Episode 6. Career Development Series Review
Episode Description
In this solo episode, Hannah wraps up the career development series by synthesizing insights from across the four guest conversations, pulling on a few threads that are still in progress, and looking ahead to what’s coming next on the podcast.
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Concepts and Resources Mentioned
Career development as a concept Arulmani, Gideon., Bakshi, A. J., Leong, F. T. L., & Watts, A. G. (Eds.). (2014). Handbook of Career Development: International Perspectives (1st ed. 2014.). Springer New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-9460-7
Experiential development and feedback DeRue, D. S., & Wellman, N. (2009). Developing leaders via experience: The role of developmental challenge, learning orientation, and feedback availability. Journal of Applied Psychology, 94(4), 859–875. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0015317
Sensemaking Weick, K. E. (1979). The social psychology of organizing (2nd ed.). Addison-Wesley.
Weick, K. E. (1995). Sensemaking in organizations. Sage Publications.
Team leadership and sensemaking as a leadership function Morgeson, F. P., DeRue, D. S., & Karam, E. P. (2010). Leadership in teams: A functional approach to understanding leadership structures and processes. Journal of Management, 36(1), 5–39. https://doi.org/10.1177/0149206309347376
The pressure of speaking with precision – Still looking for this one! When I find it, I will add it here.
Introversion, extroversion, and the workplace Wilmot, M. P., Wanberg, C. R., Kammeyer-Mueller, J. D., & Ones, D. S. (2019). Extraversion advantages at work: A quantitative review and synthesis of the meta-analytic evidence. Journal of Applied Psychology, 104(12), 1447-1470. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/apl0000415
Rand, B. (2024, February 16). Is your Workplace Biased Against Introverts? Harvard Business School. https://www.library.hbs.edu/working-knowledge/is-your-workplace-biased-against-introverts
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Music: “Feel Good (Instrumental Version)” by PØW via Epidemic Sound
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Episode Transcript
Hannah:
Hey, y’all. Welcome to Office Hours at the Alignment Lab, where we explore what it really takes to align values, strategy, and behavior at work. I’m Hannah Yung-Boxdell, an organizational psychology practitioner, strategist, and systems architect. In Office Hours, we take an honest look at the human side of work and offer practical takeaways for evaluating what matters, what doesn’t, and how to focus our attentions accordingly. Whether you’re mid-career or in the executive suite,
The things you’ll hear about in Office Hours can build careers and organizations that are effective, resilient, and aligned with what matters most to you.
Welcome back to Office Hours at the Alignment Lab. today we are wrapping up our series on career development. In the last five episodes, we have explored this topic from a number of different perspectives and with a number of guests. ⁓
though every conversation had a different focus, all the guests were asked one common question, which is where do they see the onus sitting for intentional career development? And every reaction and answer to that question was different, but they were also the same in that intentional career development.
Is a shared effort. So doing a little review here, I think it’s fair to say that each guest’s perspective added a layer to the ownership question, right? So Elizabeth started us off a really strong considering the individual layer and offered right away an important insight, you know, just by reframing the entry point, how we think about the entry point for career development conversations.
in that people don’t usually arrive in those conversations thinking about career development specifically, but often they’re arriving through
frustration or hitting a wall or feeling of restlessness, right? So that’s a very practical insight for anyone supporting others development. and not just coaches, right? And then beyond that, you know, to actually walk through that door, it’s necessary to create the internal bandwidth and the time to do the the work.
So after that, we had a great discussion with Nick around who walked us around the managerial layer, right? Illustrating for us how managers can be enablers of other people’s development. And also just talking about how managers are off to are also kind of players in the same game, right? They have their own development to attend to as well. And that there are are
Opportunities to kind of do these things together. Doing one can be part of the same act. I have a lot of thoughts about functional management and leadership, but I’ll circle back to that later.
Our third guest episode, Steven talked about something that might feel a bit uncomfortable, which is that development on its own without feedback has diminishing returns. Right. So that solo efforts run into a ceiling. And I know this is probably hard for some of my fellow introverted perfectionists to hear, if you’re used to doing it all on your own, it can be hard to hear that.
