Pivot

by Jenny Blake

  1. Casual Conversations

  First, you can use the Pivot Method as a way to talk about career development when having one-on-one conversations:

  In its quickest form, share the basic premise: Double down on what is working to pivot toward what is next within the role, team, or company. Turn existing strengths and interests into related opportunities and help people shift incrementally, instead of aiming too far ahead to make dramatic career turns that are too sharp.

  Share the basketball player analogy: Focus on strengths and interests (Plant foot) to scan for new opportunities (Pivot foot). From there, identify small pilots to help impacters expand their skills and pursue interests that also benefit the team.

  Review the Career Operating Modes from the introduction: Ask employees to self-assess whether they are in reactive, proactive, or innovative mode, and what would move them into the latter categories if they are not already there.

  2. Structured Annual Career Conversations

  Setting dedicated time aside for career conversations once or twice per year improves retention, engagement, and internal mobility, and does not require a massive budget or highly sophisticated tools. Simply expressing interest in your team members’ development goes further than you might expect.

  Although performance reviews seem like a natural time to start a career conversation, many employees dread them. People are often nervous, on guard, and anxious about what the future might hold in terms of promotion or a salary increase. These reviews may be a great time to discuss strengths and areas for development, but they are not times when employees are most open to discussing their most vulnerable hopes and career aspirations.

  Instead, I recommend setting up regular career conversations outside of performance reviews, ideally several months apart, to increase the overall frequency of big-picture conversations. Managers do not have to do the heavy lifting here. When you are ready to roll these out, ask each employee to schedule thirty to sixty minutes on your calendar. Suggest they prepare by thinking through each of the Pivot stages in advance, particularly Plant and Scan, reflecting on their greatest strengths and how they would like to add value and develop within their role moving forward.

  Do’s—Best Practices for Conducting These Meetings

  Do more listening than talking: Save your own advice and experience for the end of the conversation, when you will have a better sense of what would be most helpful to share.

  Ask open-ended questions: Instead of asking why (which can sometimes make people feel defensive), ask follow-up questions such as What is important to you about that? What else? and Tell me more. These will help you both get to the root of what matters most.

  Focus most on the Plant stage: Explore what values are most important to the individual, what their talents and interests are, and what success looks like one year from now, while also adding your observations about their key strengths and accomplishments.

  Remain exploratory during the conversation: The more you help uncover what is working and what is exciting one year from now, without skipping ahead to problem solving or specific next steps, the more insight you will both have to scan effectively for potential solutions and pilots later in the conversation.

  Scan by asking about a range of interesting opportunities as a next move: Go first for quantity, with expansive brainstorming, before narrowing down for quality. From that list, ask them what one or two pilots would be most promising to pursue, before weighing in with your suggestions.

  Bonus: Conduct these sessions as walk-and-talks: Fresh air and movement will revitalize both of you, fostering a better connection and more engaging conversation.

  Don’ts—Common Missteps

  Do not take notes: It breaks eye contact and takes away from deeper, more active listening. You can both jot down memorable insights and next steps after the meeting.

  Do not hold these pivot conversations at the same time as performance reviews: Employees are likely to be nervous and are often overwhelmed processing information from your assessment of their work.

  Do not combine them with your usual one-on-one meetings either, if possible: This way, neither of you will be distracted by looming action items.

  Do not worry about trying to “solve” an employee’s one-year vision in this conversation: Just get clear on what it is. Regular one-on-ones can be a time to follow up with planning more specific pilots and next steps.

  3. Coaching Framework for Managers and Mentors

  You can also roll out the Pivot Method as a conversation framework for managers, mentors, and internal coaches. Whether or not you have formalized coaching programs within your organization, Pivot can be taught as a method to hold exploratory conversations, rather than tactical or advice-based ones. It can also be used to guide problem solving anytime someone feels stuck and unsure of what to do next, whether on a project, in their role, or in their career.

  Many of the coaches and managers I have trained in the Pivot Method as a coaching tool report a sense of relief that this is a simple process that can be shared directly with the person they are speaking with. Their coachees leave these conversations feeling energized, because the method emphasizes strengths and small experiments, which lead quickly to positive and productive outcomes.

  PILOT CREATIVE INTERNAL-MOBILITY PROGRAMS

  Establishing a culture of career conversations is a strong start, but not sufficient. Career development must go beyond talk, into the realm of action and real opportunities. Individuals will soon hit a frustrating wall if their desire to develop within the company is met by red tape when they actually try to make a move. One unfortunately common refrain is, “It is harder to find another job within my company than it was to get hired in the first place.”

