I gave a talk on my book 'The five myths of career building' ( published by Macmillan) to NIPM, Mumbai last month. The audience was HR managers and executives.
I had planned to cover at least 3 myths of career building during my two hour talk. However, I could cover only one myth: the myth of how employees use goals to build their career. Many participants shared their experiences of how goals mislead more than direct, how they are retrofitted to the past actions, how seemingly 'goalless' actions lead to a channelised path which later may be explained as well directed, how goals are meant for uni-skilled individuals, and how multi-skilled individuals in corporate world find this strategy of goal setting ineffective to build their careers. At the end the participants decided to have a one full day long talk at a future date, instead of hurrying up the 'talk'.
The host at the end summed up career managment's relevance to HR in a very insightful manner. He said " Career management is all about sustaining performance over a long period of life. And if HR is all about enabling employees generating and sustaining performance, how can HR not get involved in career management?"
Career management, as I have discovered, is about managing the interactions between work-life, personal- life and people-life. An organisation therefore has to 'enable' employees to manage their work-life while also helping employees negotiate the intended and unintended impact of people-life and personal-life on their work-life.
In earlier days, the organisational life and personal life had clear cut boundary. Today that boundary has got blurred due to many changes: advent of email and mobile means that even a holiday of employee can be intruded under emergency situations, 'globalised working' of 24/7 at different timings mean that one has to talk with a client at 11 pm IST, women working alongside with men means that lot of personal chores have to be finished during office hours and so on. All our lives are collapsing into one 'whole' , and therefore even career management is about managing the 'whole'.