Well, there’s there’s a limit to that, This knowledge can be both humbling but also freeing, right? It means that asking for support isn’t a weakness, it’s a design requirement.
So I also think this little nugget of information, it serves to emphasize the role of managers and other trusted advisors in the process of development.
I also think that Steven gave us some really interesting reframes just by sharing his knowledge of recent and current research. I know that for myself, even just one piece of new information can make me look at something from a number of new and different angles.
I’ve been surprised and interested actually in hearing how this episode in particular landed with folks. It’s been really great hearing feedback from listeners on what each episode sparks for you. So I encourage, I ask you to share your thoughts in the comments or directly. Most people are currently doing the latter, but someday I hope to see more engagement in the comments, and who knows, maybe even interaction. Finally,
Stephanie and Larissa gave us a great introduction to the systems layer. This might be, in some ways, the most hopeful one because they showed that infrastructure of support can be intentionally designed and in fact needs to be, right? Supportive systems don’t just emerge. People have to build them. Specifically, we discussed mentorship, personal boards or constellation of mentors.
As well as fostering shared understanding through intentional, consistent practices and norms.
What strikes me about all of these insights is that they don’t contradict each other, they compound. So Elizabeth’s individual layer needs Nick’s managerial layer to function well.
Nick’s managerial layer needs Steven’s feedback loop to avoid becoming a closed system or a system where efforts are siloed. And all layers need what Stephanie and Larissa were describing, Which is a surrounding architecture that normalizes development, makes it visible, makes it so
It doesn’t require every individual employee or manager to figure it out alone, Each layer either enables or limits the ones around it. And so if one is weak or missing, the others have to work harder. And sometimes there’s a limit to how much they can bridge those gaps.
I definitely feel like there’s a special importance of managers, Managers featured prominently in every episode. So anyone who knows me has probably heard this take from me, which I’ve definitely read at some point in like an organizational psychology textbook, which is management is not a profession, right? So for decades, the management track has been a primary vehicle for career advancement.
This is true across industries and sectors. It also I’ll just say has ties to desk and office base work, which can create even larger complexities and challenges in various vocational work settings, such as the trades, when we think about if you know the the role of management as career advancement. Anyways, most managers have not had.
The benefit of learning how to be an effective manager or developer of people. Right? Some have lucked into an organization, or maybe just finding a mentor who has great expertise in this. Basically having access to a good role model, or even someone who is skilled at developing this skill set in others. Some people have studied management. And I’m not talking about business or project or product management.
Remember, I’m talking about people management and learning about that in a rigorous higher education setting. And then some people are thoughtful and tenacious enough to develop and lead their own development. But remember, self-development can only take you so far without access to quality feedback.
I’m sure I’m preaching to the choir here. There are plenty of people that have given voice to the struggle of poor management, leading to all sorts of adverse environmental factors in the workplace. I say all this because it’s one of the things that draws me to focus on functional management and leadership, because developing it in people and in teams and organizations, and more broadly in our working environments is just.
There’s a lot of opportunity and there’s a lot of potential impact that I see in doing that work.
Okay, so moving on a little bit, there’s a few threads that I’m still kind of pulling on.
In in the first episode, I talked a little bit about how career as a concept is actually relatively recent. a relatively recent invention, right? It’s a product of industrialization and a particular set of cultural conditions. And I said that there’s another chapter to that story and that I wasn’t ready to really get into yet. And I’m not sure, I’m not sure I’m fully ready yet now.
But I will say this, we are in the middle of another one of those moments in time where the ground is just shifting underneath our feet. And I think that one of the things that makes career development feel so important, but also so charged right now is that some of the frameworks that we’ve inherited for thinking about it, thinking about career development, the linear path, the single company, the clearly defined role.
