Episode Transcript
I keep encouraging you to have a vision for your engineering career. You’ve been working on it little by little.
And your vision becomes clearer every day.
One thing that concerns you though is how it compares to the mission of where you work.
You feel a disconnect between your career heading and your organization’s mission.
It feels like you have to choose one or the other.
And you’re wondering if it’s even possible to work toward your career goals and the goals of the company at the same time.
But the two are not mutually exclusive.
How Your Career Vision and Your Organization’s Mission Can Support Each Other
What if your goals and aspirations could be aligned with your company’s mission?
What if key parts of your career vision could actually increase mission success?
And what if aligning with your organization’s mission could actually enhance your career progress?
This is not only possible but probable.
Your career vision defines what you want to do and who you want to be. Just like the organization’s mission defines what it’s setting out to do and how it wants to be known.
Your vision focuses on the contribution you want to make in the world. And the mission focuses on the difference the organization proposes to make in the world.
Your vision is a statement of what you’re all about as an individual engineer and leader. And the mission is a statement of what the organization is all about as a business or establishment.
Assessing how you and your organization can support each other is a useful exercise. And can optimize the benefit to you and your career while you’re working for this employer.
What You’ll Gain by Aligning Your Engineering Career Vision with the Mission
To be aligned with your organization’s mission is in your best interest. For example,
- You’ll move forward at a better pace because there are fewer differences or clashes or disputes to deal with.
- More opportunities will be open to you because your goals are in sync with the organization’s goals.
- You’ll be more engaged because you resonate with the mission and you have a high level of interest in it.
- Your ideas will have a greater chance of being implemented because of your engagement and motivation.
If you’re not engaged and there’s no alignment, it’s not worth your while to stay where you are.
It’s a waste of your time. And your career will suffer for it.
Total alignment would be ideal – at least for your employer. But it would be rare for your vision to be 100% aligned with the mission.
Nevertheless there are parts of you, parts of your vision, that can be.
Even if your end goal is to work elsewhere someday. Even if you don’t plan to stay with the same organization for your entire career.
It’s in your best interest to seek that alignment.
To get as much alignment as you can. So there’s synergy with your work and leverage for your career.
The Language of Alignment in Your Engineering Career
There’s a simple process for aligning your career vision with your organization’s mission.
An easy way to start is from your energetic center.
Since your vision is also created from your energetic center, it gives you a common language for alignment.
Your energetic center is where your values, skills, strengths and passion come together.
Assess each of these elements against the mission. And this will tell you where to place emphasis in your work.
Skills and strengths are widely applicable and can be flexed to align in some way.
Values and passion are not as “flexible.” i.e., it’s easier for your values and passion to be out of alignment than it is for your skills and strengths.
Passion doesn’t have to be 100% aligned. But the more passion that applies, the more aligned you will feel.
Values should be as aligned as possible. If your values don’t fit the organization’s, alignment will not be possible.
4 Steps to Aligning Your Career Vision with the Mission
Here are the 4 basic steps to determining alignment between vision and mission.
The steps are simple but the assessment is not necessarily easy. For more help with the alignment questions you can sign up for a strategy session with me.
- See where your values fit. And target work where values are aligned.
- See where your skills fit. And apply your skills where there is alignment.
You’ll also learn new skills you need to learn. And many of these will become valuable. Especially skills that are transferrable regardless of tech area or product.
- See where your strengths apply. And do work that involves your strengths.
In general your strengths stay pretty much the same. Don’t spend too much time on your weak areas because they’ll probably stay weak for you. Let others handle that work.
- See what parts of your passion can align. And apply it to optimize your engagement and motivation.
After you complete these 4 steps, you know (ideally) what work to focus on and what work to avoid. Or at least put low on your priority list.
And by using this information to generally guide your work, you’ll get the most benefit to you and your career in your current work situation.
Don’t force your work if there’s too much misalignment. Instead go where your energetic center is taking you. You’ll have to do this to reach your potential. To get to your dream career.
In the meantime, project how far you can go with your organization. See how you can make the mission yours. And get the most out of this segment of your engineering career.
Next time on Her Engineering Career Podcast we’ll look into some of the unknowns in your career and how to navigate them. You won’t want to miss Episode 135.