Are you ready to break free from the conventional career path and design a professional journey that’s tailored to your strengths and goals?
I recently chatted with Dr. Sharon Hull. Sharon is a primary care expert, academic, researcher, and executive coach with over 30 years of experience, and she’s the author of Professional Careers by Design.
Whether you’re just starting your career, shifting mid-way, or planning your final chapter, this transformative discussion could open doors you never imagined.
We dove into applying design thinking to career strategy, aligning work with personal values, and adapting to career changes in operations.
Laura:
It is an honor for me to introduce my guest, Dr Sharon Hull, author of Professional Careers by Design. Sharon has over 30 years of experience in primary care, medicine, academia, research and teaching, and an additional 12 years as an executive coach. She now guides professionals in finding clarity and purpose in their careers and navigating career transitions. Today, she’ll be sharing practical tips on how to use design thinking to build a career aligned with your values and integrity.
Dr. Hull:
Thank you so much for that great introduction and I’m delighted to be here with your audience. Thanks, Laura.
Laura:
We’ve got about 25 minutes, so let’s dive in and make the most of our time together. All right, so what is design thinking? And specifically, how does it apply to career strategy?
Understanding Design Thinking
Dr. Hull:
So many of your members of your audience will probably know that design thinking came from the world of manufacturing and people designing some amazing products. The idea is that you try something, you make it better, you iterate, you keep trying. Again, some people in your audience may know this as a PDSA cycle plan. Do study. Act where you take a problem, try to come up with a solution, study how well it worked, and then make it better.
The way that I apply this to career thinking is to say, your career is a lifelong project. You’re going to be working at this for your entire life. And I’m trying to give people tools to work intentionally around what they want out of their career and their life beyond their work life. So it’s the idea that there are choices. We always get to make a choice, even though the choices before us don’t necessarily look like what we really want. There is always a choice, and we get to make the decision. And if we don’t get it right, we can revisit the decision. That’s design thinking for a career.
Laura:
And you go into more depth about it in your book. I’m going to hold it up. It’s a great book. How does this book differ from other career books? There’s so many on the shelves out there.
The Unique Approach of Professional Careers by Design
Dr. Hull:
Oh, there are so many on the shelves. And I think there are a couple of ways this is different. Number one, it’s not meant to have you make a career plan. Three-year, five-year, ten-year career plan that I was taught to do when I was in high school and undergraduate many years ago. I don’t think works anymore. And so we need something that we can fall back on when the world changes around us, for good or ill. And I hope this book gives a model for how people can make decisions, no matter what happens, whether they’re happy where they are and want to get better, or whether they need to move on because something challenging has happened, or whether they choose to move on because somebody offered them the dream of a lifetime. There are all kinds of reasons people move around the workplace, and this is a guide that most people will be able to open it and find at least some assistance. I won’t say solutions, but assistance for most of the kinds of career decisions out there. So, it’s meant to be a lifelong tool. That’s the biggest difference, I think, from many of these.
Laura:
I have a few books, very few, that are ones that I go back to time and time again. I have sort of a massive bookshelf behind doors over there and downstairs. I appreciate how thoughtfully yours is organized and how holistic it is. And I wish I had something like this about a decade and a half ago.
Dr. Hull:
I wish I had had it.
Laura:
All there was that I knew of was What Color Is Your Parachute? That was the thing, right? And it just didn’t work for me. I don’t know if it was the layout or the way that I just processed information, but it was never a win. So, I appreciate the angle that you’re coming from with this.
Dr. Hull:
I came up through What Color Is Your Parachute, too? And I struggled with it, but I think it was more about me than it was about the book. It’s a great book for some people. What I found as a coach is I ended up coaching a lot of people who were making career transitions. And I kept thinking, I recommend books to clients all the time, but I kept looking for a book that, that would help them in today’s world of work. And I think the world of work has changed. I’m sure we’ll maybe talk about that a little bit later down the road. But I was looking for something that helped people, whether they were trying to get a handle on their lifelong trajectory, whether they were trying to figure out how to make meaning out of what they were doing, or whether they were in the nitty gritty of a job search. And this book does all three of those things. So, I hope it’s unique enough to catch people’s attention, and I really hope it’s the kind of book that people will dog ear and come back to at different times in their life.
Laura:
I get the sense that it is. Largely, my audience is comprised of operations executives. It’s not everybody, but that’s often, that’s probably who largely will be listening in today. Can you speak a little about the pace of career change in today’s operations world compared to previous generations? What’s changed? And maybe where do you think things are heading?
Generational Shifts in Career Expectations
Dr. Hull:
So that question I could pontificate for a long time, and I try not to do that. I’ll talk about generational change, but I’ll also talk about the change, I think, that’s happening within our current generation. I think when my parents were working, having a job for 40 years in the same company or the same organization, and getting a plaque or a gold watch or whatever the reward was at the end of a 40, 50-year career was the goal. That plus a pension. Right? And it’s not just operations people, but that’s most people in the middle and upper class, most blue collar, many white-collar workers of two generations ago.
I think with the economic shifts in our country, particularly in the 1980s, we began to see less corporate loyalty toward workers and the people who were growing up watching their parents get laid off in the eighties and watching all the economic pressures, sort of didn’t trust that there would be a 40-year job wasn’t happening for their parents. And these are the folks who became the sort of Gen Xers, Gen Y, Gen Z. And they don’t believe that there’s a 40-year trajectory for one company. That’s a fundamental shift, I think. I also think a lot of people talk about generational differences. I think people younger, I’m a boomer. I’m the one that the young folks look at and say, okay, boomer. And I try not to be that person. Chronologically, I am. I tend to behave a little more like a Gen Xer, but the Gen Xers don’t buy that about me.
