Accidentally in Code

Tag: career

  • A Season of Learning

    A Season of Learning

    Credit: Unsplash / Patty Spahr

    There’s a concept in computer science called explore vs. exploit. Exploitation means using what you know to get reliable returns; exploration means trying new things at the cost of those returns. Most algorithms skew too hard toward exploit. Humans have also been known to do this – including me. The known path is comfortable.

    My last job, I was deep in exploit mode. I had playbooks. I refined them. I ran them. I wrote them up into a book. But often I worried I wasn’t growing. Part of why I left – and chose the particular shape of what came next – was to return to a place of genuine learning. I had enough concreteness that I could exploit, but also space to explore.

    So what does that actually look like? A few things I’ve been in the middle of this season:

    Formal learning. I’m currently enrolled in LSE’s MBA Essentials Course. I’ve long felt under-equipped on business fundamentals. Every time I was asked for an opinion on an acquisition, I would panic that I didn’t know how to reason about it. Structured training has been helpful for me to prioritize time for learning – I did the Co-Active coaching training a few years ago, but that was immersive; a few days I could slot in when it made sense. MBA essentials is 8-10 hours a week for 10 weeks and that felt like a different ask entirely – not one I felt up for adding onto a more than full time job without organizational support. Prioritizing it for myself, finally filling in a gap I’ve known about for years, feels good. Some combination of learning and building confidence – I’m not sure how much of which yet – but so far, it’s interesting.

    Getting back to the work. As you get up the org chart the job stops being the work and starts being the work that makes the work happen. It’s necessary and done right it’s impactful and I do enjoy it, but I missed the feeling of actually building. For the past few months I’ve been back to the code again, building tools, co-building a course platform – I pushed a fix to production this morning! In a time of huge change, being closer to the work feels important. I want to understand this shift deeply because it will be affecting our whole industry for some time to come.

    Deep collaboration. The best periods of my career have always featured a great collaboration. But the higher up you go, the lonelier it gets. Coming back to a real, balanced, give and take collaboration feels like a glass of cold water on a hot day. I love it. We negotiate to our strengths, balance getting stuff done with having fun. I also learn a surprising amount just from being close to another person’s workflow.

    Fractional CTO work. This is a different kind of leadership than I’ve done before. In some ways it’s like running a large org – you have to be deliberate about your time because it’s limited. The strategic work (my favourite) is more visible when every decision counts and resources are limited. In other ways it’s very different – more hands-on with the actual infrastructure decisions, closer to an IT function than I’ve ever been (not a strength for me, I’m working on it).

    Social media. For me, Twitter was everything in one place – community, self-promotion, ambient industry conversation – not that I had to be so clear about that. It worked so well for me and I missed it for a long time, without doing anything about figuring out how to fill the holes it left. I miss the community most, and I’m slowly trying to find it again. Given everything I’m doing, I need to figure out self promotion that doesn’t give me the ick.

    AI workflows. Having space to actually play with this – without the constraints and overhead of an organization – has been revelatory. What works, what doesn’t, where it helps and where it’s just noise. The context matters enormously for perceived impact: if you use AI to do a mid version of someone else’s job inside an org, it’s insulting and will cost you in credibility. If you use it to do a mid version of something you otherwise couldn’t do at all, it gets something done and helps you learn. Jean and I are building a course platform, running cohorts, developing new material… with plenty of other things going on for both of us. We’ve used AI to create efficiency and leverage, to build something we couldn’t otherwise have built, while retaining the time and attention to make sure the pieces that should be human are.

    I do really love running bigger teams. But you end up constrained – by org structure, by politics, by the cost of starting anything new, the difficulty of changing direction when you’re already moving, the morale hit of killing something even when it’s the right call. In a time of this much change, the number of people becomes its own constraint; change management could easily be the whole job right now, and not an enjoyable one.

    It’s good to be free for a while. A hill-climbing algorithm will always find a peak – but it might not be the highest one. Sometimes you have to go down before you can go higher. I don’t think careers have to go up and to the right, and this season is making that clearer every day.

    If everything is changing, you may as well choose the change you want.

