It’s the beginning of a new year, and you may be wondering which direction to take your career in in the next few months. As a matter of fact, this may very well be the question you ask yourself at the beginning of every year. As much as you may be excited (or not) at the prospect of a clean slate of time ahead of you, you may not be sure of the best way to strategize your career going forward. As a working woman and mom, you may not even have the time to devote to thinking about it as you juggle all the plates you have balancing in the air. Career strategy? How about a strategy to get through last week’s laundry?
The reality is, not having a career strategy in the long run, may leave you without a sense of purpose in your career, along with the feeling that you’re somehow stagnating professionally. In the worst case scenario, it may end up hurting your overall career prospects. This is even more significant as a working woman who may already be at a professional disadvantage as compared to your male counterparts as a result of the various gender-based biases experienced by women in the workplace, from the gender pay gap to the glass ceiling or concrete wall for women of color, to cite a few.
If you’re reading this and nodding along, you certainly are not alone. It took me decades to understand the importance of strategy as a crucial component of our careers, especially as working women and moms. I remember once when I was still in the corporate trenches, one of my mentors telling me: “It’s as if they put all the men in one room, and told them the rules of a game we were never told about.” By “we”, she meant professional women in general. Years later, I realized the rules of the game she was referring to, were really ways to strategize one’s career. Yet, I could not help wonder at the time: “How about the value of hard work? How about endlessly proving yourself by going above and beyond? Wasn’t that supposed to be the only career strategy?” Right? Wrong…
For many women like myself, hard work, endless dedication and unending service are often confused with an actual career strategy. Actually, it’s a mindset that has been tacitly imposed on women for the longest time, falsely rewarding us with the praise of self-sacrifice and devotion in and out of the workplace. So much so that working hard at work and working hard at home became the norm, until it wasn’t, that is…
With the advent of the work revolution during and after the COVID 19 pandemic, many women have been redefining the meaning of work in their lives and careers. From the “Great Breakup” to the “she-cession”, women have begun and continued abdicating the heavy crown of thorns that is underpaid, inequitable work and unpaid household labor, in favor of increased equity on the work and home fronts. Many women are choosing to start their own businesses as an alternative to underpaid careers riddled with gender bias and inequities. Others are opting for flexible schedules allowing them to strive in all their roles and capacities. Others yet again are stepping completely out of the career path, choosing to refocus on themselves and their families.
What this also means as women’s work is being reinvented, is that women’s career strategies also have to be reinvented accordingly. It’s no longer about emulating a masculine model of work, founded on a patriarchal system relying on women’s free labor and on the paradigm of trading time for elusive and unsustainable success. Nor is it about abandoning purposeful ambition in favor of choosing the safe harbor of inaction and passivity. Instead, it’s about aligning our career strategies with the priorities and values guiding us as women in and outside of the workplace.
Here are three steps that may help:
- Outlining your priorities
Have you been operating on everyone else’s priorities and timetable but your own? I know I did too…Too often, it’s all about what’s urgent at work, what needs to get done on the home front, and everything else in between. As a result, it’s easy to have an entire career and life based off of priorities that are not yours.
What are your work priorities? What areas of your career are most important to you? What are your personal and collective priorities? How can these be aligned in a way so as to feed off of and serve each other?
As I started outlining my own career and personal priorities, I realized flexibility in my various roles as mother, partner, and professional, as well as being able to practice my writing and teaching craft, are at the top of my list. This has led me to orient myself toward a career that offers me a flexible environment, and encourages me to practice my craft.
- Eliminate or delegate unpaid or invisible labor
One of the biggest obstacles to women’s careers is the “extra” fluff that gets in the way of the true, purposeful work. From excessive and unwarranted amounts of invisible and unpaid service work, to the unseen mental and household load, there are too many silent and frustrating obstacles in the path of women’s work.
Part of devising a successful career strategy as a working woman is addressing these obstacles. Reducing or streamlining the amount of service work is one way to do so, whether through less volunteering or bringing increased attention to the need to share the service load in the workplace. Having honest conversations followed by intentional action at home to help share the household labor and mental load can also go a long way. Underneath it all, ridding yourself of the guilt of not doing it all is also essential.
- Applying the rule of 80/20
The rule of 80/20, also known as the Pareto rule, essentially dictates that 80% of our efforts produce 20% of our results. While this rule is most often used in business, it can be extended to any area of work or life. From a career perspective, it is a call to focus on the 20% of inputs that will produce the most, and best, results.
What are your most valuable skills that produce your best results at work? Are you most gifted at writing, public speaking, networking, research, analysis, or any other area? Can you capitalize on those skills to guide and direct you towards the areas and projects that you would be most successful at and prioritize those? Conversely, can you steer away from those areas and projects that do not use your best inputs and as a result do not produce your best outcomes?
Applying the rule of 80/20 in my career and life has been, and still is, much of a work in progress. While it’s been challenging to focus more on my most impactful skills and best outcomes, as opposed to desperately trying to do it all, it’s certainly paying off. One of the greatest side effects is the lessened amount of stress going into managing work and life. The greatest benefit yet is in being aligned with my purpose, and using what I have to do the work I’m supposed to do.
All in all, the right career strategy can be one of the most important tools for working women and moms to thrive in and outside of work. Devising a powerful strategy is about being aligned with one’s vision and values, setting the appropriate priorities, focusing on the best returns and reducing invisible and unaligned work. While it’s certainly not an easy feat, and very much a work in progress, it’s also one of the most profitable career and life investments.
How are you strategizing your career at the beginning of the year?
The Corporate Sis.
