What is career success? For many years professional success and a managerial career were synonymous. The success in your profession was measured in the size of your company car, the views of your office, or the credit of your card. Even today, many continue to see it that way.
However, more and more of us are professionals with a new concept of success based on a job that we like, with a level of autonomy that allows you to combine results and learning. With a set of emotional rewards that go beyond status and salary.
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Not all of us aspire to be managers.
We have broken the vertical growth paradigm where the company shows you how good you are and how much it values you, making you boss. There are many reasons for not wanting to grow as part of the company’s structure.
Seeing that the best does not always come up or how a good employee is spoiled by becoming a bad boss may have helped open our eyes.
Having experienced firsthand how the valuation of your bosses has dropped by asking for a “reduced” day that does not reduce your contribution at all but allows you to get to school by saying “no” to the 7 o’clock meeting is undoubtedly an experience that brand.
Each one with its reasons. The truth is that more and more of us are senior professionals who feel comfortable in horizontal promotions, who seek professional growth based on the challenge, interdisciplinary work with other groups, or the strengthening of our agenda.
We are looking for more flexible models.
Because when you advance in your professional career, you decide less and less on the salary/activity binomial. You begin to take more into account the context in which you should develop that activity.
And if you have to choose between arriving every day at 10, without time for children, or for the gym, or the piano, without stopping or when you sleep or closing at a reasonable time, reasonably combining work, hobbies, and family or friends, Well, you choose the second.
Most of us who have families choose this model. Many women feel very alien when we see identifying female empowerment with quotas in managerial positions. But we are not the only ones.
Increasingly, childless men and young men of both sexes eliminate a managerial career from their career growth goals.
A new ideal work paradigm is beginning to emerge, including learning, work-life balance, autonomy, personal time, and social impact.
Increasingly, we aspire to flexible work, based on a relationship of deep trust with the company that allows us to give the best of ourselves… without being literally exhausted.
We all work for money.
But once our needs are covered with a reasonable salary, the aspiration will not grow in the paste. Intellectual challenges, social recognition, appreciation for the added value, delighted customers, or simply a good atmosphere begin to tip the balance.
We no longer see a part-time job as crappy. Not being autonomous is synonymous with being a professional outcast. We are becoming more and more interested in freelance collaborations or in micro-entrepreneurship with individual professional projects that, who knows, end up feeding us.
In few countries, unfortunately, the offer of these activities and the support to carry them out is still timid, but everything will come. Because they are already doing it in other countries and because there is an increasing demand for professionals who would not look down on switching to that model in exchange for gaining control over their careers and lives.
Earning money is ceasing to be a social mantra. In an increasingly diverse society, where digitization makes sense of “weirdos,” we feel freer and freer to write our own definition of success.
Redefining our ambition for different ways to ensure a decent income and successful professional development. We probably don’t all want that abrupt transition from stressed manager to burger vendor.
What is career success for you?
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