As a vice-chairman-of-the-Goldman-Sachs- Group turned-Harvard-Business-School-professor, Robert Steven Kaplan often has graduating students dropping into his officefor career advice.
A typical case might go like this: the student applied for a high paying job in the financial services sector, but now that the offer has actually come though, he's not sure it's what he wants. He feels guilty about his ambivalence since it's a job everyone else covets and rejecting it seems selfish and self-indulgent. Maybe he should put his misgivings aside and do what his family and friends expect?
"Many of us motor through our young adult years trying to rack up one achievement after another - being 'successful'," says Kaplan, who has recently authored a book titled What You're Really Meant to Do: a road map for reaching your unique potential.
"I advise students to beware of conventional wisdom and focus on the difficult task of understanding who they are and where their interests lie. You can't be a bystander in your own life. Managing your career is 100% your responsibility." The problem is not limited to b-school campuses. Kaplan narrates numerous cases of accomplished individuals who find they no longer enjoy what they are doing. "They don't feel successful, though everyone around them thinks they are," says Kaplan.
"In mid-career executives it manifests itself in a feeling of confusion about where to turn and a concern that they have painted themselves into a corner. In older executives and professionals, it's sometimes reflected in feelings of bitterness and regret."
Whatever stage in their careers they may be at, Kaplan advises his readers to go through a process of heightening their self-awareness. The first step here is to assess one's strengths and weakness, not in terms of vague character traits, but in terms of skills.
These might include skills in written communication, presentation, quanitative analysis, negoatiation, interpersonal skills and ability to confront others constructively. The importance of these skills varies according to the job and the level of responsibility, so this analysis is an ongoing process. A skills mismatch is one of the common reasons people find themselves unhappy in a job to which they have been promoted.
In some cases, it is the reason they are not promoted. Kaplan advises everyone to make a habit out of introspecting on their skills so they may pro-actively manage their capabilities. This doesn't mean trying to develop a skill you are inherently weak at.
On the contrary, it might be best managed by delegating that part of the job to someone who is truly good at it. Kaplan presents an example from the financial sector, where a junior executive had excellent market knowledge and client skills, but lacked the quanitative skills required for financial modeling, an important part of stock picking.
She was set to quit her job when her seniors suggested she might be able to offset her weakness by teaming up with others on her client teams. She stayed on and moved up to more senior positions where her job required less modeling and ultimately emerged as one of the top professionals in her firm. "This is a lesson I learned in my own career: the capabilities of my assembled team needed to fit with my own skills and deficiencies," says Kaplan.
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