  Career conversations are most beneficial when accompanied by internal-mobility programs that support them, making employees even more likely to stay long term. If your company does not offer the types of programs you would like to see, take the lead in starting one, or see how you might pilot a smaller version. Do not assume that just because it does not yet exist, it never will.

  In keeping with the Pivot Method, consider the following questions:

  Plant: What is your organization already doing that is working? What would success look like in terms of creating a culture of engagement and mobility?

  Scan: What are other managers, teams, departments, or outside organizations doing that interests you? What ideas stand out as particularly achievable or that would make the biggest impact? Who else could you partner with inside or outside of the organization?

  Pilot: What small experiments could you try with one team or department before rolling out to the entire organization? How will you evaluate these pilots?

  Launch: What resources would be required for a bigger launch in terms of time, team, and tools? When would you launch this program, and how would you measure its success?

  Internal Programs to Support Career Mobility

  The chart below shows a handful of examples for how to create a Pivot-friendly development culture. Companies range in size, budget, and resources, so there is no expectation to implement all of the following.

  Visit bit.ly/2bg6yrE for a larger version of this image.

  Below are a few more creative ideas, many adapted from programs cited in Fortune’s “100 Best Companies to Work For”:

  Guest speakers: Authors, industry experts, prominent public figures, and musicians hosted at lunch-and-learn sessions or special events. Many companies stream these events live to other offices, and record them to post on public channels. Cliff Redeker, who manages the Talks at Google program, has developed a model for this that many companies have since followed. He has hosted over 500 talks in the eight years he has been involved with the program, first as a volunteer, now in a full-time position managing other volunteers who dedicate a small percentage of their ti
me to recruit and host interesting speakers.

  On-site library: SAS, a business and analytics software company, has “more than 16,000 books, research resources, business tools and loaner equipment that help employees work toward their professional and personal goals.” Zappos also has a library of favorite books in the lobby; employees and visitors are encouraged to take one on their way out, or read and return them. They do this to contribute to one of their core values, “Pursue Growth and Learning,” to help employees connect with each other and the outside world.

  Externships: Wegmans facilitates externships for employees, hands-on learning opportunities outside of the company.

  Job-specific certification programs: Whole Foods provides job-specific development opportunities, such as the American Cheese Society Certified Cheese Professional training and exam, and the Produce Warrior Program.

  Companywide volunteer initiatives: Google’s GoogleServe encourages all employees to volunteer during the same week of the year, and this time off is company sanctioned. There are directories of thousands of global initiatives to choose from, ranging from donating domain expertise, such as résumé review or training, to environmental cleanup efforts.

  Fund a Goal program: Lululemon (a Canadian company, thus not on the Fortune list) promotes a culture of goal setting and accountability, asking all employees to identify business, health, and personal goals for one, five, and ten years. They have created a Fund a Goal program for high performers to contribute money toward aims such as running a marathon or attending yoga teacher training.

  Reverse mentoring and lunches: General Electric pairs senior executives with younger employees. The junior employees mentor their counterparts in technology, social media, and emerging trends, and the senior employees provide more traditional career guidance and organizational mentoring in return. Acuity encourages executives to schedule lunch meetings with more junior employees to foster communication and idea exchange at all levels of the company.

  Experiment with project-based teams that disband when complete: One midsize defense contractor launched an internal talent market to increase productivity, collaboration, and engagement by connecting employees with excess capacity to leaders who have short-term development opportunities. Laura Grose had the idea for teams to experiment with setting up a fantasy-football–style draft for talent, mirroring the way professional sports teams recruit to make performance management more engaging and effective.

  Many of these initiatives can be rolled out in a cost-effective manner, led by anyone with a passion to do so within the organization. Do not wait until you have the perfect solution to try something that sounds interesting; you will probably never feel like you have enough time, budget, or resources.

  If you are not sure where to start, ask. Return to the grounded theory approach from the Scan stage. Listen to your team members, either in open all-hands meetings, during office hours, or with a suggestion capture tool or internal survey, and choose one key area to tackle first.

  Better still: recruit impacters looking for leadership opportunities to lead the charge.

  ______

  During my time at Google, one of the traits recruiters looked for in potential employees was adaptability. Hiring managers would consider how willing and open someone was to change. If new hires were not adaptable, they would surely struggle. Our job roles changed frequently, our teams shifted strategy often to meet the company’s rapid expansion, and departments within the company were often reorganizing. During my five years there, the teams I was on were “re-orging” as much as we were “orging.”

  Dr. Tom Guarriello is a professor at New York’s School of Visual Arts and founder of RoboPsych, a platform for exploring the psychology of human-to-robot interaction. When I told him about the ever-changing nature of companies today and asked how it relates to the economic landscape, he said, “The fantasy is that there is org, that there is an ‘org’ to be ‘re.’ There is no org anymore. The org is an emergent entity that reconfigures itself circumstantially around opportunities.”

