We begin our careers at a disadvantage, novices in a world of professionals. Over time, for most of us, our understanding of our potential increases.

But just as has happened to those who have gone before us, it fails to keep up with our increasing capacity for value creation.

The unfortunate result is that, after a few years of work, most of us are pursuing careers contorted to fit a mixture of realities and limiting perceptions.

After a decade or so, it’s common to be experiencing issues such as:

• Diminishing enthusiasm for a career path that, over time, has become less attractive
• Feeling locked in by ongoing commitments and the need for a certain level of income
• Finding our marketability seemingly restricted by others’ perceptions regarding our careers
• Frustrated by entrenched management practices that have robbed us of motivation
• Lacking perspective on our alternatives
• Having made mistakes that have compromised our options and our confidence to pursue them
• Feeling trapped, unable either to advance in our current organization or to access a more attractive position elsewhere

Issues such as these coalesce to create a pervasive disempowerment that will only worsen over time unless it’s addressed.

Few jobs provide the deep fulfilment possible in a career. Experiences such as creation, the achievement of motivating goals, and freedom to become the beings we want to be, are necessary for our wellbeing.

If you’re ready to build a better life through your career, you’ll need to enlist the power of a strategic approach. Several terms are key:

• Strategy is the essential bridge between purpose and planning. It’s an integrated set of choices that enable an entity to plan effectively by establishing priorities and accepting the sacrifices required for their achievement. Unfortunately, it’s usually confused with planning and/or tactics. This blocks achievement of desired outcomes. To harness strategy, we must understand how it differs from planning and tactics, and place it ahead of both:
• Planning is the necessary bridge between strategy and tactics. It determines how we will access and deploy the necessary resources to implement our strategy. It’s not strategy, and strategy is not a plan.
• And Tactics are the step-by-step methods we employ in implementing our plans.

Career Strategy and Life Strategy

Even when the above concepts are understood, strategy is all too often used with the assumption that it can validly be separated from commitment to the greater good.

Fortunately, such thinking is increasingly being called into question at the level of organizations.

And even more so at the level of individual careers, where it naturally begins.

Our definition of career strategy acknowledges the connection between career and life success:

Career strategy is a single, integrated set of choices that collectively position an individual to plan for, create and sustain career success aligned and integrated with life objectives.

1. Strategy. Defined as a plan of action designed to achieve a long-term or overall aim. For this, we need:
2. Clarity. Because we work to create the lives we want for ourselves and others, we need to recognize that clarity, in the context of a career, begins at the level of knowing what we want to manifest in our lives.
3. Tactics. Tactics are the short-term actions taken to implement a strategy. Unfortunately, the two terms are often confused with each other. Tactics become dangerous if used for any purpose other than to support a strategy. If we mistake tactics for strategy, then we won’t have a strategy.

The consequences are described in the saying, usually attributed to Sun Tzu:

Strategy without tactics is the slow route to victory.

Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.

Navigating the Maze

Our career journeys usually extend over many decades. The territory is complex, and the pace of change is extraordinary, and accelerating. While our careers profoundly affect our life satisfaction and the lives of those who are near and dear to us, we influence the lives of the people we work with and others in the wider world.

In short, strategy, and the career clarity it should support, deserve our deepest attention.

Are You Ready for a Strategic Approach to Your Career?

Career strategy is mostly developed and implemented outside the comfort zone. It’s here that we build the awareness, skills and habits that will take us to where we want to be. Because its power and the path to developing it are not widely understood, most people – and even most executives – never adopt a genuinely strategic approach to their careers.

Many effective leaders don’t realize how valuable their willingness to commit the effort required, makes them. Often because they’re introspective enough to see their own limitations and are burdened by impostor syndrome, they focus on those limitations. But effective leaders are always in short supply.

If you are the kind of person who is prepared to take the hard actions required to build a truly strategic career, then you’ll enrich your life immeasurably by doing so.
And this will benefit all those whose lives your leadership touches, starting with those who are nearest and dearest to you.

Showering them with material benefits is at best a poor substitute.