Senior Management
Mapping Your Journey: Avoiding the Road Going Nowhere
With more and more layoffs affecting all types of businesses, many managers are focused on keeping their jobs or quickly finding new ones. Mapping out a 10-year career plan isn’t likely to be a top priority in this economic environment. Wharton Professor Ian MacMillan, however, says that this could be a powerful opportunity to take a realistic look at who you are, what your capabilities are, and how you might shape, with your family, a realistic specification of where you would like to be 10 years from now.
In Wharton’s Advanced Management Program (AMP), MacMillan introduces participants to a mapping exercise in which they create a business profile of themselves 10 years hence. The participants then obtain frank and open feedback from their study teams about where their profile is realistic and where not, and any blind spots they need to be aware of as they pursue their charted course.
In times of duress we are inclined to cling to past, 'comfort zone' behaviors, but such past behaviors could merely compound problems. If you aren’t flexible about your future, then you will keep on doing the same things that got you into a mess in the first place.
Ian MacMillan, The Dhirubhai Ambani Professor of Innovation and Entrepreneurship; Professor of Management; Director, Sol C. Snider Entrepreneurial Research Center; Faculty member, Advanced Management Program
The intense nature of the AMP program provides the ideal context for participants to form networks and build close relationships with their peers. The candid feedback that participants receive during the career-mapping exercise is based upon what they have learned about each other during the five-week program. Participants challenge each other to weigh difficult choices and look at how their decisions will affect not only their career but their family. The exercise gives the group the invaluable opportunity to see themselves through the lens of their executive peers from outside of their industry, business discipline, culture, and geography.
This type of career mapping “can get participants to realize that they are in a rut that is leading them to the wrong future, and that they should broaden their perspective on who they want to be in 10 years,” says MacMillan.
MacMillan, who also is academic co-director of the Strategic Thinking and Management for Competitive Advantage program, notes that having a broader perspective is even more important in the current global economy. “In times of duress we are inclined to cling to past ‘comfort zone’ behaviors, but such past behaviors could merely compound problems. If you aren’t flexible about your future, then you will keep on doing the same things that got you into a mess in the first place,” he says.
Examining where you are currently in your career and where you need to go in the future should also involve thinking about how family members will fare as you pursue your career decisions. “As participants go through the mapping exercise, we insist that they think about what happens to their family,” says MacMillan. “So on your march to greater glory, should everyone else go to hell? We say no. What does your family think? What are they proud of, and what do they regret? It breaks open these self-imposed limits on where we want to go in life. If they do the exercise right, resilience emerges from having gone through the exercise.”
Mapping out your executive journey for the future can actually be necessary for survival today. Envisioning where you will be in 10 years involves planning the steps that will take you there, which may be the very actions that you need to survive the current economic downturn.
Clearing the Path Ahead
When Gonzalo Vera wrote his 10-year profile during the AMP program in 2001, the managing director of Schindler Elevator Company in Argentina imagined himself flying high in different senior management positions not only in China, but also at his company’s headquarters in Switzerland.
It wasn’t long after Vera completed Wharton’s AMP program in 2001 that his 10-year plan became a reality. In a move from Argentina to China, he became the director of product line management for the Asia/Pacific region of Schindler. And then early in 2009, he again accepted a new position as corporate certification officer at Schindler headquarters in Switzerland.
“The feedback from the mapping exercise helped me realize that to succeed in a global competitive environment I needed to develop some new capabilities. And I realized that being open to moving to different countries and cultures was completely necessary,” Vera says. "When you are able to 'fly high' and envision your future like that, your group can help identify soft spots that might get in your way. You can then work on those issues and clear out the path ahead of you."
Considering New Paths
Going beyond his comfort zones to take on new challenges isn’t new for Vera. In fact, the first “watershed” moment in his career came when he was hired to work in sales and marketing for Schindler in Chile. When he was first offered the job, he thought the person hiring had been looking at the wrong resume. “I had never sold anything in my life at that point,” Vera says. But the company recognized that Vera had what they wanted in a salesperson. He accepted the job and ended up discovering his passion and aptitude for sales.
Two years later, the offer of a managing director position in Argentina required that Vera move to a new country. Since then Vera has stepped outside of both comfort and time zones and moved with his family to Hong Kong and Shanghai, China.
“I’m from Chile originally and a natural career move for me after working in Argentina would have been to return home to Chile. But I had been working in rapidly growing markets with huge challenges. If I had returned to Chile, I would have lost the opportunity to tackle all of those challenges,” Vera says.
Moving within an organization to take on different types of jobs requires developing the necessary proficiencies for each new assignment. “With each new job you acquire more skills, learn how to adapt better, and build resilience,” Vera notes. In his case, moving from country to country gave him an invaluable asset in today’s economy – a first-hand international perspective.
Of course, gaining a global view of the world is not without its costs. Vera is married and has six children. Three of them had to remain in Chile to complete their studies while he moved his wife and youngest kids to a new country. “In addition to splitting your family, you have the challenge of adjusting to new cultures and new environments. It’s one thing to say that you can accept the changes, but making the adjustment is not always easy,” Vera says. "Mapping out your executive journey for the future should be a family exercise," he advises.
Focusing on People
Wherever Vera has worked around the world, and regardless of whether he’s been in sales and marketing, operations, or management, one priority has remained constant. The most important factor in translating his 10-year vision into reality has been his focus on the people around him.
“When you work in different environments and cultures, people issues should always be on top of the agenda,” Vera remarks. “Your success or failure will ultimately be in their hands.”
This people-first approach is of particular importance in Vera’s current HR position. “After almost 30 years in operations, sales, and management, I am now leading a global project to train and certify all technical-level people in the company – more than 25,000 people worldwide,” he says. “People were always at the top of my agenda, but now I have the opportunity to do something with employees worldwide and have a positive impact on the business.”
Balancing Work and Life
Vera’s commitment to making a positive impact required first finding an appropriate work-life balance so that he could achieve a higher level of productivity. “Before I participated in the AMP program, I was a workaholic,” Vera says. “After experiencing the work-life balance sessions at AMP, I realized that my productivity could be higher if I could find the right balance and then transmit that to the people I worked with,” he says.
The AMP work-life session includes an exercise that requires participants to add up the hours spent at work, and those spent with family. Vera found that reducing his work day by just one hour – or 10 percent – would mean a 25 percent increase in the time he could spend with his family. “Even small changes can have a big impact,” he says. “We are not machines. We have careers that can span 20 years or more, so it’s important to find the right balance.”
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