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The Career Lattice

Make Your Job Description a You Description

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What’s not on your resume?

  • What you’ve learned about sourcing materials running your Etsy shop?
  • How you’ve gained project management skills by chairing a nonprofit fundraiser?
  • That you overcame your white-knuckle fear of public speaking by leading a Scout troop?

Skills you gain through life experience — you remember life — it’s what happens between 5 p.m. and 9 a.m. — can propel professional growth.

But there’s rarely a place to wedge in these experiences on a traditional resume. And there are even fewer opportunities to apply off-hours experience on the job — at least, not officially. (If you’ve managed a carpool or playgroup, you have univerally applicable leadership skills.)

Finally, though, employers are starting to mine the deep veins of talent lurking in their very own corridors. As reported thoroughly in the Wall St. Journal, employers like Cisco, Google,  and Booz Allen Hamilton are hard-wiring 360-degree talent searches into their human resources databases. Yup, they’re catching up with recommendations in The Career Lattice!

Employer are in sync with the life skills deemed most applicable to professional development by The Career Lattice research partner, the Council for Adult and Experiential Learning:

  • Cross-cultural adaptability
  • Foreign language skills
  • Willingness to relocate – i.e., appetite for adventure!
  • Client retention track record

Have you discovered unusual life skills that have played into professional advancement? Tell us about it!

Lattice as Scenic Route

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An otherwise unremarkable career advice column makes a great point about a benefit of latticing: When you take lateral turns in related departments, you gain insights into how your organization works.  You not only make good connections, but you also see how the moving parts mesh.

I absorbed this lesson when I spent seven years writing for a magazine about debt collection. Not too glamorous, but I did learn a lot: about human nature, about how people soldier on in an unpopular career, and about how much of the organization’s mission breaks down  when people don’t pay their bills.

Sales don’t count unless customers pay.

Marketing doesn’t mean much unless it attracts customers who are willing to buy what you are selling.

Operations is falling down on the job when it delivers goods and services that are so damaged that customers can’t use them or won’t pay for them.

And if customer service isn’t serving, frustrated customers resort to refusing to pay their bill. Their calls might go to voice mail. Their emails might disappear into the ether. But if they don’t pay their bill, they get attention.

Of course, at that point, the collection staff is the only thing that stands between the complete loss of the customer (and all future sales from that customer, plus the defection of that customer to a competitor, which translates to lost market share). It all rolls downhill and lands in their laps.

They clean up the messes left by the rest of the company.

Some smart organizations requires up-and-comers to rotate through many departments, observing how the gears fit together. If they’re really smart, they have them spend a few days dealing with that most tiresome of all creatures, the public, by working the phones in the customer service center or in the collection department.

Adopt the same attitude for your lateral move. You’re seeing the same organization from a different perch.  How are the culture, terms, and approach different from your prior position?  What you see informs the job you have today — and the job you’ll land tomorrow.

When Did Self-Awareness Become a Job Skill?

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What’s the difference between a matrix and a lattice?

There isn’t one. They’re mirror images of the same type of organizational structure.

A matrix is a web of responsibility distributed throughout an organization.

The lattice is the personal version of this. A lattice is a personal career path that goes both over and up, enabling you to get ahead as you gain skills and experience in several directions.

The matrix replaces the chain of command.

The lattice replaces the ladder.

What does it take to succeed in a matrix, when you can’t count on your title and all the authority it confers to scare others into doing what you say? Here’s what the Hay Group says:

  • Empathy
  • Conflict management
  • Influence
  • Self-awareness

Sounds like a set-up for an enlightened workplace.

If only.

Hay recently found a mismatch between the skills demanded of the matrix and the skills actually possessed  by leaders in such organizations:

  • 9% held a strong sense of self-awareness
  • 20% were able to lead using influence
  • 22% had a strong sense of empathy
  • 31% had good conflict-management skills

I’m wondering how the 91% of employees who don’t even know that they’re clueless, given their low levels of self-awareness, are going to figure out that they need the other skills.

Back on point:  if you’re in an organization that says it’s a matrix, actively cultivate these four skills. Whether your bosses know it or not, these problemsolving skills are the currency of advancement.

How Do You Know How To Grow?

