Your Leanings Can Impact Career Progression

Make sure you know in which direction you want to go.

Depending on your variation of early childhood education, you may be familiar with a particular nursery rhyme, its short unattributed variation below:

“For want of a nail the shoe was lost;

For want of a shoe the horse was lost;

For want of a horse the battle was lost;

For the failure of battle the kingdom was lost—

All for the want of a horse-shoe nail”

The conversation this month is about leanings. Or what some might more aptly call values. I regard leanings as our personal culture. The way we are around our inner selves, sometimes silently, sometimes not so silently.

When talking about leaning(s) in this month's newsletter, I want it to sound like the homophonous version of “Lean In”, the ubiquitous phrase taught to countless women as a way to make it into the C or E suite. The cute sounding phrase that appeared to work, until it didn't. As many women found out in first person, it can quite be hard to lean in well when you're bearing the care-giving weight of a child with special or complex medical needs. Not that there are things that the movement didn’t get right. I am a huge champion of negotiating and speaking up and going for gold when you can. Because as Nigerian parents would tell us when we were growing — “all those people doing X, Y, Z do not have two heads on their shoulders (mostly in relation to academic achievements, as that was typically what it was all about for them).

Knowing Your Leaning Helps You Build a Career Development Blueprint.

If I had to paraphrase the beginning stanza of the rhyme above for career progression, it would go:

“For want of a value, the north star was lost…

Cheesy? Sure. But there have been worse rhymes. I know because I’ve received plenty of mandated school-craft Mother’s day poems over the years from my child (bless his heart).

Yet, this line is in order, especially for those of us in healthcare or education (speaking from direct experience). Many of us came into the helping professions with one singular goal; to help people. Probably never gave a thought at the time to:

• what kind of companies/systems (are their missions, visions and practices compatible with the kind of person I am?),
• the kind of team (what kind of people do I envisage working with?) and
• the location (is the job located in the kind of city that appeals to a person like me?)

When you are an immigrant, or a person who checks off many points off the adverse childhood experiences scale. You are mainly seeking and working toward a better life and standard of living, you generally do not think of these kinds of questions.

You need adjacency and actual experience living and working in spaces to be able to sit back and think about which way we lean and where we want to go.

But, if we pay attention to the journey, we would have seen certain markers that let us know some of these things intuitively.

The goal this month is to help speed up that process for those who may be in the early to mid-stages of their careers. Taking out time to think about where and how you lean can help you stay course or change direction if need be.

Since we are in election season, I’m going to borrow some terms here. Similar to knowing how you lean, whether red or blue, if you are able to clarify and articulate your values regarding work and what you expect to contribute to a workplace and what you also expect from a team and a workplace. You can in turn delineate your boundaries (and never have to resort to any type of gerrymandering simply for career progression votes or points).

The issue with work comes in when people try to insert their personal preferences as a rule of thumb. Or even try to get people to lean their way as opposed to following the rule of law (in this case, employment laws and other aspects of civil rights and anti-discrimination policies and procedures).

While, anyone can work anywhere they like in a free country, an individual who leans a certain way who deliberately goes to work in a private organization that has declared their values and what they stand for and then wants the system or whole organization to change for them is an example that comes to mind. The saying “Know Before You Go” would be applicable here as anywhere else.

Some Things to identify, determine, resolve as you move.

1. Who You are
2. Whose You are (for those with spiritual practices)
3. Why You Are (working where you are currently.
4. Who You’re Working for (some people who understand purpose work understand that it’s not always a physical boss they work for and besides, unless they own the company, bosses themselves move to other jobs or get switched out all the time)
5. How you are (This is more about personality, knowing this allows you to work on strategies that can help you influence and engage without getting burnt out).

Think about anything else you need to know before you climb?

About the Career Acceleration Precepts (CAP) newsletter:

A monthly LinkedIn newsletter designed to provide early to mid-career pharmacy and healthcare professionals with tools and ideas for career advancement. CAP is curated by Dr Otito Iwuchukwu, CPTD, organizational psychologist, pharmacist-scientist, author, consultant, and career strategist. As a certified professional in talent development and career advocate for multi-passionate healthcare professionals, Dr Iwuchukwu helps individuals cultivate personal cultures of belonging while putting their gifts and strengths to use in work and in life.