Reflecting on Long Term Career Value

Reflecting on your past career … it isn’t always a comfortable activity.

Typically it’s only when you start updating your resume in the hunt for a new job that you go through the process in any real detail and unfortunately in 2020, this is something that many of us have had to do.

Even when you’re looking for that next job and updating your resume, recruiters always tell you to keep it brief and to the point because employers don't have the time to read a “waffly” resume that doesn’t focus on tangible achievements.

We all know we should probably reflect more often. So what stops us?

Is it time pressures? We typically get so consumed in the moment when we’re in our current roles. Celebrating the launch of that new product or feature is short lived and we quickly move on to deliver the next most important initiative.

Is it a broken performance management process? The conversations are so infrequent that our memories are stretched when preparing them. And individual performance goals are tightly tied to near term KPI’s that don’t reflect the true value of one’s performance.

Or is it that we are naturally self-critical and undervalue ourselves?
So “we could have done better”, “it took us so long to get there” or “we had to compromise on x feature” are the words that often come out of our mouths when reflecting.

Rather than a shallow, short and sharp reflection, I’ve recently realised that reflections need to go deeper & further … and it’s usually a light bulb moment that makes you go there.

For me, it took a random Slack conversation with an ex-team member to prompt my deeper reflection of one of my prior roles.

And this got me realising that the time frame that we usually evaluate our careers on is wrong. The real value you bring to an organisation isn’t just what is realised during your time in the role, it’s the things that endure within that team and organisation beyond your time.

I know many of us work to the mantra that you’ve done well if you leave something in a better state than when you found it, and I’d like to think I did that more often than not. However I still always focused on what I achieved during my tenure as the measure of success, until now.

After finishing up at Australia Post in an organisational restructure a few years back, I must admit I was a little bitter. We had spent the good part of 2 years building an innovation lab which was just starting to hit its stride. But the powers that be decided that our time was up so it was time to move on.

Two years on and two roles later, it was this slack conversation with my ex-team member which got me realising how long it takes for your value to crystalize.

The team member went on to explain how our Innovation Lab’s ways of working had permeated into the core teams and that the business was now starting to realise that the way we were operating worked.

We had always had cross functional teams of product, design and technology, however the typical operating model was we have an idea, let’s just go and build it. Now you might say, “there’s nothing wrong with that” and my answer would be “you’re right, with a caveat”. If what you’re building is going to cost you $10k, go knock yourself out and get quick feedback on your concept. But if you’re planning to deliver something that will cost millions, I’d probably call you a lunatic. Unfortunately this is the case in many corporate environments where there is little market validation prior to investment.

So to get back to this slack conversation, this ex-team member went on to explain that upfront customer research was now embedded in (most) projects and that the business has seen the value of the service design & experimentation skillsets which seek to understand the full customer journey (which was previously seen as a dark art and only seen in small pockets of the business such as ours).

At the time it felt like the organisation was against us and that driving this change was going to be impossible. There were:

• Frustrations with internal politics;
• Meetings where a passion to drive transformation was misinterpreted as a challenge to authority; and
• Definitely some conversations that I could have handled differently.

Whilst I apologise wholeheartedly to those I may have offended in the process, I’d like to think that they now realise it was required to achieve this organisation change and that it was nothing personal.

It then got me thinking of the long term value created by the more tangible items delivered by our team.

Firstly, a consumer police checks product built from the ground up by leveraging the company’s identity and retail network assets as its differentiator. We pushed so hard to get the company to buy in to building an Australia Post branded product, to get marketing budget to promote it and to obtain our own ACIC licence to remove 3rd party dependencies. We also fought hard to remove the confusion between competing police check workflow solutions for state police authorities. These strategies were right, but the timing was not. Now 2 years on, we see our plans in action.

Also a Workforce Verification solution for on boarding staff, which was identified by the team through in depth customer research into employment processes. The opportunity was validated in conjunction with another development team via a proof of concept built for our internal HR team. The product was formally launched to market 18 months after our teams’ departure and is now being sold to Enterprise customers.

So my deeper reflection got to me to the conclusion that the long term effects of our career contributions should never be glossed over. Whilst you may have moved on and weren’t there to see all the benefits fully realised and whilst others are often responsible for continuing on our great work to get to the final outcome….we should never be ashamed of thinking it started with us.

In order to create a movement, a spark needs to come from somewhere and we should always feel proud if part of that spark comes from us.

So next time you’re sitting back and reflecting on your career achievements…

…dig deeper;

…take longer;

…think of the long term value you created;

…think about the tangible and intangible value; &

…definitely don’t undersell your contributions.