Careers

Careers: Attractors, Bifurcation Points and Bull Durham

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Does luck more than judgement drive our careers?

This week, we’re staying with the idea of career choice but are going about as far as away as you can get from Holland’s career congruence and person-environment fit — so hold on.

In the 1988 film “Bull Durham,” aging minor league baseball catcher and slugger Crash Davis (Kevin Costner) complains to Annie Savoy (Susan Sarandon) about the inherent unfairness that she, rather than he or Ebby Calvin LaLoosh (Tim Robbins), gets to decide which of the two will receive her personal favors and coaching mentorship for the season. He asks her, “Why do you get to choose?… Why don’t I get to choose? Why doesn’t he get to choose?”

She replies, “Well, actually, nobody on this planet ever really chooses… I mean, it’s all a question of quantum physics, molecular attraction, and timing. Why, there are laws we don’t understand that bring us together and tear us apart.”

Organizational writer Gareth Morgan, in his Images of Organizations (Sage, 1997) explores the use of nine metaphors to examine ways of considering organizations. One of those metaphors, “flux and transformation” (see chapter nine) presents us with four “logics of change,” embracing all of the ideas to which Annie alluded — and much more.

Morgan’s second logic of change, “shifting `attractors;” the logic of chaos and complexity is particularly interesting. Though this book was written with regard to the relationship between organizations and their environments, it’s fun to layer some of these ideas onto individuals and their careers. As we discussed last week, the applicability of choice when considering careers is open to question. A great career fit based on congruence may or may not exist. If it does exist, it may be difficult to discover — or its competitive nature may exclude all but the most skilled and talented. It may be a career that’s gone in 20 or even 10 years, or it may require the careerist to play a role that doesn’t seem quite as attractive a few years down the road.

So, then where else might we look in making career choices?

Drawing from the theories that inform Morgan’s second logic of change, here are some ideas for you ponder.

Chaos theory posits competing attractors – i.e. circumstances or “contexts” that pull a non-linear system toward one situation or the other – for example, away from an existing context and into a new one. In order for the pull to resolve in favor of a new context, a system gets pushed far from its equilibrium into an “edge of chaos” situation, where “bifurcation points” (forks in the road) emerge. These bifurcation points represent different potentials. Inevitably, some sort of new order will emerge, though it cannot be predicted or imposed. Morgan advises that the implication for managers is to “shape and create `contexts’ in which appropriate forms of self-organization can occur.” New contexts, he continues, can be created by generating “new understandings of a situation or by engaging in new actions.” Further, in non-linear systems, it only takes very, very small changes at critical times to trigger “major transforming effects.” Anyone, he continues, who wishes to change the context in which he operates should search for “doable, high-leverage initiatives that can trigger a transition from one attractor to another.”

This is all very esoteric, but what it might really come down to for the individual is being on alert to recognize situations in one’s employment context where competing attractors have the potential to create “edge of chaos” situations. If there is a practical lesson here – other than continually scanning the horizon of one’s employment context – it might just be to think small instead of thinking big.

Here’s a personal example, which only in retrospect makes sense – as I certainly had no idea what I was doing at the time… When I was downsized (made redundant) in 1993, the company I worked for worked very hard to provide helpful support to those of us who had been displaced. It staffed and opened a full-time outplacement center, provided a generous severance package and gave us two weeks to vacate. I had planned to use the career center – but first, went around the building leaving handwritten notes on the doors and desks of people I knew, advising that I would be available to help with projects, if needed, until I figured out what I was going to do. (Broad-based work solicitation wasn’t permitted within the old context). Well, I only made it to the career center once — because that one small series of note-leaving acts resulted in a deluge of consulting work that launched a new career. The downsizing had created an “edge of chaos” situation that led to a new context – one in which my skills could now be used for the benefit of the organization. Through naïvete and uncertainty, I had somehow navigated a bifurcation point in a way that has worked out pretty well – at least so far. I’m a little embarrassed to be using this personal example because there was such an element of luck involved — and this good fortune is not something I take for granted.

Just please take the following away: If you and your career are verging on an edge of chaos situation, are there small actions that you can leverage into major transformations?

If anyone has thoughts or examples, please share.

Till next week. All my best,
Jan

Morgan, G. Images of Organization. (1997). Thousand Oaks, London, New Delhi, Sage.

Article source: http://www.roymogg.com/careers-attractors-bifurcation-points-and-bull-durham/

5 Simple Steps on how to get started with Coaching

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What if you discovered how to get started making massive money from your coaching program easily? Here are 5 simple steps to get you started.

Step 1 – Help your clients to solve their problems.
Step 2 – Be absolutely honest in what you are providing them.
Step 3 – Win their trust and establish yourself as an expert in your niche.
Step 4 – Make your coaching interesting and interactive.
Step 5 – Solve their most pressing questions to get results.