  • Wired for Change: When Tech Stopped Being “Safe”

    Wired for Change: When Tech Stopped Being “Safe”

    For a long time — especially in software engineering — there was an unspoken promise: if you were smart enough, fast enough, or technical enough, the rest would work itself out.

    That promise no longer holds.

    I had the chance to talk with Amy Yee on her podcast Wired for Change about what’s changed in tech, and what engineering leadership demands now. We covered a lot of ground — identity, AI, leadership, values, career paths — but it all comes back to one thing: we have to let go of what we thought was normal, and understand reality as it is.

    When Did Things Change?

    For me, it was when the mass layoffs started. Before that, doing a layoff was a sign of failure. Somehow it rapidly became a normal thing to do – at volume and in an inhumane way.

    The underlying shift is that org size went from a status symbol to liability. The base assumption used to be a large enough group of developers would generate value. Post-ZIRP, all kinds of debt got more expensive. Organizational debt included.

    On a human level, a social contract was broken. You saw people who had worked at an organisation for a decade or more just have their access cut one day. Now I think there’s a split between people who think they can out-work or outmanoeuvre being dispensable, and people who know that a job is just a job and their career – and life – is something outside of that, that they need to pay attention to.

    The Identity Problem

    I don’t think demand has evaporated, but it has changed. I think most obviously, in hiring, it’s a buyer’s market and that means longer, more arduous processes and less good candidate experience. Within organisations, fewer perks and promotions.

    External validation was always a shaky foundation. Picking a CS degree at 18 was often arbitrary, and building an identity on it was never healthy. What matters now is clarity about how you bring value.

    The job was never to write code – the job was to solve problems and move metrics. What problems or metrics are you responsible for? Do you know what impact you’re having on them? Can other people – like your manager, their manager – tell the impact you’re having?

    The 80/20 Shift

    Scaling yourself is about building systems and instilling judgment – how you continue to deliver things of value as more is available to you. It was always the case that at a certain level code was not the limiting factor. But with AI that’s happening earlier in someone’s career.

    If it used to be the case that a good developer was say, 80% throughput, and 20% team multiplier, that calculation has now changed. Let’s say in 2026 it’s 60:40 – the result is that figuring out how to be a multiplier is more important than ever.

    Engineers often used to put off that shift until staff level, but now they need to adjust their mindset earlier. It’s less about the code or language – more about systems design. Being good at systems design, being able to critique, give feedback, and set standards are even bigger levers than before. These were multiplier skills that used to be 20% for strong ICs – not everyone. Now 20% is the minimum, 40% is expected – a bigger part of the role and greater drivers of impact.

    AI as a Multiplier

    I think about AI as a multiplier, and that’s part of the dissonance around it. Competent, self-aware people use it to get more done. Less competent people use it to generate noise — it’s easier than ever to produce something superficially polished but lacking depth. That creates work for the people reviewing it, and undermines credibility.

    Worth naming: we’re all competent and incompetent depending on the task. I have a workflow that makes me produce better written content. I use it for frontend development because I know enough to get adequate results. But when I tried to use it for a professional development policy — something I have no expertise in — I could tell the output was bad but couldn’t fix it. At least I knew, and didn’t waste anyone else’s time.

    What You Can Control

    Developers have less control than we had before, but all the more reason to use the power we do have well. Nowhere is that more true than over our own choices and attitude in the face of change.

    We need to expect to earn our keep. In the ZIRP era I think a lot of software devs lived in some world where they expected to make a lot of money in a way that was divorced from the realities of the business. Now you need to know what value you drive to the business and stay focused on that.

    Embrace the idea that your career is bigger than your current job. A bad job is hard, but it’s survivable. You can come back from it. Start with the things you can control – it’s more than you think.

    Listen to the Full Conversation

    Amy and I talked for over an hour — self-management, feedback, privacy and values, what leadership looks like without authority or abundance. You can watch the full episode here or listen on [Spotify | Apple podcasts]

    If this resonates with you, you might be interested in:

    This isn’t a doom-and-gloom conversation. It’s a reframing — about judgment, agency, and what it means to lead when the old assumptions no longer hold.

  • Resisting Capitalism’s Shoulds

    Resisting Capitalism’s Shoulds

    A confused raccoon looking at a selection of headwear
    Image credit: Joe Groove

    I’ve been feeling pretty mad about capitalism lately.

