ANGELIQUE ELECTRA
I’ve been fascinated and even passionate about the psychology of career development for decades. How do we use and choose “career” to maximize our gifts, talents and passions? How do we make career decisions? How do we know what we want and how to get there? How do we know what fulfills us or satisfies our deepest values? How do we know enough about ourselves to make good career decisions?
This is a big topic, so this post intends to brush off a bit of dust on a career theory created many years ago by Edgar H. Schein, a renowned and prolific MIT professor, as well as a leading organizational psychologist and specialist in corporate culture. He wrote the book and associated assessments called “Career Anchors.”
I bought the Career Anchors book decades ago (during an earlier career transition period) and it’s been sitting on my bookshelf patiently waiting for my return, long forgotten. Recently back into exploring my own next career phase, a premier executive coaching company referenced it as a key tool in exploring career development. So I pulled it back off the shelf and got reacquainted, and lit up like a Christmas tree — as though I had struck brand new, un-mined gold.
There are many career assessments that look at personality types, interests and strengths — including Myers-Briggs, Enneagram, Gallup Strengths, DISC, the Holland Codes, and the Strong Interest Inventory, among many others. There are few, however, that can hone in on what really drives our career choices and decisions (and how we work best). Identifying deep motivations generated by our own unique set of values becomes more urgently important than focus on just our substantive interests and personality traits. In other words, it’s about what matters most to you with respect to work. If you’ve had significance working experience, you likely already know what matters most, but putting it into words to guide the course of future decisions can be challenging. The good news is that it’s a matter of clicking your own ruby slippers to get your own insights. The Career Anchors model is one of the most naturally intuitive tools available. Its simplicity is stunning.
So, here’s the concept, which was prompted by some actual studies conducted and reviewed by Schein. A “career anchor” comprises one or more factors about your work that you are not likely willing to give up, in the face of choice or change. It is a set of work characteristics, circumstances and dynamics that give rise to your view of your “best you.” They are driven by key values such as need for challenge, expertise, security, freedom/independence, order, creativity, leadership and caring about others. When you recognize your Career Anchor, you can make sense of every work or job you’ve ever had, and where you want to go from here.
Schein’s 8 Career Anchors are:
Technical/functional competence (Subject-Matter Expert) – You like being good at something, developing expertise and being valued accordingly as an expert. You enjoy being appropriately challenged and then to use your skills to meet the challenge, and doing the job better than almost anyone else. Acknowledgement is a big part of your incentive.
General managerial competence (Corporate Climber) –You are more closely aligned with vertical career pathing, and are not tied to a particular subject matter expertise. There is a drive to be broadly multi-functional, achieve through others, and synthesize information from multiple sources as the basis for decision making. You are motivated by increasingly higher job promotions and salary levels.
Autonomy/independence (FreeStyler) – You crave personal freedom — to do your job your way, during your own best times and with very little oversight of supervision. You enjoy being left to your own devices, and to be able to act without needing too much direction, and not getting muddled with rules or conformities.
Security/stability (Stabilizer)– You tend to seek stable and predictable positions and activities, which enable you to plant yourself comfortably, taking few risks. You tend to be trustful of your organization, and count on the rewards long term loyalty will bring. You may be content with the same functional position.
Entrepreneurial capability (Entrepreneur)– You are motivated to create projects and business based on your own ideas, often creative and stimulated by a talent for ideation and brainstorming, as well as innovation and invention. You like to launch and move on to other projects or opportunities, handing off the baton to others to implement and manage. Success is measured by the financial opportunity, and getting bored signals a departure for greener pastures.
Service/dedication to or for others (Helper) – You feel dedicated to deep values or causes that value and seek to help others, whether within or outside of the organization. Your work is characterized by wanting to be helpful or make a positive difference in the lives of others.
Pure challenge (Super Hero)–You are driven nearly entirely by a need to be continuously stimulated by new challenges and tasks which test your abilities to solve problems. If there is no challenge enough to engage you, you will likely leave the job.
Life style (Lifestyler) – You experience work as one essential piece of an integrated life, and as your highest value, you honor all other aspects of your life as needing to be in balance with work. You will take your vacations and ensure you have balance and focus in other important areas of your life. If you cannot achieve that, there is great stress.
A Career Anchor operates as a main driver — that which could cause you to change a job or seek something more in the job you have. It becomes an undeniable need you must have to be motivated and satisfied in your career. We all may have more than one Career Anchor in combination, but there is always one that weighs substantially more than the most that sets our career theme (hence, the notion of “anchor.”)
If you have been working for a significant time, and consider these anchors, you may be able to chart your past course in terms of your primary anchor and how it has operated, and how you want to navigate your future. If you are at the relative beginning of your career, you may already sense or intuit your motivational triggers among the Career Anchors, in which case you have the anchors as additional tools to guide you as you make new career decisions. If you are currently frustrated or dissatisfied in your career, they can provide guidance as to why, and the ability to consciously incorporate the elements of your Career Anchor into your career.
The Career Anchors can also begin to identify a sense of purpose and locate your passions.
We all have deeply embedded values and beliefs, in ourselves and the world around us, including our place in it. When we can step back and examine our own Career Anchors objectively, it can free us up to make informed, optimal choices, with a sense of spirit and excitement. Being internally aligned is what we all strive for with our careers and the organizations and people we serve.
The Career Anchors allow you to distinguish among the many valid kinds of career expressions and help you to fully appreciate your own career brand, and the specific ways you want to contribute your talents.
Too often, for instance, the Corporate Climber Anchor has been traditionally perceived as the more desirable (leadership) model and can make the other models seem less ambitious or desirable. Yet this Anchor has specific underlying individual values that generate this career expression, and that not all of us define success as a title, salary and broad scope of authority over others. The engineer who delights in solving impossible problems that lead to significant corporate outcomes is just as validly important. The customer service manager enjoys making the customer experience the best their organization can offer. Claiming what is important to you enhances your ability to be successful — according to the definition of success you set for yourself.
What you can do now:
— Review each of your jobs and roles, and assess from 1-10 your level of satisfaction. Identify the extent to which there was a strong operation of your primary Career Anchor. Where there was dissatisfaction, can you pinpoint, using the model, why?
— Whenever you changed jobs or roles, or went to new organizations (or formed your own), what were the factors that caused it?
— Consider roles or jobs you turned down. Why?
— Think about your current job. What Career Anchor element (or lack thereof) would cause you to remain or leave?
— Assess whether you can see themes over the course of your adult life running in your careers, and your career decisions.
— If you’re restless or dissatisfied now, consider the Career Anchor-related questions you want to ask yourself as to why, and what would make your role more satisfying?
Schein suggests a number of ways to hone in on your Career Anchor — through a simple assessment or by engaging in an interview with a counselor or a coach. The latter allows you to describe the dynamics of your career experience in a profound way. If you want to take the authorized Career Anchors Assessment, it’s available for a fee. A free version adapted from the Career Anchors is available if you want a directional indicator. Schein’s book, “Career Anchors” (a quick, easy read), includes an outline of interview questions, can be purchased at amazon.com.