Here are step-by-step details that you can apply quickly and easily…

Step 1 – Help your clients to solve their problems.

To make massive income online from your coaching your main goal should be to help your clients to solve their problems. All you need to do is help them out and be reachable when they are in need. Give them one-on-one support and this will make sure that they are always motivated to stay subscribed to your coaching program. Honesty is the key to massive coaching success…

Step 2 – Be absolutely honest in what you are providing them.

You have to be absolutely honest with your clients and tell them exactly what you can provide out of your coaching and what you cannot. Reason being, they are paying you big money and they will surely expect something more from you in return. Therefore you have to make sure to specify exactly what they will be getting in terms of products and your personal time. Trust and relationship is the key to massive coaching success…

Step 3 – Win their trust and establish yourself as an expert in your niche.

If you are planning to start your coaching program, you have to be sure that you establish a trust factor with your visitors before you go about promoting them your coaching. This is because no one online will be able to shell thousands of dollars for your coaching without knowing and trusting you as an expert in your niche. Therefore make sure that you setup a system wherein your clients are forced to trust you and then you can softly promote your coaching at the backend. The more interesting will be your coaching program, more money you will make…

Step 4 – Make your coaching interesting and interactive.

It is absolutely important that your coaching program is interesting. You can do this easily by making your coaching session interactive and by allowing your clients to participate in your coaching call. The easiest way to do this is that you can tell your clients to ask you questions as soon as you are done with a particular coaching topic; then you can discuss the solution with your client. Question and answer session will make you big money out of your coaching…

Step 5 – Solve their most pressing questions to get results.

Make sure that you setup a teleseminar in your coaching program where you provide a question and answer session for your clients. All you have to do is conduct a weekly teleseminar specifically for your coaching clients and allow them to throw questions on you. Their questions will provide you a bunch of ideas that will allow you to setup your next group coaching call.

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Of Earth Quakes and Careers

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The part of the U.S. where I live was roused from its collective sleep in the wee hours of Friday’s pre-dawn morning by an earthquake that measured 5.2 on the Richter scale The Richter Magnitude Scale and lasted for more than 30 seconds. What was so different from this one and previous others was the intensity — and the fact that there was time to wonder whether it was going to stop, get worse or maybe even escalate into the “big one” that is long overdue here in the Midwest.

It was a little unsettling. But amazingly, there were no personal injuries, though some people narrowly escaped harm at the epicenter, a small community that is about an hour north of where I live.

As one of our local TV stations was already doing its morning news run, coverage was immediate – and calls and e-mails from throughout the region quickly pored in to the media. All had a common theme. People were reporting that their loved ones from nearby or far away had felt and heard it, too. Aside from the realization that a single phenomenon could be experienced simultaneously hundreds of miles away, such events are unique in other ways. Instantaneously, they capture and define a moment in time. They also evoke an immediate and unchallenged awareness of whom you need to call, whose well-being you hold dearest, and whose voice and frame-of-reference you most need and want at that moment.

These are “strong” ties.

You might wonder what this has to do with careers or career theory — and you would be justified in asking. Strong and weak ties are concepts that have been defined and studied — and proposed for further study to help us understand how careers unfold and advance. They are particularly meaningful in considering networking and job-finding.

Emotionally, you and I might think of strong ties as those that we hold with the people who are most important to us – families, best friends, even pets. But in the career world, we can think of strong ties as the connections we have with the people who are most like us, who are part of our world day-in and day-out. An example of a strong tie might be the editorial staff of a newspaper. Reporters and editors work late into the night under pressure to get the facts right and out there on time, night after night, week after week, year after year. At the end of the evening, they meet at a local pub to chill and recount a post mortem on what it took to get the job done.

On the other hand, weak ties are different.

An example of a weak tie might be someone you worked with 10 years ago and now e-mail once a year just to stay in touch. Both of you now work in different occupational sectors than the one that you once had in common. Another example could be two people who serve on the board of directors of a local not-for-profit organization. One is a banker, the other a hospital administrator. Except for regular board meetings, the two have little outside contact; but they’re well-enough acquainted to stop and chat if they meet by chance in public.

Which kind of tie do you think might be of greater benefit to your career?

Think of “strong” ties as “redundant” ties, and you can see where an argument for the diversity suggested by “weak” ties comes from. Ibarra & Deshpande (2007; in Gunz & Peiperl, 2007) write, “weak ties are argued to be more valuable since they act as bridges among diverse networks and bring new information not available through redundant ties in close objective networks.”