    One of the core things I’ve been angry about is realizing that capitalism is a huge source of “shoulds” and fake productivity. The goal of capitalism is to keep us running, keep us consuming, and to distract us from what is actually meaningful to us as human beings.

    The goal of capitalism is maximal utilisation, but it’s a pretty horrible thing for a human being to be maximally utilised. And, if you allow your day job to maximally utilize you (or close), that leaves very little left for you to think about how that job fits into the broader picture of your life – or career.

    In this era of tech, the premise of job stability has been broken. We’ve all seen the layoffs. The shift to more hostile employment conditions, whether it’s RTO (return to office) or longer working hours. The other thing that has been broken is the idea that if you don’t like your current job, you can just go and get a better one. The market is tough. 

    I’m mad at capitalism, but like most of us, I still need to live under capitalism.

    For the past year, my friend Jean and I have been talking regularly about what this era of tech means. How perhaps the things that have always been true (your job won’t love you back) are truer than ever, and the need for tech workers to develop a better set of coping skills than “find a new job”.

    We wanted to find a way to make some of the benefits of 1:1 coaching accessible to a broader audience, in a format that is more accessible – something that was needed for our collaboration, given that Jean lives on the West Coast, and I live in Ireland.

    The course we came up with is the course we wish we’d had, in a format that we hope makes it easier to fit into your life – wherever that is, and however that looks like.

    Each module lasts two weeks. You get a document outlining the concepts, and a podcast we recorded together about how this has shown up in our own lives and careers. Then there are some exercises to work through, that you can submit and get feedback on from us.

    It’s async, self directed, and carefully and deliberately cut down to try and help you use the time you have well. If you can carve out 45 minutes a week for 8 weeks, we believe you’ll come out of it feeling more grounded in what you want, what your values are, how you want your career to fit into your life – ready to push back and be more deliberate when it comes to what capitalism expects from you. 

    We’d love you to join us. More at: driyourcareer.com

  • Announcing: DRI Your Career

    Announcing: DRI Your Career

    Image credit: Joe Groove

    When I wrote part 1 of The Engineering Leader, about what it means to be the DRI (Directly Responsible Individual) of your career, it was a product of some hard won lessons of my own, conversations with friends, and an arc I saw repeatedly with my 1:1 coaching clients.

    Talking with my long time friend Jean about it all, it was apparent to us there needed to be something in the middle ground. More than a book that you might read, but struggle to apply, but something less than the intensity of a 1:1 coaching relationship, which just isn’t available to everyone. Especially in this market. And yet in this market, I think we need to own our choices and create agency in our own career more than ever.

    Over the past year, through sync conversations, voice notes, and text messages and documents shared back and forth, Jean and I have been putting together the course we wish we had had earlier in our careers. Something self paced, and suitable for introverts, but also something that we hope will provoke deeper reflection and more deliberate choices.

    We are so excited that we’re finally ready to share it with you all.

    What is DRI Your Career?

    DRI Your Career is an 8-week course starting on January 15th, 2026  to help you take ownership of your career with clarity, confidence, and intention.

    Through this course, you will learn tools, mindsets, and frameworks to become the Directly Responsible Individual of your own growth. 

    The course is designed for mid to senior-level engineers (or engineering managers) who aren’t finding the default career ladder all that motivating and are ready to figure out what they actually want — and how to move toward it.

    Why now?

    The tech industry is being flipped upside down and inside out. The old career playbook doesn’t work anymore. But that’s actually good news — because it means you get to write a new one.

    One that’s actually yours and is based on what you want, not what creates a consistent pipeline of workers for a growing tech industry.

    If you’ve been stuck between “shoulds” and wants, if you’re wondering what’s next but don’t have a good answer, if you want to feel intentional instead of reactive — this course is for you.

    It can be hard to make time to be intentional about your career, and if you’re like us, you might be thinking, wow I really need this, I just wish I had the time.

    We get it, and we’ve talked through so many possible versions of this course to land on this format that feels genuinely like something we’d want to take.

