The Agile Executive

Embracing Career Risks and Rewards

Marianne Broadbent

• Publisher: Melbourne Books
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781925556391
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Careers

Marianne Broadbent is a leadership and executive search consultant who works every day with women and men making career decisions and life choices. Her multiple careers, from high school teacher to global business executive, have been experienced alongside raising four children in a 'guilt free environment' and sustaining long term relationships. She provides sharp and informed insights through working with organisations and teams to build and sustain great talent. She shares her personal experiences of taking career risks, making multiple choices and managing a 'blended life' in our new modern paradigm where careers aren't as linear as they once were, and diversity and risks are required to achieve success. She complements this with the thoughts and words of 24 executives who willingly provide their personal and career perspectives on their own trade-offs and 'getting on with it'.

Part 1

Lead yourself with purpose

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The first part of the book is about how we grow our careers through a series of decisions, rather than a pre-determined plan. It draws on many of my own experiences, along with those of others with whom I have worked. We each have our comfort zones and inflection points, and we each seek different types of risks and rewards. We have to understand our strengths, use them well, and build our resilience along the way. There are always trade-offs and, having made a decision, we should not look back and feel guilty about what might have been. Sometimes, too, we engage in activities that reinforce our sense of guilt to others—we might not even realise it, but we need to stop doing it. We need to own our achievements and know our own story, and that particularly applies to women. We should know how to ‘get noticed’ in a good way, and glean a few tips from a search consultant.

1

Risks, Inflections Points and Learning

Career starting point are just that—starting points

There are no longer careers for life. There is not one set pathway to success. Professions that might once have offered structured progression, like law or accounting, are under threat. Teachers and tertiary sector educators are dealing with different student expectations and the potential commodification of some parts of their knowledge base. Much repetitive work is being, and will be, replaced by automation and artificial intelligence.

At the same time, we have great opportunities to use technology developments creatively. In the performance area, whole sets of new capabilities are being employed. In the health sector, many of us are benefitting from terrific developments, as we combine discoveries and new ways of doing things by linking the human and technology sides of health care.

It is this innovative thinking that is the key to success. Your career is now driven by your ability to understand your capabilities, your strengths, any important developmental needs, and what you really enjoy doing.

A friend of mine is a keen sailor. He always talks about having some kind of destination in mind, but the way you get there will vary according to the conditions.

It is not a straight path. You need to use the tiller to provide some direction. Sometimes you have to tack and put up different sails depending on the wind, the swell, and the obstacles along the way. And then you need to adjust and trim the sails as the wind changes direction and strengths.

Sometimes just travelling in a big circle around San Francisco Bay or Sydney Harbour is fine, if that is what you enjoy. Your career can be a bit like that. Careers grow through tacking, using the tiller, and sometimes trimming the sails—choices are made based on the circumstances at the time.

With the trajectory of change now around us, we should expect to have multiple careers throughout our working life. For those of us with opportunities, or who are able to make opportunities, continuing to grow and evolve might take us in quite different directions.

Take some examples: one of Disney’s international technology executives started her career as a public relations consultant, a leading Ombudsman started her career as a pharmacist, one of Australia’s Vice Chancellors was a research assistant in a commercial laboratory, a medical practitioner from rural India is now CEO of a large disability services organisation, a chemical engineer moved into banking and now uses her combined skills and experience to chair company boards, and a law and Asian languages graduate is a global health technology entrepreneur.

Each of these executives used their initial education and experience to build a varied and satisfying career, ending up in roles that they may never have seen themselves in, but their careers emerged from their passions, desires, self-knowledge and growth.

So, the first thing you need to ask yourself is: Where do you get real satisfaction and what type of growth do you want?

In questioning people about their careers, we often ask about their inflection points—what were the decisions you made, the big risks you took, or the career opportunity that really challenged you? Where did you take a career risk and how did it turn out?

Certainly, we won’t always have the choices we want, or be able to choose between options. What will matter increasingly though is our ability and willingness to take risks—considered risks—to gain new or different capabilities and experiences that will give us some future options.

Once upon a time, I had a career plan. But my actual career took a very different path—or many different paths, in fact. It involved taking risks—most of which worked out, but some not as well as I might have wanted at the time.

This chapter will provide some insights into HOW I made many career decisions and what I saw as the risks at time.

These decisions are my key inflection points. They involved some use of the tiller, some tacking and some shifting of the sails.

The plan I had at the start of my career journey…

I am a bit of a planner and a list-maker. I had always planned to meet the right guy when I was about twenty-six, which was a ‘mature’ age to do that forty years ago. This would happen after I completed my university degree, qualified as a teacher, travelled the world and then established my career. Children might or might not happen at some stage. (Due to some minor medical issues, I was not convinced that I could have children, anyway.)

Well, that was not quite how it turned out. I met that guy when I was nineteen, became engaged just after my twentieth birthday, married before I was twenty-one, and got pregnant on our honeymoon. Another three children came along in the next eight years or so, some planned, some not so planned. (Fertility clearly was not my problem, and, if anything, I came to realise that I had the reverse issue.) We did agree to have four, although my husband has no recollection of this (he would have been happy with a few more). I was one of seven and he was the eldest of eight, so four seemed like a good compromise at the time.

