Demystifying Career Dilemmas

What are the most common dilemmas one has in his career? Is what the author of the book, “The Right Choice-Resolving 10 Career Dilemmas for Extraordinary Success”, by Shiv Shivakumar, Author & Group Executive President, Corporate Strategy, Aditya Birla Group; discusses in a session recently conducted by Tata Literature Live! Business Shastras.

The panellists of the session were, Shiv Shivakumar and Hema Ravichandar, Strategic HR Advisor, in conversation with Aparna Piramal Raje, Writer and Columnist: Business and Design. Corporate Citizen brings you the excerpts of the discussion

Aparna Piramal Raje: Your book mentions ten dilemmas, which of these is the most common? Why is it so common and how would you go about resolving it?

Shiv Shivakumar: I have listed ten dilemmas in the book. The most common one believe it or not at every level, be it junior level, middle level or senior level, has to do with money. Money is possibly the most common denominator of all dilemmas of anything. Why is it so? I think at a junior level it is a hurried aspiration-I want to have a holiday vacation, I want to have a car, a gadget; things like that. Secondly, right or wrong; people are using money as a measure of self-worth and I think a lot of that has to do with what we get fed in the media. We see in the news that the salary of a CEO is so much, looking at some of these astronomical numbers people are saying if he can do it, why can’t I do it? Hence, I think that is a measure of self-worth.

Thirdly, as a measure of risk mitigation-any risk you take, for instance, a change in job, a change in the industry, a change in a role etc. As long as there is money, you want to justify it to yourself. I’m doing this for the company but you know what, if money will take care of the risk that you are taking so that’s the other reason I think so and finally, I think at middle and senior manager levels, money is a dilemma or an issue in terms of providing-what do I provide for my family, what do I provide for my elders, what do I provide for my kids, what do I provide for my retirement, that’s the big one which I see. I’m not a great believer in that. The Beatles said many years ago that ‘Money can’t buy you love’. I think money is a head jug and sorrow it doesn’t buy you happiness it doesn’t get you happiness. I think money is the mother of all dilemmas for people.

So, how does one resolve this dilemma because in the book you have said that particularly young people should look at companies where they maximise their career and their learning rather than trying to multiply their earnings.

If you look at careers of individuals, most of the savings that you generate are after 40 or 45 years of age until then, you’re actually breaking even and having very little savings. So, many times I tell this to very young people, why are you changing jobs for 5000 rupees when you’re 27-28 for what? You’re not building a runway for take-off and that’s why you’ll find a number of people who’ve changed jobs or multiplied jobs in the first 10-15 years of the career very few of them actually achieve take-off velocity and then they are in the small company circuit or then they become independent. If you look at successful people with successful careers they have had reasonably long stints in some good companies which gives them that momentum and take-off. If you don’t do that it is not worth it. So I would say build experience, build learning capability, build reputation, and money will follow you.

What is the recommended tenure for young people wanting to join a company because that’s actually one of the other very common dilemmas how long should you stay with the company?

Hema Ravichandar: As far as the tenure goes, honestly, it is not my position to say what is the exact number of years one should stay with a company. But I would put it with certain guardrails. The first guardrail is learning, and if you are learning you will stay in the job; if you are resumable, if you have career resilience built-in, if you are constantly improving your skills, knowledge and aptitude, I think you stay in. I’m reminded of Tom Peters who very rightly looks at a ten-year experienced person who’s stepping off a company. And somebody tells him he’s there goes ten years of experience and he says is that one year multiplied 10 times or is it 10 new years; so I think career resilience and learning is very important in deciding whether you’re staying in the job or not. The second point is you have to love it. I’m going to hazard a guess but every one of us spend more than two-thirds of our waking hours on the job and if you are not loving it then what are you doing.

One of the quotes from Steve Jobs which I recently came across was, “If you’re in a job make a great show of it make a great output of a great product out of it and you can’t do that unless you really love it”. So, I think loving is important so learning, loving and the third is that you know Shiva has mentioned this very beautifully in his book. He says a career is lived forward but understood backwards usually once you are done with it. I love that quote. It’s a bit like planning your marathon and while it’s not easy to do it there are some small ways to do it as you go through it and that is having small milestones and large milestones. I think you should stay in it so learning, loving and lapping the marathon - these are my three key takeaways on how long you should stay in a particular job.

"If you look at successful people with successful careers they have had reasonably long stints in some good companies which gives them that momentum and take-off. If you don’t do that it is not worth it"

-Shiv Shivakumar

You’ve mentioned in the book that one should never leave a company when one is unhappy with it but yet the instinctive reaction for most people to leave is when they’re unhappy with their bosses, that’s actually an extremely common phenomenon. So how should one resolve this dilemma? If you’re working for someone who you really don’t like but you do want to get out of that situation should you or should you not?

Shiv Shivakumar: Let’s ask ourselves what are the attributes or dimensions of unhappiness at the workplace. Let’s start with what I have noticed. Unhappiness is at its highest at the annual appraisal time. If you believe you have done better than what your boss of the company thinks then annual increment time is another time when you are unhappy, so appraisal happens by let’s say the month of March-increment happens by the month of June-July. You’ve planned everything based on a certain assumption that your increment has not happened so you get unhappy then you are unhappy because of your peer group-your peer group has a certain behavioural pattern either they include you or exclude you, whatever it is, and you are unhappy because of your boss that’s one of the reasons.

You believe your boss doesn’t understand you or your boss is not your sponsor or he’s not backing you that’s the other reason. Next, you don’t get a promotion when you think you deserve it and invariably all of us think we deserve the promotion well before we got it-so everybody has that same fatigue.

The next is you’re not put on a specific project in the organisation which are high profile projects and you feel left out—that is the other reason. Sometimes you might feel peaked and want to leave because you’ve not been sent for a coveted training program which you looked at and which is an important training program. Finally, culture, you get to know the culture of the place within six months. If you are telling somebody I don’t like the culture after spending five or ten years, then that’s surprising to me because you should have figured out the culture etc. in six months’ time.

Now, why is it easy to say that I’m leaving because of the boss and that’s an answer which everybody loves to hear. Nobody will challenge you on that so it’s very easy to say that. Here’s what I would say going back to my first point about appraisals. Let’s assume you have three decades of career; you won’t be outstanding or excellent in all 30 years, you might be excellent in 10 years or maybe you might get brilliant in 12 years. You might get good in another 10-12 years; you might get average in maybe five to six years. For example, take Roger Federer and Novak Djokovic, each of them has played 31 Grand Slam Finals and each of them has won 20 Grand Slam Finals in the 11 where they didn’t win it, which was a winner takes all. They finished second but it’s not that they didn’t give it their best but it was not their day. So, similarly, when you look at your appraisal or increment or promotion etc. think of Federer and Djokovic and say there will be some years which I will not get.