They’re not just less reliable. They’re basically living legends, myths, even. I will say I said that last one, and it’s like, well, okay, not the last one exactly. Clearly defined positions still exist and they should, but often they don’t, right? So when they don’t, this can be a symptom, sure, of poor management or insufficient organizational practices in the talent space. Employers.
have a basic responsibility to be clear about their expectations.
But in addition to that, lack of clarity in roles is also a symptom of changing pressures and organizational reactivity to those pressures, which is leading to faster changes, more uncertainty and ambiguity in roles themselves. So as I just said, we are in a moment in time that’s experiencing a lot of.
these types of pressures, right? And so we can talk about the harm and the psychological distress that role ambiguity specifically can cause, leading to things that have recognized adverse impacts for organizations. I’m talking about things like reduced well-being, burnout, alienation from work, or lower engagement and turnover, Anyway, that’s another topic. This is a whole digression that I’ve just went down the this little rabbit hole. So
Let me know if you’d be interested in that.
But getting back to my earlier point, a vastly and swiftly changing landscape is not necessarily bad, but it does mean that we have to be more adaptable, right? To hold our frameworks a little more loosely while at the same time being more clear with ourselves about what our primary aims are, so that we can make clear-eyed decisions with speed.
I think that this came up, this need for adaptability came up in different ways throughout the episodes, So it came up when Elizabeth and I were talking about the need for self-awareness and adaptability and an entrepreneurial mindset. It came up when Larissa was discussing ways that technology is actually making real connection harder. way that Steven mentioned expanding our scope of view
when we consider our options about what a calling might be.
Something else I’ve been thinking about, bandwidth, which I touched on earlier. Elizabeth mentioned that sometimes the first step in development work is actually creating the space to do it, right? The mental and emotional bandwidth.
I have this memory of the first time that I took my dog swimming I took him paddle boarding and he he was pretty good. he just kind of sat on there and
just chilled, but I could tell at some point he was ready to be back on land. And so he kept wanting to step off the paddleboard. And finally I said, Okay, you know, go ahead. And he stepped off the paddleboard and then just dropped right into the water. I mean, he picked it up naturally, like the doggy paddle kicked right in, but you could tell he kind of shocked. so I kind of imagine creating the bandwidth.
that we’re talking about like stepping off into the deep end of a pool. And if you haven’t made plans for how you’re going to breathe, how you’re going to swim, you you’re just gonna really struggle. Right. And so I guess I’m mixing metaphors here, but I feel like
taking the time to create that bandwidth for yourself is like wading into the water and learning how to tread water before you start trying to swim laps.
That’s something I actually think about a lot. And I think it’s more structural than it sounds, right? So bandwidth isn’t just something that people have or don’t. It’s dynamic. It’s also something that managers and organizations can either protect or consume. If you’re running at 110% all the time, the invitation to reflect on where your career is going or where you want it to go.
might not just be hard to take, it might frankly feel absurd, laughable to actually to say yes to that type of invitation. In fact, I’m reminded that Larissa shared a bit about her experience with exactly that inclination, once she became a parent and had to rebalance the scales. So when I think about what
it actually takes to make the whole system work. Bandwidth feels like the first of many hidden prerequisites, And that prerequisite relates to all three layers, the individual, the managerial, and the systemic.
Something else that I think about a lot and I found myself noticing when I was talking to Nick was a function of managers that didn’t get named directly in that conversation, but I later in the wrap-up, called sense making. That’s not my term. I didn’t make that up. Karl Weick, an organizational theorist, used that term like 50 years ago to describe the process by which people give meaning.
To their experiences. And managers are uniquely positioned to do that for the people and teams that they lead. Right. Morgeson and colleagues put out a really great paper on this in 2010, which includes sense making as one of the functions or dimensions of team leadership. And so sense making is not just “here’s an opportunity.”
Or “here’s how it connects to where you’re trying to go and what this organization needs,” right? it’s the function that managers or team leaders play in helping their team to interpret and understand events, situations, ambiguity, right? So that contextualizing work is, I mean, frankly, underrated. It’s not cheerleading, it’s orienting, right? It’s meaning-making.