    We designed the course to fit in your schedule — plan to spend a minimum of 45 minutes a week (more if you’d like!). It’s completely asynchronous, so you can listen to our audio conversations on a walk or in the car, read the module content in between meetings, and do each module’s targeted exercises whenever is best for you.

    Enrollment is open now.

    Early bird pricing: $349 USD (available until December 31st)

    Regular pricing: $399 USD

    This will be the last time the course is available at this price point.

    The course starts January 15. Enrollment closes January 10th or when we are at capacity.

    👉 Learn more

  • Explore / Pursue / Depth

    Explore / Pursue / Depth

    My friends and I went pottery painting recently. Next, we’re trying crotchet. The pottery painting was fun, and my star shaped bowl painted in rainbow colors came out better than I expected. I’m thinking to go back and paint a dragon next.

    My friends and I, we’re exploring. Trying some new things. Seeing what we enjoy. No pressure to be good at it, or even do it a second time. It’s oddly liberating. I think this is good for me, because I get too focused on being good at things, which makes me too likely to stick to what I know, unwilling to branch out and explore.

    It also reminds me of professional development. Sometimes I know what I’m trying to learn and how to do it – I’m pursuing it, in a depth mode. For example when I took the full co-active coaching training, or when I wrote the book.

    Right now I’m in more of an exploratory mode. I have some broad themes that I’m interested in, but I’m not quite ready to commit to anything that big. I was inclined to be a little self-judgemental about that, like, I ‘should’ know and focus and achieve. But I’m trying instead to find the beauty of the exploration. The freedom to make small decisions, the lack of pressure when I can truly believe that it’s okay to be wrong, the joy of following my own curiosity, just because.

    As a result I’m:

    • Listening to wildly different podcasts (a history one!)
    • Reading an interesting book with no real practical application
    • Redoing a new version of a program I took before, and experiencing it very differently
    • On a program committee for a conference I really like
    • Planning on taking a course that feels wildly different from anything I’ve done in a long time
    • Working on a fun / exploratory project with a friend

    In an exploratory mode, I feel much less of a sense of progress, perhaps because it’s so much more chaotic than when I’m more focused on something specific. But I think maybe that’s part of what makes it good for me right now. Exploring is a more generative activity, as in, generating of ideas and perspectives. Depth is more of an exploitation of ideas and perspectives that are already there. Post writing a book – basically a packaging and exploitation of years of exploring – I really want to get back to a more generative space; and I’ve concluded that means I have to explore.

    How about you? What have you been exploring lately, and what did you learn?

  • How do you DRI your career in a bad market?

    How do you DRI your career in a bad market?

    Credit: Joe Groove

    I started 2022 with a post in Qz – 5 signs it’s time to quit your job. The list is:

    1. You’re not learning (and you want to be)
    2. You’re learning coping mechanisms rather than skills
    3. You feel morally conflicted about hiring
    4. Your job is affecting your confidence
    5. Your job is affecting you physically

    I stand by this list, I do think this is a solid list of reasons to think about moving on. But three years later, the market is very different and there are two great reason not to quit.

    1. How hard will it be to find another job?
    2. Will that new job actually be any better?

    A brief diversion that will make sense – I know I should do more weight training, but I really really love cardio. I keep meaning to do more but… the spin bike is right there, and so tempting. So I put off weight training, again.

    I think tech workers in a good market, we often approached career growth that way. We know there are some set of things to do which might help us get what we want where we are, but recruiters are emailing and it’s easier to interview elsewhere instead. This goes particularly for under-indexed people, the latest McKinsey report on Women in the Workplace shows that advancement for women, and particularly women of color, is still moving slowly – and in some cases, regressing.

    The current market is like… enforced weight training (or enforced spinning, if you have the opposite inclinations). It sucks, and it hurts, but it can also be an opportunity to expand your skills at maximizing the current situation rather than the skills to seek out a new one.

    One of the specific things that I think is hard right now is the constraints we operate in. When organizations say “do more with less” that means individuals have more to do. When inflation goes up but wages stay stagnant, that means individuals – even those who are fine overall – have less discretionary income that can be used to save time, recharge, or invest in learning. When things overall feel risky, we’re more likely to be risk averse. If it was hard to do a side project before, when the market was better, it’s probably even harder when things are more difficult and more precarious.

