Plan Your Path to Career Success in 2016, But Take Your Chances Too

At this time of year, it seems like a tradition to look back on the last 12 months and then look forward and think about all the things we are going to do in the next 12 months. The question is: if we wrote down all the things we want to achieve by December 31 2016, how many of them will we actually have achieved this time next year? If we leave it to pure chance, then precious little I would argue. However, life is full of surprises too so even perfect planning will not necessarily deliver your ambitions. In my experience, it’s been about getting the right balance between planning, executing on that plan (i.e. doing something about it) and also taking your chances when something unexpected comes along.  

Throughout my career, I’ve benefited from regularly taking stock of what I’m doing, what I want to be doing in the medium and long term and finding ways of getting there. However, some of my best ever decisions and moves came from left field. They weren’t meticulously planned in advance, but they were fundamental to my life. Here are a few ideas to help if you too are thinking about what it is you want to achieve for yourself in your career in 2016. 

1. Find the right environment to ask yourself some hard questions

If we lead busy lives, it’s often too difficult to find the time to really take stock of what we want to achieve in our careers. The day-to-day urgency of work and life just doesn’t seem to offer up the chance to step back and reflect on what your goals are. It’s the old adage of we concentrate on the urgent (the task in front of us now) and ignore the important (what do I want to do with my life). The festive break however gives us a little time at least to take that step back. For me however, it’s never a case of sitting down and working on the issue, as if it’s some sort of deadline-driven business decision. It’s more about having time away from the daily routine and I often find that my best ideas come when I’m doing something totally different where my mind can wander. That can be hiking in the hills or cycling along a quiet country lane. It’s never sitting at a desk with a deadline. So, create the environment where you can freely think without time pressure and without the anxiety of having to come up with an answer. Often I may need to revisit the question several times, but in the end I know I’ll get there, so there’s no point getting stressed about it along the journey. 

2. Define your goals and plan to achieve them

Once the answers emerge from the mist, write them down. There’s something definitive and real about committing a thought or plan to paper. It now exists and demands to be actioned. Above all though, ask yourself a couple of questions to test your plan: is it something you are sure you really want (and why) and what are the specific steps you need to take to deliver it. For me, there’s a huge benefit in making the steps shorter term so I know I have to take them. If it’s all longer term planning, the easiest thing in the world is to not worry about it yet and delay action. If your first committed action however is in the next week, it’s much harder to ignore it. If you don’t take that first step, ask yourself why not? The usual answers are often something like “not enough time, too busy, a bit risky right now, something came up etc. etc.” That’s all fine, provided you also accept that you’re concluding that you don’t really care much about achieving the goals you thought you had decided were right for you. Apathy is OK, but don’t complain about another year wasted when New Year 2017 rolls around and nothing has changed for the better. 

3. Do the same if you’ve just started a new role

You can apply exactly the same process if you’ve just moved into a new role too. I was with a friend last week who is relatively recently in an important new job with a new employer. He was rightfully excited about the prospects. However, when I asked what he would point to this time next year as a set of things he would have delivered which would make him both happy and feel as though the year had been well spent, he wasn’t so sure. No doubt he’ll draw up that list though as otherwise how can he influence the outcome? Proper planning definitely improves your chances. 

4. You cannot plan for the unexpected opportunities, but take them all the same 

That all sounds fine. However, life is not a perfectly planned journey and that’s why it is so interesting. Making good plans will prompt you into action. However, you must also be adaptable to the opportunities that suddenly appear and take your chances along the way. Someone asked me the other day what was the most fundamental career decision I’ve ever taken in my life and how did it happen? That’s a tough one to answer as the series of events over the last 50+ years that lead to me sitting here now and writing this note has been both the result of planning and also of grabbing hold of unplanned opportunities as they occurred.

As a 21 year-old student in my final year of university, I was set to start work as an engineer in an aircraft factory, armed with my new degree. However, chatting one evening with a friend about his summer internship which he’d spent in the oil industry with Schlumberger was a moment that changed my life. He described his work in a company I had never heard of, doing a job I never knew existed, but it captured my imagination. I applied for a job there, was lucky enough to be accepted and spent almost a decade working in a business that has taught me so many invaluable lessons that have helped me ever since. Towards the end of that decade though, while working in the North Sea in Norway, I held another chance conversation with a good friend about "what’s next in life”. Seeking to broaden my experience outside the oil industry, he advised studying for an MBA, an idea I had already started to consider as part of my plan. However, in those pre-internet days, I had no idea where to go or how to even start the process. “Simple” he said. “Go to Stanford”. To be honest, based in Europe, I can’t remember if I’d even heard of the place back then in 1988. But based on that conversation, I applied, was accepted and the experience transformed my life for the better, and continues to do so today.

Two totally fundamental decisions and actions that have shaped my life in the most profound ways, yet both borne out of apparently random conversations and events. I never regret anything about my life, but it’s interesting to note how it is so influenced by a series of events and coincidences that might never have happened!

So, I don’t think there’s a magic formula to successful career planning. However, when I look at my own experience, the diligence of properly thinking through what I want to do has certainly helped clarify what I am looking for, whether I can find it in my current employer and what specific steps I should take to achieve it. You then need to take action. However, you also do not know where the next opportunity may suddenly and randomly pop up. If you’ve thought through in advance what you are aiming to achieve though, at least you’ll then have some sort of reference against which you can judge such an opportunity. That helps reduce the risk in making a change, but, at the end of the day, nothing in history has ever been achieved without a degree of risk. It’s actually about managing the risk, not avoiding it. Hopefully this may help make 2016 a good year for you too.