They go on to report that the empirical support for the value of weak career ties is strongest for “finding a job” versus “other outcomes such as promotion and salary. (e.g. Boxman, et al., 1991; in Ibarra & Deshpande, 2007; in Gunz & Peiperl, 2007).”

Notice the mention of “networks.”

Ibarra & Deshpande say that “networks of relationships” are the “social resources as well as social contexts in which careers take shape.” So let’s think about this for a minute… You’ve just been downsized and need to find new employment. Your first thought might be to query the people you work with every day (strong ties) about possible opportunities elsewhere. But the “weak ties” argument mentioned above suggests that you might get better results by mobilizing your weak-tie network — if you have one. If you don’t have one, you can ask your strong ties to approach their strong and weak ties on your behalf, but that can get tricky… because it requests third parties to spend their social capital on people whose skills and work ethic they can’t actually vouch for. (We need to talk about this in a future column).

But I digress… so back to the point.

Job seekers: Get your own network – and make sure it includes plenty of weak ties. If you don’t have a network, you can start building one through short-term volunteer projects that involve team work and meeting groups of people — people whose jobs, interests and abilities are very different from yours. There are also organized networking opportunities; but I have to wonder how much good it really does, for example, when women go to a networking group luncheon and sit at the same table with people they already know.

Yes, I know, we are talking about moving beyond one’s comfort zone here — but will a little anxiety really be all that bad? And don’t take your best friend with you because it will be too easy to cling to him in retreat. The idea is to forge new acquaintances, so get out there and dance.

A couple of other points need to be brought in here:

One is a term – “homophily” – that I was unfamiliar with until reading about it earlier this week – before the earthquake, actually. “Homophily” refers to the degree of demographic and identity similarity of individuals who regularly interact with one another. (Ibarra, 1993; in Gunz & Peiperl, 2007). Mayrhofer, Meyer & Steyrer (2007; in Gunz & Peiperl, 2007) report that “homophilic reproduction” and “reduction of opportunities” have a tendency to be linked. In other words, if we continue to associate only with people we know, people who are like ourselves, people we feel comfortable with… then we are reducing the possibilities (career and otherwise) that may be open to us in the future.

The second point comes from Weick (1996; Thomas & Inkson, 2007; in Gunz & Peiperl, 2007), and it has to do with context. Think of “context” as the circumstances you begin to explain when starting an answer with, “Well, it depends.” Weick describes strong and weak “situations,” rather than strong and weak “ties;” but there may be a caveat for us here. A “strong” situation is one that is highly constrained. The careerist doesn’t perceive a great deal of freedom to choose her actions. A “weak” situation has few constraints. The “actor” is free to move about at will. An example: You work for a rigidly bureaucratic organization in which it would likely be a career-ending move to bypass your supervisor and request an appointment with the company president to tell him about a great idea that you have for a new product. However, if both you and the president of the company get downsized, the constraints are off. You can approach her without fear of anything more than embarrassing yourself. This is a “weak” situation.

Thomas & Inkson interpret Weick as stating that “career outcomes can be powerfully enacted by their career holders in an environment relatively free of constraints…” but in strong situations, “perspectives encouraging individual enactment may be limited.”

So the lessons put forth for your consideration today are:
1) If you don’t have a network of weak ties, please get busy and start building one.
2) Before you start using those ties, pay attention to the degree of constraint in your environment – i.e. whether you are acting in a weak or strong situation.

And, I guess, if there’s a third piece of advice this week, it is this: Get under a doorway or a desk if there’s an earthquake.

Jan

Want to know more?

Primary ReferencesGunz, H, Peiperl, M. (2007). Handbook of Career Studies. Thousand Oaks, London, New Delhi: Sage.

Ibarra, H, Deshpande. (2007). Networks and identities. H. Gunz & M. Peiperl (Eds.) Handbook of Career Studies: Thousand Oaks, London, New Delhi: Sage.

Mayrhofer, W, Meyer, M, Steyrer, J. (2007). Handbook of Career Studies. Thousand Oaks, London, New Delhi: Sage.

Secondary References
Boxman, E, De Graaf, P, & Flap, H. (1991) The impact of social and human capital on the income attainment of Dutch managers. Social Networks, 13: 51-73.

Ibarra, H. (1993). Personal networks of women and minorities in management. A conceptual framework. Academy of Management Review, 18 (1), 57-87.

U.S. Geological Survey. (Accessed April 20, 2008). The Richter Magnitude Scale. U.S. Government Printing Office. Abridged from The Severity of an Earthquake, a U.S. Geological Survey General Interest Publication.
The Richter Magnitude Scale

Weick, K. (1996). Enactment and the boundaryless career: Organizing as we work. In M.B. Arthur & D.M. Rousseau (Eds.), The boundaryless career: A new employment principle of a new organizational era (pp. 40-77). New York: Oxford University P