  Coaching conversations are an excellent start toward helping impacters adapt to a world of ever-shifting orgs, and in fact, the best tool we have to collaboratively redefine our roles as often as is now required.

  Lead: Online Resources

  Visit PivotMethod.com/lead for additional tools, templates, and book recommendations for this stage.

  CONCLUSION: CELEBRATE COMPLEXITY

  People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. . . . I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances within our innermost being and reality, so that we can actually feel the rapture of being alive. . . .That’s what it’s all finally about, and that’s what these clues help us to find within ourselves.

  —Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth

  I REMEMBER SQUEALING WITH DELIGHT WHEN ONE OF MY COACHING CLIENTS, Brian, told me what he thought was an extraneous fact about his past.

  Brian was a high-level engineering director who had hit a plateau at a large technology company. After nearly a decade there, he was looking for a career reboot, something new and challenging. Brian had a robust compensation package at his present job and a wife and kids to support, so the choice about when to leave and what to do next was not an easy one.

  As we continued talking, Brian mentioned that he pursued a PhD in knot theory for a year and a half. A huge smile spread across my face. Brian’s love for knots—and knotty, complex challenges—was the perfect background for navigating this transition. Rather than viewing his current career conundrum as a struggle, he started to see it as just the type of knot he loved to untangle, and one that he could solve with the same diligent problem-solving skills that he practiced in graduate school.

  Through our work together, Brian grew increasingly clear on his values and vision. Within a month, he was certain that he was ready to leave his job; now it was just a matter of timing. Brian’s one-year vision was to work in a smaller organization in an emerging area, and help expand and connect with others in the burgeoning technology community where he lived.

  A few weeks later he got a call, seemingly out of the blue, from a venture capitalist looking to hire a senior vice president for a technology start-up in his hometown, in an emerging industry, with great potential for innovation and leadership. After several exploratory conversations, Brian accepted the job and made the move. This all happened within a span of two months.

  Hitting a career plateau is not a problem, nor is it a crisis. It is a captivating knot waiting to be untangled, in exchange for accelerated growth. As an impacter, you would not have your work be any other way. Like Brian, you too can become a master knot worker.

  High net growth and impact individuals usually have high self-efficacy: they generally believe they can accomplish what they set out to achieve. But when pivoting, they still wonder, “Am I capable of these grand ambitions I am setting out to achieve?” All of us, when we reach even higher than we have previously or bust out of traditional norms, may wonder, Am I smart enough? Capable enough? Am I the rule or the exception? Am I cut out for this?

  YES. Your biggest vision is worth pursuing. Just as no two people share the same fingerprint, your ideas have not yet been tackled with your unique upbringing, worldview, and life experiences, at this moment in time, in the framework of our current economy and technology, for your intended community.

  That does not mean that your exact conjecture about what’s next is guaranteed to be successful or profitable. But what I can say with absolute conviction is that you are creative, resourceful, and resilient, and will find a way to bounce back from just about anything. That is a certainty you can return to.

  CHECKING IN AT THE LAST RESORT

  There was one particularly low point during the pivot year I described in the introduction, the period of
my life that inspired this book, when I looked out the windows of my studio apartment with a mixture of hope, prayer, and slight desperation. “How?” I whispered to the array of lower Manhattan buildings in front of me, as if they could answer me out loud. “How do I do this? How do I make it here? Is there a way out of this muck of uncertainty?”

  My money had run out. In order to stay in New York City, I had wiped out the last of my savings to get the apartment in which I was asking these questions. My rent doubled overnight, but my business income did not. Many of my biggest fears about self-employment had come true. I was doing what I loved at a macro level by coaching, speaking, and writing, but I did not know how to best apply these skills in my business moving forward.

  At that point the question is not, “What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail?” but What do you do when your back is up against the wall?

  Two weeks later, I was on the phone with Vanguard, my 401(k) company, ready to move into my worst-case scenario by liquidating part of my retirement account—the final frontier of my remaining cash savings. In my mind, the last resort was always just a paper exercise meant to appease my inner CFO . . . and the leasing office that accepted my rental application despite my being self-employed. As I contemplated the next steps in pickpocketing my future’s bank account, a gremlin sat on my shoulder telling me that I was delusional and should just go get a job, throw in the towel on this crazy dream.

  But my gut was saying something else: to keep going, that this low moment was a necessary part of my personal development and a critical, pivotal time in my life and business. This was an initiation, another doorway to the career I knew was waiting for me on the other side.