Whose job is it?

Photo by Ad Thiry.

The jobs numbers look good. At least the ones in the US do. But then the Canadian small business report is very bleak. Record bankruptcies which wouldn't be so notable except that more than 90% of Canadian jobs are small business jobs. And inflation seems to be better. Ish. Our 8-year-old keeps asking about Marie Antoinette. It's unclear if this is related to the local grocery magnates testifying about price-fixing bread.

The economic news, particularly for our cross-border house, seems to be some mix of "it's going slightly better than you think" and "there is still cause for concern." At work, the question we've been getting in hushed tones is how one ought to think about a career against this complex economic backdrop.

Folks are quick to say, "I'm not actively looking. I'm happy where I am. I feel lucky to have a job. But..."

The sentence that comes next is the opposite of people don't want to work anymore. It's the opposite of lazy-girl jobs, lazy-boy jobs, lazy-non-binary jobs, quiet quitting, quiet hiring, or quietly deleting Slack from your phone.

But..."I still want to grow. I still want some stretch and some challenge. To feel like I'm making progress. And to feel like the various work experiences I've had are all building toward a thing. I want to be able to talk about work, not as a string of jobs I've done, but as a career."

They want to know if this is a reasonable thing to want. If these expectations are out of whack. And the question they don't ask but is tucked right in between the ones they do ask is this:

Whose job is it? Am I on the hook for figuring this out? Or is my boss? Or both? And if it's both, what does that even look like?

Your boss is trying to help you

But they have no idea what they're doing.

They sit in our program. Take notes on how to run better one on ones. Set better goals. Make sense of organizational strategy. And a whole host of other management things. But nowhere. No. Where. Is there more confusion than on the topic of career pathing. Everything about the discussion is upside-down.

If it helps to know it, your boss feels low-key guilty. They know you're waiting on a career discussion. They understand that it's part of what they're supposed to be doing. But in the midst of layoffs and hiring freezes and no backfill decrees, it's a super loaded topic.

What if my direct report demands a promotion or a raise? Do I tell them how close we were to missing payroll last month? Or will that cause a panic? See? This is why it's better to just leave it alone. Any time you touch career discussions it's a recipe for disaster.

If you're waiting for your boss to help make sense of your career, it might be a while.

Nobody's career makes sense

Like, fine, maybe 10-20% of the people you meet are doing the thing they expected to do, in the way they expected to do it, a decade ago. Maybe they went to school for that thing. They may love it, or they may be deeply unhappy. But at least they have a story that makes sense at parties.

For everyone else, though, it ends up being kind of a mess. You take a job that you think you'll love but it isn't at all what you thought it would be. You wallow in that for a few years until a former colleague tells you their new place is way better, and you jump ship. The new place is better in general, but your direct boss is a nightmare so after eight months you take a remote job that sounds more boring but it's 20% more money and a title bump. It's fine. You dodge a few layoffs, but three years into it you haven't really made any progress, the place is sort of a revolving door, and your friend who recruited you to the last job is now a VP. Your third boss in a year, let's call them Sam, hops into a one on one with you and, trying their best, asks, "So, what do you really want from your career?"

Like, from a cold start, what are you supposed to say, right? Meaning? A sense that my work has substance and integrity, and reflects the striving, creative, multi-layered person that I am instead of stuck in meetings I don't need to be a part of? Seriously Sam are you sure you want this smoke? Did you see what they did to our man Elmo?

So you say something about wanting to understand the path to Director. And Sam answers but sort of vaguely because you haven't exactly been standing out as an internal candidate. Which is fine because you're not actually excited about Director anyway, except that it's more money and, like, what else are you supposed to say?

We're willing to put a lot of things at the feet of managers in this little newsletter of ours. But fundamentally, this one is not Sam's to carry. Yes, a good boss can be an incredible ally and sponsor and door-opener and opportunity-spotter. But only if they know — only if you know — what actually matters to you.

What if you don't know what you want?

If you have a clear answer to the question of what matters, and where you want your career to go, we're cheering for you. But the good news is that even if those topics have you drawing a complete blank, you can figure it out. Try this just to get started.

Think of three times work has felt great. Could be the same job or separate ones across different industries. Could be a single afternoon or a months-long project or a side-hustle. Why were they great? Be specific. Was it about the work? Was it about the people? What about them? The biggest lie about career planning is that it's a flow from one title to the next. Titles are a descriptor, not a predictor, and in a career conversation they can box in your thinking. So forget titles for a minute, what work actually feels good to you?

Okay and with all that work-could-be-good-if-it-looked-like-this juice flowing, here's a second question to sit with: who has a job that seems cool to you? Again, forget titles or stature or whether you're tall enough to dunk — who is out there doing work you'd love to be doing, and what is it about that work that seems so great?

Maybe, maybe you get to the end of this exercise and your answer is that you want to be in your current org, in your current department, you just want to be a Director. That's great! That's a really righteous outcome and that clarity will change how you engage in your work, and in your next conversation with Sam. But maybe the answer you reach won't be nearby. Maybe it's not even in the same ballpark, or the same sport. That's good, too! Once you've got a direction you're looking, you can start to measure and reduce the distance between where you are and where you want to be.

And no. We are not here for that "if you work at something you love you'll never work a day again" line. We love our work and we promise we work hard at it. But we're also not willing to accept that quiet quitting a lazy job is as good as it gets. It's okay to want more than that. You're allowed to want your work to be meaningful, and joyful. It just isn't gonna get there without your help.

— Melissa & Johnathan