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Latticing sounds great! How do I know which way to grow?

When you start to look around for career growth, rather than just up, a new world of options opens up. How do you narrow down the possibilities?

Here’s how to get a grip on your lattice.

First, don’t assume that the training your employer provides or encourages you to get is the best  strategic fit for your career growth.

The Accenture Skills Gap Study found that employees were most likely (52%) to have gained technical skills in the past five years. Lagging far behind were problem-solving skills (31%), analytical skills (26%) and managerial skills (21%). But guess what skills employers claim are in shortest supply? Yup: those know-it-when-they-see -it creative and problemsolving skills — the very ones that employers are least likely to pay for.

Scrutinize the skill sets and job descriptions of people who currently hold jobs you’d like to have. (LinkedIn and BranchOut are great sources for job-skills-peeping.)

Match up what they have that you lack.  What can you most likely get your employer to pay for? Technical skills, probably. You might have to gain creative, problemsolving and managerial skills by volunteering for leadership responsibilities on the job or in your off-hours.

Another way to tackle the where-to-start dilemma is to see how your situation compares to the norm. Leadership consulting firm PDI Ninth House recently tracked the strengths that men and women business leaders tended to have at various points in their careers. Both men and women senior leaders tend to be highly ranked on all skills.

But PDI found that middle management men are viewed as stronger in financial management and strategy; women are better at collaboration, trust, developing others, and customer needs.

Do your current strengths align with these gender norms? If so, you will need to explicitly pursue opportunities to backfill the skills usually considered a strength in the opposite gender.  As you do, build case studies that show your skills in action; your success stories will show how you demonstrate the skills used by current organizational leaders.

Careers and Kids: Collision Course

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Clueless politicians notwithstanding, young women are accelerating their career ambition. The latest report from Pew Research finds that their careers are ‘very important’ to fully two-thirds of young women — ten percentage points more than in 1997. Meanwhile, young men’s ambition is the same as it has been, with 59% saying that their careers are ‘very important.’

The reality that women must pace their economic lives differently from men appears to be sinking in. Women live longer but have lower earnings to prepare them for their retirements. It’s smart for young women to get to cruising altitude quickly.

They’ll need the momentum when they run into their childbearing years. The same Pew research reports that young women haven’t compromised their expectations for having families.

How will they reconcile these two apparently conflicting ambitions? Latticing can help.

Contrary to some prior constructs of the lattice, lateral career paths are not a panacea for work-life tensions. In fact, latticing requires constant acquisition of new skills, experiences and competencies. Continual professional development is essential for continual growth; for lateral moves to fuel career advancement, lateral moves must position employees to build new skills. This is demanding, and undermines the notion that lattices are hammocks where one can kick back and coast for a while.

Latticing alone doesn’t reconcile family and career tension. But when combined with alternative work arrangements, such as career-track part-time positions; alternative schedules; job-shares; and even diverting to contract work for a stretch, parents can free up time and energy for their families, while continuing to grow their skills and earnings. You shouldn’t have to trade your future for your family.

 

 

Go ERG!

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In a recent webinar  on latticing I presented for Canadian Women In Communications, a participant asked how to detect good lateral opportunities within her company.   Her question is a common one;  opportunities can be opaque to rank-and-file workers, according to the most recent Accenture Skills Gap study.  While bosses presumably have a bird’s eye view of short and longer-term lateral assignments,  it’s frustrating to hear about them only after they are filled.

Here’s the silver bullet: the Employee Resource Group, or ERG.  “Affinity groups” took root about 15 years ago, mainly as a way for women and minorities to find each other in large organizations.  Smart companies realized that ERG’s were built-in focus groups. Smart employees realized that the horizontal nature of such groups meant that they had a great chance of meeting higher-ups with whom they already had something in common, as recently explained in the Wall St. Journal.

As I outline in The Career Lattice, ERG’s are a rich lode for self-promotion, especially if you need to cultivate skills that are outside your official job description.  Here’s how to aim the silver bullet that is an ERG:  look for new connections in adjacent functions or departments.  These are the folks with whom you will naturally intersect on a project at some point.  Use the ERG to get to know them before your work responsibilities collide – so you can be each other’s friends in lateral places.