The Portfolio Life: A Career Model Fit For Today’s World of Work

A common theme from 2 seasons of The Edge of Work Podcast is this premise that the world and the workplace has changed over the past few decades, but the way we lead and manage, develop company cultures and invest in our people has remained the same.

In our personal lives, why do we expect the latest technology, safest engineering, and best in class environmental regulations out of our cars, but yet in the workplace, are somehow tolerate leadership and management practices that were built for a different era?

For this next season, I’m going on a journey to find other people who are exploring ideas to change the way we think about leading, culture, and talent in hopes of inspiring leaders who want to lead and grow their people through modern ways of working.?

If this sounds like your jam, I hope you’ll follow along!

How Do You Think About Your Relationship with Your Career?

Throughout the course of a given week, I’ll talk to 10-15 people about their lives and careers. When I ask them what they think about their career, I often hear something like this:?

• I care about my career, but I’m not sure what my next step is
• I know I have a lot of interests, but I’m not quite sure which one I want to pursue
• I don’t know what a 5 or 10 year career plan looks like
• I feel like a generalist, and square peg in a round hole

While the world of work has changed, the ways in which we, collectively as a society have thought about careers has remained relatively the same.?

But in a world of work that requires workers and talent, finding and retaining diverse talent is critical to success. And for many employees, they hunger for career growth and learning. Unfortunately, many employers are falling short, and some of the problem stems from our outdated thinking on the ideas behind how we construct careers.

Many of the ways we construct career models and pathways and even incentivize and goal managers to develop their employees are based on ideas and frameworks of important periods of our history of work that are no longer entirely relevant. For example, there’s at least one generation in the workplace, (if not more) that has no idea of the concept of an employee pension plan.

So how do we help our employees navigate and build career models that can help them navigate today’s world of work. Enter the Portfolio Life, ? by Christina Wallace.

A Human Venn-Diagram

Christina is a lot of things - author, podcaster, entrepreneur, professor, and many more. By day, she teaches entrepreneurship at Harvard Business School, but she’s built a career at the intersection of technology, the arts and business.?

A self-proclaimed “human-venn diagram” Christina has spent a good portion of her working professional life curious about how she and her multitude of talents “fit in” to the traditional context and norms of traditional career paths. And then one day, she decided instead of trying to fit a proverbial square peg into a round hole, that she was going to find another path.

What if, instead of trying to get boxed in, we could use our talents, strengths and skills into multiple aspects of our lives? What if instead of telling employees there was only one path to growth, we could offer them multiple paths so that they wanted to stay and grow??

What if, instead of going down one career road for a long time, we could pursue multiple ones at the same time, double down if needed, or perhaps even take an exit to a “pit stop” before coming back on the highway later on?

And what if we could create a world of work where people could have diverse definitions of a “career” such that they could have a flexible and sustainable path for their career?

To make this idea come to life, Wallace decided to apply concepts of portfolio theory to our lives and careers. Instead of thinking of our career as one big bet, what if we could have a few “smaller” investments/bets that we could partake in over time, and what if we could?

The Concept of the Portfolio Life is based on three core themes:

• You are more than any one role or opportunity. - People are 3-dimensional human beings. As people, we have so much more to bring to the table (talents, skills, strengths, etc) than just our role and title in our company directory or LinkedIn Profile
• Diversification helps navigate change - In a world of increasing and constant change, we need to be able to be agile in our choices and sense and respond to market opportunities. Diversification helps in that it allows you to run concurrent tests and experiments, and manage both potential “home runs” (double down on these” and “strike outs” (the cost of failure is lower)
• When your needs change, you can and should rebalance - Just like your investment portfolio changes and sometimes requires you to rebalance, so too does your career and life. Instead of viewing change or a switch as an anomaly, rebalancing is now a feature not a bug. Note: they will change!

How Employers and Employees Benefit From The Portfolio Concept

In today’s world of work, I see a lot of benefits for employers, executives and employees:

A more expansive way to think about career growth

Many people want to manage their career but oftentimes struggle to put into thoughts the ways in which they want to develop and grow outside of what they see at their company, or what has been traditionally talked about in culture and society. The Portfolio Life provides people who are looking for new ideas on how to grow their career an alternative approach about managing their career within the context of their life.

