What is your relationship with Work?
A recent LinkedIn post by a young entrepreneur emerged as the subject of heated debate and controversy. In his post, the entrepreneur speaks about throwing oneself into one’s work in their early 20s and working 18 hours a day. He adds that the flex that one builds early in their career would carry one through the rest of it. The entrepreneur was widely criticized for glorifying unhealthy work practices.
While we may choose to agree or disagree with what the entrepreneur had to say, what the incident brought to life was the changing relationship that people are having with their work and careers today.
The pandemic has given many of us time to reflect on our priorities in life and what really matters in the larger scheme of things. One of the things that many of us have been reassessing is our relationship with work and the place that it ought to occupy in our life.?
After a lot of thought on this subject, I have arrived at the following two hypotheses. (I have used the terms work and careers interchangeably.)
When we think about our relationship with work, a lot of it stems from what we might expect from it.
One of the most popular frameworks in this regard is the?Career Anchors Framework?shared by Edgar Shein, one of the founders of the field of modern organizational psychology. In this framework, he suggests that each of us has a particular orientation towards work and that we all approach our work with a certain set of priorities and values. He calls this concept our ‘Career Anchors’.
He defines eight distinct career anchors which are broadly defined in the image below:
Testing hypothesis one: Work/ careers mean different things to different individuals and occupy a distinct place in each of our lives
Each of us has a different career anchor or a different combination of career anchors that drive our choices and feelings towards work.?
For example, someone who is driven by?Pure Challenge, would not like to give up the opportunity to work on solutions to seemingly unsolvable problems or to overcome difficult obstacles. Novelty, variety, and difficulty become ends in themselves, and if something is easy it becomes boring.?
On the other hand, someone driven by?Lifestyle,?would not like to give up a situation that permits them to balance and integrate their personal and family needs with their career. They feel that their identity is more tied to how they live their total life and how they develop themselves rather than with any job or organisation.
?Testing hypothesis two: Work/careers could mean different things to the same individual at different points of their life
Research shows that Career Anchors evolve as one gains occupational and life experience.?
For instance, young professionals who have student loans or other forms of debt to repay might be more driven by?Security/ Stability?as an anchor.?Professionals in early stages of parenthood might wish to prioritize caregiving responsibilities and embrace greater flexibility and work-life balance. During this phase of life, it is possible that?Lifestyle?might emerge as a strong career anchor.
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As we progress in our professional and personal lives, we might have career anchors that become more enduring. Research also shows that once our self-concept is established, an anchor can be thought of as the values and motives that a person will not give up if forced to make a choice.
?Career Anchors in the age of disruption
An additional factor that impacts career anchors today are the environmental factors including the social, economic, technological, and political shifts experienced anywhere across the globe.??
?During the pandemic, many sectors and organizations became obsolete overnight leaving countless people unemployed. Many of us can still vividly recall reading earnest appeals for jobs on portals such as LinkedIn and Facebook. For many of us during this phase?Security/ Stability?was a critical anchor. We were grateful to remain employed.
?The IT/ITes sector has been witnessing huge disruption over the past few years with every organization/ industry vying for tech talent, specifically for tech talent possessing certain niche skill sets. Now more than ever before?Technical/ Functional Competence?might be a key driver for many technology professionals.
?Aided by technological disruption, comfort with remote working and flexible staffing models by employers, India is seeing a rising uptake in the Gig Economy which is expected to have 2.35 crore (23.5 million) workers by 2029-30. This has offered a great opportunity for individuals driven by?Autonomy/ Independence?and the resultant need to define their own work their own way.
?In Conclusion
Returning to the post mentioned at the beginning of the article. In his post, the entrepreneur extolls the importance of working hard early in one’s career. He saw this as well-intentioned advice for youngsters. The flipside could be that perhaps not all his followers viewed careers from the same/ similar lens. They might believe that identity is tied to one’s overall development as an individual.
?Simultaneously, his detractors might benefit from considering that what the entrepreneur might have been alluding to was that career anchors could shift depending on one’s life stage.
?Ultimately a career anchor is a useful model to refer to, to help us get a good sense of what drives us as individuals and gain greater self -awareness. We spend considerable amount of our life working. Given this reality it is useful to know what we expect from our work and therefore make wise choices.
Organizations can also benefit from using similar models to understand what drives their workforce. This could be a useful input for designing jobs and career paths.?
For those interested, there are several free online tools that can help determine your career anchors and how and whether they are being met by your current role.?
All views expressed in this article are personal.
?References:
Business Coach helping companies to grow profitably
2 年Yes. Many people look at work in a different way at different stages of career. Entirely personal. WFH has introduced a big change. Moonlighting is a term that is becoming more known. Relationship of companies with employees also undergoing change.
Leadership Assessments and Coaching
2 年A very well thought out article Vaishnavi. We have been exploring this and the change that is taking place because of demographic, social, economic and other factors. I think as economic security increases many might see work as purely transactional and switch on and off as they feel like. Where that security needs is higher work may be seen as a longer term engagement and may have emotional ties. Where people love what they do work is a fulfillment. The reality is that there is massive change taking place and both individuals and organizations need to find ways to make work meaningful and provide purpose as we go ahead.
Automotive Professional dedicated to helping industries reach their full potential. My cross-functional experience across multiple industries renders me industry-agnostic.
2 年Vaishnavi Chella I have also gone through that LinkedIn post . It's interesting to know about eight career anchors as well . People in their 20s have very limited clarity on those aspects . What a young entrepreneur has suggested is a very simple and focused way of addressing your career in the beginning. Paramount is what you should enjoy it by heart .
Societal and Environmental Capital | Climate Change | Sustainability | ESG | ITC Mission Sunehra Kal
2 年At one level the shift in career anchors is also aligned to Maslow's hierarchy. One key aspect that is shaping how the current generation is looking at career anchors is their assessment of the future context - self, work, profession and overall. In earlier generations, the view was of a stable future and hence anchors tended to play out over a longer time frame (a la Test cricket). Now the view is driven by a VUCA view and hence the view to compress the play of anchors over a much, much shorter duration. Earlier, one thought of retiring at 60, but now talk is of retiring at 40!!
Executive, Leadership and Emotional Intelligence Coach
2 年Vaishnavi Chella excellent article and very useful. I am forwarding the link to my coachees to help them understand their relationship between work and career, and to understand their priorities.