And I don’t think we talk about it enough as a core managerial competency.
The last thread I want to pull on.
Stephanie and Larissa got me thinking about norms again, which, fair warning, is a topic that I I think about a lot and will probably return to on this podcast as well, because it sits at the intersection of so many things that I care about. So norms are shared behavioral expectations, often unwritten, but not always, right? I mean, like so three shouts for team
Anyway, norms determine whether a policy is real or it’s performative, right? They’re collective in nature. They are the behavioral execution that serve as the skeleton of culture.
So in the context of career development, norms might become visible with questions like, “how is growth handled here?” Right? Is it talked about? Is it modeled, supported in the day-to-day? Or is it a thing that people do quietly on their own time and hope someone notices or hope it has an impact? A favorite
Personal example that comes to mind for me are the gaps between stated and lived values. I think I touched on this in my conversation with Elizabeth, The latter lived values. Those are norms, right? And
Gaps like that between stated values and lived values are where a lot of development systems break down. I’m saying all these things to kind of like help set a primer for what norms are and why I care about them. But I want to be really clear. Norms aren’t this untouchable, intangible thing. There are specific levers – behaviors and practices that construct and caretake norms.
Speaking of functional management, right, actively developing norms is a part of that too. I’d be interested to do a full episode on this at some point. Again, let me know if any of this sounds intriguing to you. helpful to know.
So what’s next? I wanna come back to something that I called out at the start of the series. The guests in this series, and honestly, a lot of the research and the frameworks that we were drawing on were largely speaking to office workers, right? Desk-based, typically college educated, working in environments that ⁓ at least nominally value professional development as a concept.
And that focus can be a real limitation, right? Because the discussions of career development can look very different if you have, say, a vocation in the skilled trades, a restaurant or a hospital setting, or if you’re balancing caregiving in addition to your career, or if you are looking to transition between very different contexts, such as
veterans transitioning out of a military structure into a civilian one. The frameworks we discussed in this series might still apply, but the conditions, the supports, the barriers, those can be vastly entirely different. And so that’s where I’m heading next. I’m working on a series about overlooked workers, groups that industrial organizational psychology and people management practice in general.
have underserved; whose working lives and career experiences deserve a much more direct and thorough examination. And I’m excited about
Moving off topic or at least moving off the topic of career development, as I was getting ready this morning, it occurred to me that I actually might share a little bit about something in my life that I’ve been considering recently, since that’s a question that I ask most guests, right? So
I’ve mentioned a number of times that this podcast is new. It is, right? It’s an infant. And podcasting is not my area of expertise, right? Like I’ve never self-produced a podcast before. So hopefully it’s not it’s not like painfully obvious, even though it’s probably very obvious. Anyway, there’s been a lot of learning for me, some of that’s been very technical. You know, the recording, the editing.
I learned a little bit about creating a clip, like a very basic one. I feel like I’ve started to scratch the surface of this podcasting thing. I know, I know it goes a lot deeper than what I’ve done so far, but you know, I’m enjoying that. But there’s also some really confronting aspects as well. And this is what I’ve been thinking about, right? There’s nothing like recording yourself and then forcing yourself to listen to it.
often repeatedly, right? Like the way that I’m doing because of editing and self-producing this podcast. I’m not talking about just listening to a digitized version of your voice. I think most people know, like when they hear like themselves on voicemail or something else, like it’s it’s uncomfortable. And that’s that’s because like we’re used to hearing our own voices inside our own heads and bodies and and
It’s much more resonant that way than it is when you’re listening to, you know, a voice coming to your ears from an external source. So I’m not talking about that. What I am talking about is coming face to face with your own speech patterns and verbal ticks. And it’s funny because like one of the things that I’ve noticed is those patterns and those characteristics change depending on the context.
So for me, the largest differences are noticeable between guest episodes and solo episodes, Everything about those are different, right? Where the effort is loaded in the process of creating these two types of episodes. Gosh, I feel like I’m saying that word a lot. for me, the solo ones are much more front-loaded, like in terms of research and prep.