    Three suggestions to DRI your career in a bad market (without quitting):

    • Take a longer view
    • Get creative with what can you learn and where can you learn it
    • Mine “opportunities” for Opportunity

    Take a longer view

    When you think about career goals, we often think about the external markers – we talk about getting the job title rather than doing the work, about publishing a book rather than writing it, about giving a talk rather than preparing a talk. This is totally fair – this is when the goal is “done” after all. But if you accepted that external markers are particularly hard to come by right now, that all the work you might do might come to nothing – what would you do?

    • What would you prioritize just because you enjoy it?
    • What groundwork could you lay for the future?
    • What would you stop chasing – and where would you put that effort to better use?

    In my book, I write about how this job is just a moment in your career. The same is true here – this market is just a moment in the overall arc of your career. Things may not return to where they were, but the way things are won’t last either. Software engineers have valuable skills that will continue to be needed. If you are in the fortunate position to be able to ride out this period, what do you want to be true at the end of it? What can be intrinsically motivating to you? Orient you? Find that, and hold on to it.

    Get creative with what can you learn and where can you learn it

    Before the pandemic, I used to love going to conferences. I enjoyed meeting people, I appreciated the insights I got, I liked the feeling of having given a talk (not so much everything that went up to that point, let’s gloss over that). I still like to attend the odd event, because I enjoy it, but in terms of professional development, it’s perhaps not the best ROI. Things that have better ROI for both money and time for me personally:

    • Regular conversations with friends in the industry
    • Books
    • Podcasts
    • More directed / focused learning (paid courses)

    Maybe you also had your way of doing professional development, and now it’s more of a struggle to get it paid for or carve out the time, or whatever is holding you back. This doesn’t have to mean no more professional development. What it does mean is that you have to 1) be more clear about what you want to learn and why 2) get creative about how you do that, 3) navigate a possible (likely) lack of organizational support in order to prioritize the things that matter to you.

    Yes, it will be harder, and yes it’s easy to be annoyed that your current employer isn’t supportive. But, your career is bigger than your current job, and it makes sense to prioritize accordingly.

    Mine “opportunities” for Opportunity

    Let’s get real, tech has always loved the trailing promotion, the whole “perform at the next level in order to advance”, and this has always generated bias in terms of the people who are allowed to do that, and those who have a harder time. For many of us, “do this and get promoted” was always kind of a gamble. In this market, you know the odds are even more stacked against you. Why bother?

    In this market, there’s less Opportunity, and more “opportunity” – where you get the (additional) work, but not the job title, and certainly not the money. It’s easy – fair – to view this as a con, and not bother. That is certainly a valid option, and at times the correct one.

    Sometimes though, the “opportunity” is an opportunity to negotiate, and to think about how to craft it in such a way that it furthers your career goals. This means you need to know what your career goals are. If you’re an IC with aspirations of being a manager that is a hard switch to make currently. But given the option, perhaps you can pick up some additional responsibility, and use it to build your resume in order to be in a stronger position when the market recovers. The trick is to do it in a way that does genuinely build your resume. So in this case, negotiation starts with looking at what is available to take, and crafting a piece of it with a clear narrative that you’re willing to take on. So less “I work as an IC and manage four random people my manager wanted to offload” and more “I run the sub team working on the $component, as a TLM”.

    To be clear, I’m not on the side of organizations extracting labour they have not paid for. In my view, you can take the deal as long as it suits you to and you owe the organization nothing. Once you find a situation that will pay you for the work you’re doing, if you get a counter offer, remember you should also be owed back pay.

    My bigger point, is that in this market, where down levels are rife, opportunity is scarcer and budgets are frozen, a moral stance might mean less progress for you overall. If that’s the right choice for you, great, but if you can get creative and make progress regardless, you can hopefully turn that progress into money down the line. Remember that job titles are inconsistent to the point of being meaningless, and you’re not obligated to reveal your salary when interviewing for your next job – I strive not to give advice but definitely don’t reveal your salary if you have reason to believe you’ve been underpaid.