When we married, Robert was in the early stages of his studies for a PhD in Chemistry, so of course he was still a student a few years later. This meant remaining in Australia till that was done and travel plans were on hold for a while. Then the two of us were about to become the three of us, so it was time to make some new plans.

I enrolled in some qualifying subjects for a Master of Arts degree with a particular emphasis on the sociology of organisations and anthropology. The plan was that I would return to work for the eight-week required post childbirth period to qualify for a maternity leave payment, which we needed to support ourselves. (This was the arcane system in place then—you qualified for your maternity leave pay once you had been back at work for over two months.) Then I would resign and return to full-time motherhood and part-time study.

The choices that were never made…

I started my secondary school teaching career in one of Sydney’s toughest high schools suffering from lacklustre leadership. It was a newly established school where the principal and his deputy were both out of their depth in terms of dealing with its many challenges. But two years later I found myself on the staff of an inner Western Sydney girls’ high school with great leadership.

So, when my eight weeks post-maternity leave was up, I found I was getting physically nauseous trying to resign. I went to see the Deputy Principal, Marie Lynch, for some advice.

Marie asked me what I really wanted to do the most: study, spend more time with our son David, or keep working full-time. The answer was I just did not know yet. She suggested I keep doing all three till I figured it out.

It was some of the best advice I have ever had—and she continued to ask me how things were going from time to time.

Three or four years later, my master’s was completed, we’d had a second child, a third was on the way, and I was still working full-time—broken by short bouts of maternity leave. I’d never had to make that choice amongst the three options.

When Robert finally finished his PhD and got a paying job, we moved into our first home with a mortgage in the mid-1970s—a classic three-bedroom fibro with a sunroom added along the back. We had lived very frugally for many years to save the deposit we needed. We had to completely furnish the house as we had been renting furnished ‘half-houses’ till then, and the only pieces of furniture we owned were a piano and a roll top desk, which probably says something about what we valued at the time!

A sense of purpose and direction: more useful than a detailed plan

You have to work out what is best for you—and deal with situations as they arise.

My friend and former Gartner colleague, Robin Kranich, calls this the WHY, what is it that makes you want to leap out of bed and take on the world? Robin is Gartner’s Executive Vice-President and Chief Human Relations Officer. Last summer, with two kids away at summer camp she took some time to reflect on what drives her, and her WHY in terms of the mark she wants to leave on the world. In her case, ‘her world’ is her family, friends and the 15,000 or so people she works with at Gartner. She wrote down a list of ‘Truths I know about me’ and the result was that she did figure out her WHY. It was about discovering the unique and differentiated talents of others, helping them to tap into it, and then harnessing the collected strengths of many diverse people and perspectives to achieve their full potential both as individuals and as a company. That is her WHY.

This WHY energises her, gives her purpose, helps her to work through the difficult situations and provides clarity that counteracts the occasional inertia.

We each need to find our WHY, our sense of purpose. This helps you to understand your comfort level with your career, personal choices and options, and the trade-offs you are prepared to make. It helps us to have the perspective to adjust to changing circumstances. Sometimes we make trade-offs consciously, sometimes unconsciously, and sometimes just intuitively. It helps to clearly articulate your strengths and trade-offs to yourself, and those around you.

If you have real career choices to make, you’re already heading in the right direction, but, yes, making those car...

Table of contents

• Introduction
• Part 1: Lead Yourself With Purpose
• 1: Risks, Inflections Points and Learning
• 2: Risk, How Much Are You Prepared To Take On?
• 3: Don’t Be Afraid To Move Out Of Your Comfort Zone
• 4: Grasp Big Change Management Opportunities
• 5: Parenting Often Requires Trade-offs
• 6: Decide Your Course And Exorcise The Guilt Thing
• 7: Know And Play To Your Strengths
• 8: Personal And Professional Growth
• 9: Keep Growing Personally and Professionally
• 10: Well-Being Matters
• 11: Seek And Value Multiple Insights
• 12: Be Mindful Of Your Impact On Others
• 13: Know Your Business. Value Those Around You
• 14: Know Your Own Story. Claim Your Achievements
• 15: Make An Awesome Impression
• Learnings and Reflections: Part 1
• Part 2: Lead Others With Resolve
• 16: Transformative Changes Need Transformative Leaders
• 17: Achieving Change Means Managing Risks
• 18: Building Trust Delivers Great Workplaces
• 19: Behaviours Reflect Real Values
• 20: Succeed With Great Talent and Teams
• 21: Leadership is a Participatory Sport
• 22: Rethink Our Lenses. Take A Fresh Look At Bias
• 23: Inclusion: The Key To Growth
• 24: Broaden Your Talent Pool
• Learnings and Reflections: Part 2
• Part 3: Lead With Insights From Others
• 25: Tap In: Advice From Experienced Professionals
• 26: Think Differently: Young Is Okay
• List of Contributors
• References
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author