Be the Architect of Your Career
The following is adapted from Advice to My Younger Me by Sara Holtz.
When I was in my late thirties, in the late 1980s, I was a Vice-President at a Fortune 500 company. At that time, there were very few women at that level in any major company. The head of HR at my company organized a presentation by the company’s four most senior women, of which I was one, to speak to the more junior women about our careers. I walked into a room full of smart, ambitious, and attentive women, dressed in suits and high heels. They were there eager to learn our “secrets” to career success.
When it came time for me to speak about my career, I described it as a sort of haphazard “I did good work, and one thing led to another” journey. No vision, no plan, no ownership, no risks. Just a mixture of smarts, head-down hard work, and luck.
Looking back, I am appalled at the picture I chose to paint that day. It was a message of such passivity. I was uncomfortable acknowledging my ambition (that would have been so distasteful!) and the intentionality with which I had navigated my career (that would have seemed so calculating!). Somehow, it seemed preferable to project the image of someone who had gotten where I was because of a combination of long hours and good fortune.
But the truth was, I had been ambitious. I had strategically built and leveraged my network. I had been politically savvy in dealing with the organizations in which I worked. I had taken some significant risks. In short, I had taken responsibility for how my career progressed.
If I could rewind the clock and deliver that presentation again, I would say, “It’s your career. How it unfolds is your responsibility. No one will care about your career as much as you should. Be intentional and craft the career that you want.”
Take Charge of Your Career
Many women abdicate ownership of their careers. They ride the wave of what is happening and wait for opportunities to come along. Shellye Archambeau, former tech CEO, public company board member and author of Unapologetically Ambitious: Take Risks, Break Barriers and Create Success on Your Own Terms, shared this analogy:
You would never spend thousands of dollars for an airline ticket, put your dog in the kennel, pack your bags, get to the airport, board the plane, and then ask the pilot, “So where are we going?” But we do that all the time with our careers. We spend tens, if not hundreds of thousands, of dollars on our education, on training, on coaches, on conferences, on all these things to help us, and then we abdicate control of our career.
This passive attitude is like being in the passenger seat, rather than the driver’s seat, of your career. Being in the passenger seat is certainly more comfortable, but it may not take you where you want to go.
One of my clients, Deanna, always wanted to be a teacher. But when she went to sign up for a major in education, she was told that there were only a limited number of spots available, and male students were being given preference because of the shortage of male elementary school teachers. She accepted that explanation and picked English as her major. After college, she found a job as a legal secretary, was quickly promoted to being a paralegal, and ultimately became a lawyer. She had a successful big-firm legal career, made a lot of money, and garnered a lot of respect. But to this day, she wishes that she hadn’t let herself be so easily talked out of getting her teaching degree. Despite all the benefits that came with being a lawyer (including a large salary), she feels that being a teacher would have been a more satisfying and meaningful career.
Taking ownership of how your career unfolds is key to having the career you dream of. As Dana Look-Arimoto, executive coach and author of Stop Settling, Settle Smart: Rethinking Work-Life Balance, Redesign Your Busy Life, urges, “Make your career choices by design, not default.”
You don’t need someone else’s permission to tell you that you are ready for that stretch assignment or promotion. You can ask for it. You don’t need someone else to tell others about your stellar work. You can make your accomplishments visible. You don’t need to wait for someone to give you a raise. You can make the case that you deserve it. You don’t need to hope that when the time comes to look for a new job, you’ll know the right people to alert you to opportunities. You can intentionally build a network to support your career goals. You can be the architect of your career.
For more career advice, you can find Advice to My Younger Me on Amazon.
Sara Holtz is a Harvard-educated lawyer and former Fortune 500 C-suite executive. When she left the corporate world after twenty years, she vowed to make the workplace a less challenging, more rewarding place for the women who came after her.
Over more than two decades, Sara has gathered advice from hundreds of women at the pinnacle of success — CEOs, tech leaders, media and advertising executives, consultants, journalists, and lawyers — asking them what they wish they had known earlier in their careers. She wrote this book to share that wisdom so the next generation of women can achieve their own career success.
