At Work Newswire

By D. Quinn Mills

We usually think of a career path as a series of jobs of increasing responsibility in a single organization—but that is too narrow a view. Many people assume different roles during their working lives, sometimes they may even pursue multiple careers. Doing very different things can both enrich a person’s life and can sometimes contribute to moving up the ladder in the most important of his or her career paths.

For example, in New York there is a woman who is an investment banker and a gospel singer, and whose singing performances, for charity, have greatly enhanced her reputation and effectiveness as a banker, even though she sometimes faces difficult competition for time between the two.

Why do people pursue different roles? There are many reasons, most of them good.

Some people are good at more than one thing and want to do them both, so they do, even though they can be as different as banking and gospel singing.

Some people want to do one thing, but can’t make a living at it; so they work at another and do the first on the side. This is the case for many artists, musicians, and actors—each of whom would like to make a living at his or her art, but often must work in less interesting jobs to survive.

Sometimes people’s lives take them in different directions—a business person becomes a public official or even a politician; a medical doctor becomes an author of thrillers; a teacher becomes an inventor.

Each of these situations of different roles—sometimes simultaneously, sometimes one after another—are likely to lead a person to a fulfilling career.

However, there can be a less positive reason for pursuing different roles—that a person can’t make up her or his mind what she or he wants to do, and so wastes time and effort without being able to focus on a course of action. This sort of indecisiveness is a career killer. It’s acceptable to experiment with different careers to see what we’d best like to do, or to find what is most advantageous to us, but it’s a terrible error to be unable at some early point to make up our mind to focus on a key direction.

A strategic shift in roles

Sometimes a person shifts roles for strategic reasons—because she finds the ordinary path to promotion blocked. Then she might do what Gayle did. Gayle was hired by a large firm when she graduated from college to work in the information technology area. She was an individual contributor, but was given some assignments to manage project teams and discovered that she liked to manage. However, the department in which she was working was not growing, and consequently her path up the promotion ladder was blocked.

So Gayle looked for a low level management job, and found one in another department. Then over the next few years she was promoted twice, only to come to a stop because the path up was again blocked by other people. So after two years in the same job, and with no prospect of near-term promotion, she looked for a position at the same level in another department, and found one. While this was a lateral transfer, in her new department there were promotion opportunities and soon she was again climbing the corporate ladder.

Gayle formulated a personal rule: she wouldn’t remain in a single job for more than two years. If there was no promotion likely, she’d move laterally. In one instance, she actually took a down-grade in moving to another department. But it was growing rapidly and in six months she was promoted to what had been her previous level, and then soon after another promotion put her above where she’d been before her lateral move. With each shift of departments she was also getting valuable experience in different aspects of the business. With another lateral move, she found herself on the path to the top of the firm.

What was most instructive about Gayle’s career was that although she was continually switching roles, she was in fact pursuing a deliberate course of action that was leading to a high position. What might have been in another person an aimless wandering among roles was in her case the imaginative avoidance of career blocks by shifting her activities several times.

D. Quinn Mills, the Alfred J. Weatherhead Jr. Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School (emeritus), consults with major corporations in the U.S. and globally. He has written extensively on leadership, strategy, and management issues.

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Copyright © 2007 D. Quinn Mills

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