defeat. And fortunately, I quickly came to my senses and realized that I was doing this for me. I made myself a promise — that I would measure my own success by the quality of the effort that I put into the experience. As long as I tried my hardest, I would count it as a success.

No genuine effort is ever wasted, even if it doesn’t end up being directly related to the next step on your path. Everything you attempt in good faith, regardless of the outcome, contributes to your growth. The important thing is to just try. It is amazing what we can accomplish when we do.

And the best thing about trying is that the more you practice trying, the better you get at it. The more you force yourself to put yourself out there, the more comfortable you get with being real and honest and vulnerable. The more you open yourself up to new things, the more new things you will find that interest you.

I believe that developing this kind of practice is key to a sustainable career. It exercises the muscles that you need to continue to grow through your whole life — and more than likely, at least one of these attempts will help you find where you want to go next in your career.

Persuading

The next stage in crafting a sustainable career is persuasion — this is where you start to test the viability of your ideas about what you want to do. The “follow your passion” self-help industry tends to under-emphasize this key point: all of the personal growth in the world is of little use professionally if you aren’t able to convince an employer or a client of the value of your vision. A sustainable career is built upon the ability to show that you can provide something that someone else needs. This is not only true when you’re looking for a new job or starting a new business; it’s also an important framework for evolving your current job.

Peter Drucker, a consultant and author who has been called “the man who invented management”, emphasized the importance of asking yourself, “What should I contribute?” To answer this question, he said, one must address three distinct elements:

In the persuasion stage, you need to not only be able to answer these questions but also be able to persuade others that your answers are meaningful.

Failure Again

To return to my earlier point for a minute — developing a higher level of tolerance for failure is important at this stage too — because when you seek to persuade, particularly when you are advocating new ideas and change, you may not always succeed. I can point to two complementary examples of this from own career.

Around the same time that I started considering alternatives to project management, I was approached about a new role being discussed at my company, focused on construction technology. There was a sense that we were behind the curve technologically, and that we needed someone to champion new solutions. This was music to my ears — I love technology and developing new tools and processes, and I was thrilled by all of the amazing things that were starting to happen in the industry. I prepared a full-blown strategy, complete with my new job title and reporting structure, anticipated resources, and a detailed set of goals — and I presented it with great enthusiasm. I genuinely wanted to be disruptive in the best possible sense of the word — I wanted to help make big, exciting changes, and I had a clear vision of how to do it. But I misjudged my audience. I think that I sounded like I wanted to be disruptive in the worst possible sense of the word — I think I sounded like trouble. The new role never materialized.

But though it was bruising at the time, I learned a lot from the experience. The next time I saw an opportunity, which happened very soon after, I took a much more nuanced approach. In my work as a project manager, I had become very aware of problems that seemed to happen over and over during construction, that could have been dealt with much more effectively during preconstruction had there been someone to identify and address them. I thought that I would be good at that — and what if there was a new role that would allow that to happen? I sat down separately with three different department heads and discussed my ideas with them. This time, I didn’t focus on what I wanted to be doing and what was exciting to me. I focused on how I thought we as a company could improve, and how I could contribute to making our projects better for everyone. They all loved it, and together we created a new role for my company, Preconstruction Manager. Today there are four of us in this role, and there is demand for more. It has been perfect for me personally, but it has also been a big success for my company as a whole.

Everything that I have said up to this point applies equally to men and women — so you may be wondering why I chose this topic for a Women in Construction conference. Truth be told, I actually feel a little conflicted about women-focused events. To paraphrase a famous recent tweet about women in tech — I think we need fewer “Women in Construction” events and just more women in construction. The total percentage of women in construction overall in the US has remained essentially unchanged for my entire career — somewhere between 9% and 10% since 1996 — which is an abysmal underrepresentation when you consider that women make up almost half of the American workforce overall. I worry that employers may feel that if they support events like this, they can give themselves a pass on the hard work of addressing the real issues, like fairness in hiring, pay equity, and inclusion in the workplace — issues that can’t be solved just by writing a check.

