by Sven Sommerlatte
OTIUM is a Latin word that means using leisure time for Reflection and Introspection.
Use this time to learn more about Personal Development, improve your Career Strategy or become a better Leader.
Project roles and strategic initiatives can significantly accelerate your career. They offer opportunities to connect outside of your functional area or business unit. They also provide possibilities to broaden your skills and to enlarge your understanding of the strategic challenges of the company or the organization you work for. Let’s see how Luigi took advantage of that and how his interpersonal skills allowed him to step up.
Performing at top leadership level requires discipline to ensure physical and mental wellbeing. This is comparable to sports athletes, who follow a rigorous diet, who ensure they have sufficient sleep and who require a personal environment that ensures support. Let’s see how Miriam managed to grow into significant leadership responsibilities and what her key success factors were for that.
Managing your career is an important task. It is also quite challenging, because you need to make important and sometimes complex decisions: What company to join? What job offers to consider? How to maintain your employability in the job market? These questions require that you personally spend sufficient time to define your career plan and that you consider career decisions carefully.
But you should not be alone. It is highly advisable to find people in your environment, who can be sparring partners and who can provide career counseling. Talking things through, bouncing ideas back and forth, considering different perspectives and asking out of the box questions will certainly be of great help in your career management. That is of particular importance if you come to a point where you must make fundamental career decisions. Where you might feel lost, because you can’t continue but you don’t know what alternative road to take. In these kinds of circumstances, it is even more critical to have a person you can talk to in order to get career advice.
Personal and professional needs may vary at the different stages of our working life. People who are more advanced in their career may be willing to sacrifice salary to have longer weekends. They may also wish to step back from leadership responsibility to reduce operational stress.
But this type of career life cycle management is still a bit taboo, especially at the later career stages. While the new generations are quite vocal about their expectations, older generations may feel inappropriate to bring this up. They may even fear age discrimination or the risk of losing their employment if they express the need for an adaptation of their working mode.
Let’s see how Roger managed that situation and what we can learn from his example.
Being clear about your deeper desire, about what gives you fulfillment and true satisfaction should be the basis for your career strategy. This clarity will give direction to your career development.
Many are rushing into their professional life and focus on climbing up the hierarchy as quickly as they can. Unfortunately, too often they find out later that they come to a dead-end, that they don’t find meaning anymore in what they do. Sometimes it is by that time too late to make a completely new start. The introspection about your deep desire is therefore of great importance.
Job interviews are highly decisive moments. This is your unique opportunity to position yourself for a role, where you will most likely be in competition with other candidates. But this is of course simultaneously your opportunity to find out more about the job itself and about the company. As you will see in the example of Alicia below, these two aspects of “selling yourself” and of obtaining relevant information are not in contradiction if you manage the interview situation really well.
The story of Martin should help you to gain better understanding of the “size” of a role. Usually, candidates focus mainly on three aspects: the grade, the hierarchical positioning and the size of the team reporting into the role. That is also the information that is usually visible in the upper part of the job description.
The decision what company to join is of crucial importance. This is true when you start your career but as well if you decide to change employer. One of the most important selection criteria is the economic health of the company. Organizations with attractive business growth perspectives can offer better promotion opportunities and invest more in the development of their employees. Let’s see the example of Sarah.
Those of you who have an aquarium know how sensitive fish are with regards to the water quality. Multiple factors must be considered including purity of the water, temperature, level of oxygen, etc. A fish might not survive very long in an environment where the water does not match its needs, which are different from one species to another.
It is obviously an over-simplification to compare company culture with the water in a tank. Mainly because it is quite easy to measure the parameters of water quality, whereas it is highly complex to assess the culture of an organization. But what this comparison helps to illustrate is that you need the right environment to survive or to succeed. This is very often underestimated by candidates who change company. People tend to be focused on the job content, on the positioning of the job in the organization and on compensation.
But we know from many examples – you might know some of those from your own observation or experience – that the cultural fit is a major factor of success in a new job as the example of Iris will show.
International experience is an important success factor for your career. Getting exposed to different cultures, countries, markets and ways of life is of crucial importance in today’s world. In our highly globalized economies, the ability to understand customer needs across the globe is indispensable. It is advisable to gain this international exposure early on in your career because personal and family constraints make it later increasingly difficult.