Perspectives on career growth inspired by systems thinking
Career growth is an essential part of life. Success in one’s career has a profound impact on every aspect of living, including mental and physical well-being, family and relationships, and financial success. Sometimes career can even define identity. However, growing professionally and personally is not an easy task for anyone — including data scientists! This article provides ideas and frameworks, inspired by systems thinking, for growing one’s self and career. Although written from the perspective of a Senior and Applied Data Scientist at Microsoft, I would say these observations are applicable to any knowledge worker.
Systems thinking is a practice for perceiving outcomes as part and result of a system that generates them over time, in the context of the broader environment. The key idea is to see the interrelationships among entities as systems, where each part can influence other parts over time, which eventually produces the outcomes seen. An alternative view is to see isolated events and outcomes, without a full understanding of the underlying process that generated those outcomes. Fundamentally, systems thinking provides tools and concepts to handle the ever-increasing complexities of our world and lives.
Career growth refers to the process an individual goes through to improve occupational status via continuous and long-term learning in such a way that it provides physical and psychological fulfillment [2]. Career growth is strongly intertwined with personal growth, that is the process of developing new skills, behaviors, actions, attitudes, habits, and reactions to benefit certain aspects of your life [3]. In other words, career growth is about each of us growing ourselves holistically — that is, to seek and realize the larger aspirations we have for ourselves.
From a company’s standpoint, individual employees’ career growth takes place when they have a proven track record of delivering success and the capability to take on more responsibilities to have more impact. Therefore, for individuals to fulfill this expectation, they can either learn new skills on their own enabling them to drive more impact via current and future deliverables, or they can gain experiences that elevate their skills and prove their ability to take on more impactful responsibilities. The mechanism that causes individuals to grow is the commitment to continuous learning and improvement. It is crucial to be realistic and honest with oneself of competencies and areas needing improvement, and to take every opportunity to learn and grow.
The process for personal growth is a life-long journey, and significant improvements typically take years to fully materialize. This is why in the moment it can feel like one is not progressing at all, which can easily create a psychological burden, resulting in a vicious feedback loop inhibiting future growth. A vicious feedback loop represents such a situation where the entities within a system influence each other in such a way that the system produces and may accelerate the realization of unfavorable outcomes. A common bias that may inhibit individuals from realizing their potential results from people naturally perceiving events as snapshots in time of the current state and situation [4]; that is, to have a linear or event-oriented worldview. Therefore, one may not be able to recognize the true root causes of successes and failures that may be produced by longer chains of events with time delays, which can be impossible to understand without a holistic understanding of systems and feedback loops influencing one’s life.
Learning and growing is a gradual process — small improvements and consistency produce significant results over time. These improvements and consistency emerge from the daily routines and habits that form the systems one has set up. Therefore, instead of evaluating how well one has done on any particular day, the focus should be on understanding the results of the systems influencing an individual’s life that are produced in the long term. To put it another way, the most important piece of information for determining whether you are doing the right things is to have an idea of the direction where you are headed currently, given what you do each day. This is what is meant by saying “individuals will only elevate to the level of their systems.” Hence, it is very important not simply to see and focus on individual days or events (which are snapshots in time), but rather to focus on what the patterns of change will result in eventually.
Another important aspect of influencing one’s growth is the overall environment the person operates in. It is fundamentally important to understand that structure influences behavior [4]. What this means in practice is that the boundaries and options that the environment imposes define and influence the actions and behaviors one tends to take. Such structures could be organizational practices, expectations of behavior, biases in one’s thinking, patterns of behavior, decision-making processes — or even as simple as the room worked in from day to day. The influence of these can be so subtle, habitual, and normalized that one doesn’t even notice or question them, but over time they can have a dramatic effect. For instance, you could find yourself in a situation in which you are not getting the right experiences at work to realize your full potential simply because your manager’s perceived expectations of your behavior and abilities are limiting your growth. Therefore, it is crucial to understand how the structures of your daily life create your reality, shape your opportunities, and influence your decisions.
Arguably the most important concept for accelerating growth is the ability to identify the structures in life that limit growth. These are structures that over time inhibit or prevent one from realizing potential in various ways. Such structures can be hidden from oneself without deeper understanding of the systems that influence one’s life. As an example, everyone has probably heard at some point that “they should try harder” to accomplish some goal. However, consistently pushing harder and harder is seldom the best solution to produce great results over time. As an example, one might believe one did not achieve a goal because of not trying hard enough, and so next time working more intensely and longer hours to make it. By working longer and harder, however, one exhausts oneself more than normal due to increased stress and reduced sleep. Inadequate rest degrades daily performance and the capability to learn, resulting in a vicious loop that lessens future performance and eventually results in burnout. The challenge is that while such a process can yield positive results in the short term, over a longer period of time poor recovery results in negative outcomes such as degraded performance, reduced ability to learn, and a decrease in quality of life. A systemic solution to this could be to stop the vicious loop via changing one’s coping mechanism for failure (i.e., trying too hard) and instead ensuring enough balance in one’s life to lead to consistent and sustained high performance.
Another factor potentially limiting growth consists of the opportunities and responsibilities that one can work on, and these are dependent on the work environment one operates in. Generally, one’s manager provides these opportunities for the individual. This is why it is important to have honest conversations with one’s manager about career goals and expectations. However, an alternative is to proactively seek and create growth opportunities for oneself and one’s company. Identifying new opportunities on one’s own not only provides the benefits of new skills and experiences, but it can create growth for the larger organization that tends to be recognized and impact positively on the individual’s career advancement as well.
There are different ways to identify growth opportunities for you and your company. Usually, the most valuable ones are found at the intersection of the needs of the business, your personal interests and career goals, and the skills and experiences that you need to grow (Figure 2). Here’s one way to identify such opportunities: First, you need to “zoom out” from your role and think what makes most sense for your team, organization, and company in the context of the organization’s mission, strategy, and long-term goals, with the current state of the organization in mind (e.g., current processes, capabilities, culture); basically, seeing your work environment as your manager or the leader of the organization would see it. With a solid understanding of these and deep knowledge of your own area of expertise, you may see gaps in the organization’s capabilities. Identifying and filling these gaps in the organization’s capabilities, practices, and know-how is where you can proactively find opportunities for your own growth while growing your organization at the same time.
However, the reality is that sometimes your current environment will not yield the right experiences for you regardless of the effort and time you put into it. Sometimes the challenge is that you’re not being challenged enough, such as by repeatedly working on the same or similar problems with limited opportunity for personal learning and growing. This is usually a sign to start making more significant changes, such as expressing interest in and asking your manager about working in a new business area with a new set of problems.
In conclusion, career is a substantial part of everyone’s life and influences every aspect of it, which is why it makes sense to put in appropriate time and effort to realize one’s potential and reach one’s aspirations. It is important to realize that it is up to the individual to be accountable for personal and career growth, while concepts from systems thinking can enable individuals to identify previously hidden opportunities to influence and drive change in their favor.
Olli Rentola is on LinkedIn.
References
[1] Event Oriented Thinking — Tool/Concept/Definition (thwink.org)
[2] Career development — Wikipedia
[3] 18 Ways To Achieve Self-Growth | Indeed.com
[4] The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization
