Member-only story
Anchoring your career
I’ve been thinking about personal values and how they relate to careers. The motivations we have and the choices we make as we progress along our chosen career paths are sometimes called Career Anchors. These can change as we develop because what is important to us at 20, 30, 40, 50 etc varies. It’s a good idea to review your values every so often to take stock of how they have changed.
One way to get clarity on your own values is to rank them in order of current importance. A simple list of values could be:
- Personal growth
- Challenge
- Independence
- Creativity
- Leadership
- Achievement
- Collaboration
- Integrity
- Security
- Balance
How would you rank these factors in order of importance to you? Ideally you might want all of them, but what feels most important right now? What are your top 3?
Then try comparing them to your current career (and life generally!) Are your current circumstances in line with your values? Where are the disconnects? This can be a useful exercise for team members to do regularly in order to identify what they want to aim for in future. It works well as part of career development conversations.
My top 3 are Integrity, Personal growth and Creativity. In forthcoming posts I’ll discuss how I plan to leverage these in future career choices.