    Even in this market, some of us should still be very actively looking to move on. Remember the sunk cost fallacy – in good times when you can get what you want (title, money) elsewhere, but in bad times it feels more risky to give up “progress” – even if that progress is not rewarded. The meta point of all of these ideas is to figure out if you can make progress – even if it’s not recognized. If you can’t, then figuring out how to get yourself to a situation where you can make progress is job number one.

    Coming back to external markers, these things are like the milestones by the side of the road. Occuring periodically, some places more frequently that others. The current market might be lighter on the milestones, but that doesn’t mean that you personally are making less progress. However in the absence of external validation, you need to maintain your own measures, and rely more on intrinsic motivation. This may be a bit harder, but that’s okay. You can do this. I believe in you.

    If you liked this, you might also like my book.

  • 7 Suggestions for Writing a Good Self Review

    7 Suggestions for Writing a Good Self Review

    Originally shared internally and lightly edited for external readability. Note that this comes from a context where the self review is not part of the promotion packet so focuses on it as a tool to help the manager put together the review.

    Credit: Pixabay

    Goal of a self review:

    • Time to reflect and clarify what you’ve achieved over the past cycle.
    • Alignment between you and your manager on your work, impact, and goals.

    None goals of self review:

    • Sales pitch on why you should be promoted.

    Your self review – done effectively – is one of the most helpful tools for your manager in accurately representing your work and impact in the feedback cycle. It can help them cut through all the noise of various projects to hone in on the most useful points or outcomes. This makes a huge difference in how much time it takes to put together, and your manager will thank you for that alone. But it also helps highlight things they might miss if they just read through everything in your project management tool of choice. E.g. you might feel that calling and structuring a meeting was crucial to the success of your project. That might not be as apparent from the notes and project updates unless you tell them what to look for.

    I’ve put together this list of tips for you.

    1. Effectively summarise. Don’t make your manager read through every project you have ever done. Help them know what to look for. Put the most important projects at the top, and make the impact clear, as well as key points in the project timeline that are worth their attention. Leave out small projects that just needed to be done, or if you can’t bring yourself to do that, add them to “other projects” section at the end of the doc.

    2. Focus on Impact. It’s tempting to justify how hard you worked, but focus on communicating the impact of that work instead. What was different because this project was executed? What was different because this project was executed by you? What is possible or known now that wasn’t before? If you’re not clear on the impact of a project, ask your product manager (and next time consider asking before you agree to do it).

    3. Surface invisible work. We all do things that are more behind the scenes. Code reviews, releases, peer support, onboarding etc… the kind of work that makes the team run well but isn’t always visible and is easy to overlook. Make sure you surface this work in your self review, talk about the impact, and think about who you can ask for feedback that will re-enforce that. E.g. if you were an onboarding buddy, the person you onboarded or their manager can be good people to tag. If you did a lot of work improving release automation, maybe the person who does the most releases is the person to ask. It’s worth telling them what you’re hoping they will speak to and help you make more visible.

    4. Deconstruct strategy. Often the value of a project is not in any one project, but in a collection of projects pushing towards some outcome. If you have a situation where multiple projects build on each other to increase impact, expose that. Explain how they fit together and what they are working towards. For instance, if you had a set of work to improve release quality and confidence, it’s worth grouping that together and explaining it overall, because the individual work within it might seem like minor tasks. This applies even if your strategy is not yet complete; you can explain where you expect to go next and initial indicators.

    5. Show progress. Everyone should have things they are working on, and this is an opportunity to illustrate progress. It’s fine if it’s ongoing, but think about whether you have made progress, or whether you’ve not (and if not, why). It’s also (usually) fine if you’ve decided this is not what you want, e.g. last cycle you thought you would want to be a manager but on reflection you’ve realised that’s not where your strengths or interests truly lie. If you have areas of development from the last cycle, this is a good place to start.

    6. Show what you learned. It’s okay to fail, but it’s not okay not to learn from it. Don’t gloss over the things that didn’t go the way you’d hoped, show what you’ve learned from them instead.

    7. Choose your own career goals. You are the DRI of your career, so you get to have clarity on your own goals rather than expecting your manager to set them for you. Getting promoted is not a career goal, and it’s rarely a good reason to do anything (“if-then” rewards rarely motivate us, we do better with things tied to autonomy, mastery and purpose: see Drive or the TED talk). Your career also exists beyond where you work currently. Think about how you want to grow and the kind of work you want to do, and set goals around that instead.

