The Academy Of Business Strategy - Reactive Career Management
Research from the leisure industry tells us that only 7.5 per cent of members who join a gym actually attend on a regular basis
. The remaining 92.5 per cent still pay their annual or monthly membership fees but do not attend regularly.What is even more interesting is that members who make up this 92.5 per cent have no regular attendance patterns at all. They may attend regularly for a month or two and then lose interest. In six months time they try again for a month or two and then once again lose interest. By contrast the members who make to the 5 per cent who do regularly attend are likely to have consistent exercise plans which they implement methodically and improve gradually.
We receive similar feedback from the hospitality industry. Hotels groups report that those hotels with more extensive leisure and fitness facilities regularly tend to achieve higher bookings than those hotels where such facilities are lacking, but the interesting thing is that we still find that only 12 per cent of hotel residents then actually use these facilities during their stay.
As we mentioned earlier research conducted on Harvard students 20 years after they had graduated showed that 5 per cent were earning more money than the other 95 per cent combined. The only difference was that 5 per cent had clear practical career objectives before studying and were merely using the Harvard programmes as vehicles to identify the correct strategies in order to achieve their career objectives. The remaining students were enrolling upon these programmes because they wanted to achieve a Harvard qualification in the hope that this would somehow lead to greater career prospects.
This latter objective is perfectly reasonable of course and would invariably be achieved to some degree, but the fact that 5 per cent of these students will still achieve more money than the other 95 per cent combined is an enlightening statistic. The difference is nothing more complicated than having a good career management strategy in place and being capable of implementing it.
All of these statistics from various different industries are ultimately really telling us the same story. The majority of people tend to be reactive by nature, in other words, they do things only when they have to and tend to wait for circumstances to jolt them into action. This trend is also reflected within companies too. Some of the biggest global companies can still at times be managed and directed by a reactive management team.
This merely reflects human nature of course. We have seen it so many times where a company has achieved significant growth, secures significant market share, only to squander this achievement by then becoming complacent.
Developing an effective career management strategy is rather like developing an effective diet. Crash diets simply do not work. Indeed they tend to be bad for our health. We may lose some weight in the short-term but it will invariably all go back on when we lose interest and go back to living the way we were before we started the diet. All that we have achieved by doing this is putting our bodies through harmful and unnecessary stress.
Sustainable weight loss is achieved only by introducing a positive and permanent change of lifestyle. The emphasis here of course is on the word "permanent".
Studying is very similar. Those students who have not studied since they left university and are considering enrolling upon a programme maybe 10 or 20 years later, will always find it much harder than those students who have always committed 10 per cent of their time towards ongoing self-development ever since leaving university.
So we have learnt that the majority of people are reactive by nature. This is in itself no great surprise, but perhaps the extent of this complacency, as illustrated within the statistics above, is the most disturbing factor. You can to some extent understand complacency creeping in at times with exercise, diet, leisure and studying. We are after all none of us perfect. But it is still somewhat surprising and disturbing that so many of us appear to be complacent with the development of our own careers.
Our career, after all, is about survival and prosperity. It directly affects our quality of life. Money and success do not in themselves buy happiness, but they certainly help. The biggest cause of negative stress is caused by the feeling that you are not in control.
Consequently not being in control of your own career development surely constitutes one of the major causes of stress and inevitably poor health too. Proactive career management is not just about being able to earn more money. It is about achieving a better work-life balance, achieving a better quality of life, spending more time with your family and improving your health. The fact that 95 per cent of the working population are prepared to leave this entirely to chance is amazing.
In reality most individuals only tend to think about their career development when they are forced into doing so by some form of emergent change, such as redundancy, a lack of promotion prospects, a disagreement with a work colleague perhaps, or a sudden recognition of a lack of personal achievement when compared to our peers.
We then tend to put in a disproportionate amount of effort in over a short period of time until the problem we have identified has been resolved quickly and then the sooner we are able to fall back into our comfort zone, commonly referred to as complacency, the happier we will be.
We all know of course whether we should consider ourselves to be part of the 5 per cent proactive category or the 95 per cent reactive category. Recognizing and actually admitting that we are probably in the latter category is for many a challenge in itself. We all like to consider ourselves to be successful and we all consider that we work very hard too, but career management success should be measured solely by our achievements, not by how hard we might work.
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