Whereas the guest episodes have those things too, but require a lot more on the back end in terms of editing. And I think part of that is just due to the nature and the purpose of these episodes. They’re different, right? Like with guest episodes, I of course have an idea, I have an intention for the episode, but I’m also needing to build in room for.
And to facilitate real interaction, right? There’s an energy that the other person will bring that will actually be smothered if I overplan or overstructure. And that’s not the case in solo episodes, right? Those, it’s just me setting the table and cooking the meal. So there’s a couple ways that those contexts that I mentioned earlier can change, right? Because I mentioned that speech patterns and characteristics can change depending on the context. And the way that I’m looking at it right now is through a lens of internal versus external pressures.
So first, speech patterns can change due to external pressures. Like am I interacting verbally with somebody else?
This is what I’m going to be talking about. But then there’s also internal priming, this is actually a point that my brother raised to me recently. Like, when I’m recording solo, who do I imagine that I’m speaking to? was a really compelling thing to think about, but it’s not the part I’ve had in mind when I was saying, like, what what’s something that I’m considering of anew lately? so I’m just gonna stick with the first thing for now.
And what I’ll say is I am someone who prefers writing to speaking when trying to convey thoughts. And one of the reasons for this is because I have a low tolerance for being misunderstood and a low tolerance for imprecision in what I’m saying. Earlier this year, I read a piece that discusses this exact pressure, and it really resonated with me.
I’ll include it in the show notes, but it explains kind of that pressure. and if I’m gonna open my mouth, I want there to be a purpose, right? I don’t want to be talking for the sake of it. So often the point that I am trying to make has nuance, but conveying a point with nuance takes time, especially if you aren’t sure what the person or group you’re speaking to knows.
So these marks of someone who processes internally, which to anyone who knows me personally, probably is not a surprise. I am very much an introvert, have been my whole life, right? I don’t prefer processing on the fly. But of course I can do it. It’s just choppier.
And for anyone living here in the US, other places too, but here in the US, we live in a society built for extroverts. Our workplaces inherently reward extraversion. I bring this up because there are strong ties between extraversion and people who process externally. I am not this way, right?
If anyone is curious about this, I’d be happy to talk more about this on the podcast at some point, like extraversion and introversion in the workplace. But for now, I’ll just I’ll share a few articles in the show notes related to the extraversion ideal we have and how it shapes us in our workplaces. All’s to say, wow do my speech patterns change when I process and perform this way externally rather than internally.
I’ll just say it reminds me of something that I have occasion to share in meetings when posed a like a novel question that carry some importance or complexity, which is that I can give an answer right now, but I could provide my best answer in a few hours or in a day.
Still, it’s not to say I can’t learn and improve my external processing. I hope to do so. That’s something for me to be working on. And it’s definitely something that has become very apparent to me just by going through, engaging in this creative process of of launching and having a podcast.
So that’s where I’m landing after this series. I guess not with any tidy answers related to career development ownership, but hopefully with a richer picture of why it’s complicated, how to navigate this complicated landscape, and a few more threads that I want to keep pulling on one of the things that I said at the very start of this podcast is that science doesn’t have all the answers.
Neither does lived experience And I think that the most interesting territory is always in between. So I’ll keep exploring that space here.
Finally, a quick housekeeping note before I go. As we move into the next part of the season, I am adjusting the episode cadence. So new episodes will drop every three weeks. I know, I know.
I’ve been on the fence a little bit about this, but this will give me the ability to make sure that I give each episode the attention it needs, during this next season that I’ll I’ll be going into. Of course, if you miss me, let me know.
As always, if something in this series sparks something for you, I’d love to hear about it.
Leave a comment or reach out to me directly at officehours at alignmentlab.online. And if any of these conversations reminded you of someone, a manager, a mentor, or a colleague who shaped how you think about work, please share it with them.
Until next time, stay curious.