However, because there are particular challenges that disproportionately affect women in our industry, I also believe that it is helpful for us to talk about them in safe, supportive spaces — so that’s why I’m here.

It is important for everyone, regardless of sex, to believe in the power that they have in their own development. However, it won’t come as a surprise to anyone here that this is often harder for women than men. There is so much more awareness now about equality than there was even just a few years ago — and yet, imposter syndrome — chronic self-doubt and a sense of unworthiness — is alive and well. And imposter syndrome has been found to be especially prevalent for people who belong to groups “for whom there are stereotypes about competence”, certainly a fair description of women in construction. For many of us, believing has to start with this: every one of us has earned our place in this industry, and we deserve the power to decide our futures.

Trying, also, is often hard for women. In our society we are all conditioned to prize success over failure — but studies have shown that in many different ways, women set the bar for success for themselves much higher than men do. Moreover, in a male-dominated industry like ours, women often do in fact have to do more and better in order to receive the same treatment as our male counterparts. On top of that, for better or worse, we often are assigned the responsibility of representing not only ourselves as individuals but also women in construction as a group — which can be a lot of pressure. All of this can have a dampening effect on our willingness to take risks and try new things.

But it is the new things that ultimately will help us achieve equality. As women in construction we are all faced with overcoming implicit bias, in hiring and in our work, and particularly in promotion. Most people do not believe that they are biased, but the truth is that we all are. The roles that were created before us — and the mental images that were created before people in those roles looked like us — can hold us captive. Although this was not my motivation when I set out to create a new role in my company, I have realized since that being in a new role liberated me from others’ preconceived notions. It allowed me to excel in my own right, rather than wasting my time trying to prove that I could be as good as somebody’s memory of somebody else.

The practice of persuasion can also be very different for women than it is for men. For one thing, the people you are trying to persuade will probably be men; 77% of America’s C-suites are made up of men, and this number is even higher in our industry. That doesn’t necessarily mean that they will be harder to persuade than if they were women — but it does mean that you may have to put in a little more effort to understand their perspective and to make your perspective understood.

For another thing, even with all of the awareness-raising of the last few years, the data shows that there is still a very long way to go for women to have opportunities equal to their male counterparts, especially as they move up in their organizations. This can mean that we may not get as many chances to be persuasive, and that when we do, what we say may not be as well-received. If this has been your experience, I’m sorry — it’s incredibly frustrating! But we have seen with the MeToo movement the awesome power that women speaking out confer to themselves and to each other. The answer can never be to allow ourselves to be silenced.

One final note on this — it is critical to understand that career sustainability is not just about having the kind of career that you want, it is also about having the career that allows you to have the kind of life that you want. Work-life balance is not my topic today, but I would like to acknowledge that my journey down the road of career sustainability was directly influenced by my desire to become a mother, and my realization that the long hours and high stress of my job as a project manager were incompatible with the commitment that I wanted to make to my family. Recognizing how I wanted to live my life gave me the courage to take responsibility for the terms of my career.

And it’s a good thing that I did, because as I mentioned before, sometimes life intervenes in even the best-laid plans. Exactly five years ago today, I started treatment for an aggressive form of early-stage breast cancer. I was 35 years old, with a 5-month-old baby. Like many others before me, surviving cancer has changed my life. Long after the physical effects of my disease have faded, the mental and emotional effects seem only to grow stronger. The greatest of these effects has been a heightened awareness of how precious this time is. Today I have my health, my intellect, tons of energy, happiness — a beautiful life. I don’t know for how long, but I do know that I’m going to make the most of every day that I have.

Our deepest capacities develop as the result of the interplay between ourselves and the challenges of our lives — and the challenges keep changing, so we keep changing. Life pulls amazing things out of us. I believe that we all have within us more power than has ever been tapped, more talent than has ever been exploited, more to give than we have ever given before. These resources are ours to do with whatever we want.

The author would like to thank Timothy Slade, Rebecca Andersen, Laurie Haskell Woerner, Elizabeth Shulok, Roberta Ching, and Seth Jacobson for their constructive criticism of this project — and to recognize Seth Jacobson for his pivotal role in both the mindsets and events that led to it.