  • Sometimes you have to choose between being right and being effective

    Sometimes you have to choose between being right and being effective

    My latest in Quartz…

    My partner and I had a hellish move recently. We were lucky in that our landlords are nice, reasonable people, and unlucky in that they were quite disorganized and hadn’t done everything they needed to, like ordering furniture and thoroughly cleaning up after the last tenant.

    So as this played out, living in a hotel, in a new (to me) country, trying to juggle his new job, my existing job, and the absolute chaos of everything, our differences started to play out.

    My partner, a software engineer, said “they should do these things.” I, an engineering director, started to develop a risk mitigation strategy.

    Continue reading…

  • Your Action Plan to DRI Your Career

    Your Action Plan to DRI Your Career

    Credit: Erik_Karits / Pixabay

    Step 1: Review

    Step 2: Plan

    1. Assess if it’s time to quit (this will shape how you approach the next steps).
      1. If it’s time to quit, or you think it might be, figure out your constraints versus need.
        1. Do you need to make your current role manageable to give yourself time to look for something else?
      2. If you’re a maybe on quitting, think about what’s pushing you to that point, and what you could try to improve things.
      3. If you’re a no, great! Less overhead for you. Move to step 2.
    2. Look at what options you want to be available to you.
      1. Check yourself on whether it’s a job or a title – what do you really want to be doing in your 40+ hours a week you spend at work?
      2. Assess where you are relative to them.
        1. For those where you’re on track, great – you’re done here.
        2. For those where that is not the case, take them to step 3.
      3. Define your current moment.
        1. What is your current moment?
        2. What do you need right now?
        3. Given those things, what constraints do you have here?
        4. Discuss the constraints with someone you trust – do they have to be true?
    3. Clarify the deal you made under capitalism.
      1. Think about what your employer is renting.
        1. Are you building market value?
        2. Are you undermining market value?
      2. Think about what your employer is buying.
        1. Is there anywhere where they are taking more than they’re paying for?
        2. Are there any boundaries to redefine?
      3. What kind of deal do you want?
        1. What supports your longer term goals?
        2. What do you need to support your life right now?
    4. Identify some proximate objectives.
      1. Come up with some (1-3) shorter-term goals that support what you identified as your overall career options.
        1. Make sure you really nail the `what` and the `why` – achieving this goal is meaningful to you, and will represent meaningful progress.
      2. Put together development plans for each of them.
      3. Discuss and refine the plans with someone you trust.
    5. Think about your relationship to feedback.
      1. Identify what quadrant you’re in for some key relationships.
        1. If it’s receptive and actionable – great, what’s working and how did you get to that point?
        2. If it’s receptive but not actionable, or not receptive but actionable, why is that? What would help?
        3. If it’s neither receptive nor actionable, why is this?
          1. Is there a way to extract yourself from this situation?
      2. Think about what you could do generally to be more coachable. Pick 1-2 suggestions from the list to work on.
      3. Think about some difficult pieces feedback you’ve received. What can you take from them? Is there anything useful here?
        1. “No” is okay!
        2. Even in the worst contexts, there may be something we can learn about ourselves. And then, it’s much easier to let that feedback go.
        3. Some feedback and feedback relationships need to go in the bin. Do you want to put anything in the bin?
    6. Audit your network.
      1. What relationships are good? Celebrate them.
      2. What relationships are okay, but could be better?
        1. Think about how things could be better.
        2. Think about things you could do to improve those relationships.
        3. Decide if you want to make some time to invest in those relationships.
          1. “No” is okay!
          2. So is “not right now”.
      3. What relationships are missing?
        1. Think about what those missing relationships cost you – i.e. if you have a very small professional network, maybe it makes it harder to find new opportunities.
        2. Think about what you could do to build more of a network, what would be the easiest things you could do? What would you enjoy?
        3. Assess the gap versus what you might do to solve it and decide whether or not you want to do it.
          1. “No” is okay!
          2. So is “not right now”.

    Step 3: Execute

    So excited for you! Let me know how you get on.