Furthermore, some people do want to advance in their career through getting a promotion, or getting to another role or level that suits their interest, but that certainly is not what everyone wants, nor is it the only way to grow. The Portfolio approach provides those individuals with more language for thinking about how they can grow their career.?

An opportunity for employees to manage risk through diversification

Part of why we diversify in finance is to manage risk, so we’re not overexposed in a certain area or class of investment. This concept can be applied to your career in the Portfolio Life. Instead of making a huge investment in one thing, investing in smaller amounts of a handful of things and diversifying allows you to run multiple experiments to see what you enjoy, and what works. And even if something doesn’t pan out, you still have other options to explore or double down in.

A chance to become more agile and responsive in your growth

Traditionally, many careers were looked at as long term investments with long time horizons. That is changing, especially as markets and industries continue to evolve, and forces in the future of work require continuous and constant change. By taking smaller bets or experiments, we can also get rapid and more iterative feedback. Instead of going down a path into a career for years or decades, we can learn through smaller experiments, and even test numerous paths and options versus just one.

A more diverse and inclusive way to retain and develop people

Oftentimes, inside organizations we look at growth and development in things that we see and that we can measure. For example, high-potential leadership programs, new manager trainings, or and leadership programs for new executives. While these are important, they often exclude a wide range of your employees, and then often frame career development and advancement in terms of promotions, programs, and policies. The Portfolio approach is something that can be used for each individual employee - by helping every single employee think about their own strengths, interests, talents and aspirations and finding them opportunities to use them in their work and non-work lives, you can provide a blueprint for a more inclusive and accessible way to promote growth of the whole human being, not just the ones who come through high-potential program.s

Language and frameworks for evaluating your relationship with work

Christina notes in our interview that we spend a lot of our day to day lives in our work, regardless of what we think about our job and career, the better we understand what we truly want out of our job and career, the more agency we can have in determining not just what we want to do, but what we truly want and need out of work. The Portfolio approach gives people the language and permission to think of ways to incorporate the things they love in their work, but also, outside of it too.?

If you are someone who the language of the Portfolio Life resonates with, I’d love to hear how you’re making it come to life in your job and your life.?

?? People Re-Thinking Talent and Career Growth ??

Interested in exploring more expansive ways of work, life and career growth? Consider following these experts on the topic right here on LinkedIn

• Christina Wallace - Christina is an author of The Portfolio Life, and her work around portfolio lives and careers is a new and interesting way to think about developing people.
• Ben Casnocha - Ben is the co-author with Reid Hoffman of the book The Alliance
• Julie Winkle Giulioni - Julie is a speaker, consultant and author, and her book Promotions Are So Yesterday offers a great new framework that companies can use to promote internal mobility and growth inside their organizations
• Edie Goldberg - Edie is an author and coach, and her book The Inside Gig provides a framework for how companies can think about promoting internal mobility
• Andy Storch - Andy is a Speaker, Author and Community Builder and the author of Own Your Career Own Your Life . His book is a great way to help your employees think about their career goals.
• Lindsey Pollak - Lindsey is a Workplace & Career Expert and the author of multiple books on career and workplace trends
• Gorick Ng - Gorick is a Career Development Expert, Speaker, and Author of the WSJ Bestselling book The Unspoken Rules.?
• Simone Stolzoff - Simone is a writer, and an upcoming guest on the Edge of Work Podcast. His book explores our relationship with work, and the concept of a “good enough job.”
• Lorraine Lee - Lorraine is a Career and Leadership expert with a focus on visibility, presence and communication
• Paul Millerd - Paul left the corporate route to pursue what he calls a pathless path. His book The Pathless Path has sold over 10K copies and he regularly writes on re-thinking paths to work and life
• Becky Lee - Becky is a Director at IDEO, and writes and shares regularly on topics related to career development, learning and workforce education.
• Marianne Matarese - Marianne is a Career Development Manager at Indeed, and regularly connects and hosts events with other professionals who work in the career development space.

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