So, what I think is that the people younger than my generation are really watching closely and they’re making decisions about what the agreements are that they will make about their work life. And they look at us and say, I’m not doing this the way you did. Not going to work that way. There is no loyalty on the other side. And I’m going to build my skills and build my repertoire so that I can work when I want to and how I want to and maybe even save enough. Be financially independent and retire early. There’s this whole fire movement, financial independence, retire early. That the folks younger than us really have as an aspiration to work is not their entire life. That’s a change that’s happening during my lifetime. But I don’t think the boomers are real comfortable with that. I’m making generalizations here. But what I think really has accelerated this is the pandemic. We watched real changes in how we looked at work, who was an essential worker and what it meant to be an essential worker.
The Impact of the Pandemic on Career Choices
It wasn’t necessarily a privilege for the people deemed to be essential because they had to go to work and that wasn’t necessarily in their best interest. But a lot of people started questioning, how do I want to spend my working hours if I had to stay home? And I can now use Zoom and I can, there’s all this technology, and I can work from anywhere I want, how and when do I want to work, and what matters to me about my work? I think those questions started and they continue to roll through professional people, which is really who my book is targeted toward, they tend to make change a little slower. And we’re here a couple years out from the pandemic. I’m not sure it’s over. I don’t subscribe to that, but I think we’re not in the crisis mode that we were. Professionals are now saying, okay, things are stable enough that I can make a move, and they’re looking, and they’re looking for different things than employers think they’re looking for. I’ve now heard only my own voice for a few minutes to give you a chance to. It is part of who I am now.
Laura:
Well, I’m nodding and smiling because, you know, my father worked. You know, he was, he went through high school. He was in the army. He went to a job, and that company changed hands a couple times. But ultimately he graduated. He retired in his sixties with a, see, they gave him at 30-35 years, they gave him a clock, a grandfather clock, and he was like, okay. And then they gave him a watch when he retired. And he’s like, I don’t need this anymore. And that, that’s not, that’s not the way now between how industry has changed, Covid, certainly. And just technology. To your point, there’s so many more things that are available, and there are also so many things that are no longer available or are no longer assumed about jobs that require travel or going into an office or anything like that. It feels like everything just sort of got flung in the air. And it’s interesting to see where it’s landing out.
My sense of your book, Professional Careers by Design, is about how important it is, given how many options there are, to be intentional, because you could land a lot of places and not necessarily get fulfillment out of that.
The Importance of Intentional Career Choices
Dr. Hull:
Right. There’s an assumption in this book that people can make good choices that are centered around their own values. That’s a core assumption of this book. And I think for my parents’ generation, it would have never occurred to them to choose their work life on that basis.
Laura:
Absolutely. And honestly, I’m a gen Xer. I wasn’t told to choose based on fulfillment either. And I wasn’t just told, but I determined early. I was like, no, I’m going to be independent. I’m not going back under anybody else’s roof. And it’s a different conversation now.
Dr. Hull:
It is a different conversation. This is where I give those generations younger than me a lot of credit because I think they get this on a different level. And maybe this book is a bridge between the generations about how we look at this. That’s one of the things I think I’m going to be interested to see whether it gets a life like that.
Laura:
So, I do want to get back to the book, particularly the concept of bespoke career design, which I think is also fascinating. How can you imagine that operations executives might apply this concept in this rapidly changing landscape?
Creating a Bespoke Career Design
Dr. Hull:
So, I’ll start by saying I chose the word bespoke very intentionally. It comes from the tailoring world of custom-made suits, primarily thought of for men in Europe. I decided to take that word because I just like the word and say, what if we had a custom crafted career that fit us? That’s where that word comes in. For operations executives, I think they have lived through whatever the pandemic meant to their industry. And there’s been a lot of moving around as supply chains, and everything else got shifted, like you said, just got tossed up in the air.
I think that this book can help people. Even in the midst of all that tossing up, they can say, okay, what’s my touchstone? And for me, in this book, it’s your top ten list of the things that matter most to you. If you can always make that list, you can always figure out how to make a good decision for you and those you care about.
The Top Ten List for Career Decisions
The way that I ask people to do that is make a list of the top ten things that matter to you. The only rule is it must have something personal and something professional on it. But there’s no right ratio of personal to professional. Just write down the things that matter to you when you’re done, take a look at it and ask yourself how you’re doing on getting those things in your life, and if there are gaps or things you want to change, you focus on making your next decision to get more of those things that you care about.
Now, when I ask people to do that, I ask them when they’re done, I tell them they don’t have to turn it into me because it’s not homework, but I’m going to ask them one question: What surprised you? And do you know, 75% of people, when I ask that question, say the same thing: The first five, six, seven items had nothing to do with work. Nothing. They were all personal. And that surprises people. But it gives them permission to step back and say, How could I choose a work life that maximizes these things that matter? And that doesn’t just apply to operations executives.
What’s unique for ops executives is that I think they are in a particularly chaotic time. We’ve been through the upheaval that the 2020 to 2023 kind of held with a pandemic, and now we’re in the aftermath, and nothing’s gone back where it was. And organizations are seeing the long-term financial ramifications of those changes. They’re coming in with layoffs, they’re downsizing, they’re merging, they’re closing. All those things are happening in industries where operational executives work. And I think they have a unique window on the chaos. They also have a unique window on making opportunity out of that, if they can have a framework to be intentional.
Laura:
Two things come to mind about the “ten things”. I get itchy about a list of ten things. And I really appreciate that you mentioned that the first several are personal. How do you advise people? So, I can imagine that there’s somebody right now, with a notebook or whatever digital equivalent, ready for their Trello list of the ten things. How do you reconcile it when there are a lot of things?
Dr. Hull:
The first thing I do once they’ve made a list is to say, this list is going to change. Okay? But for today’s decision making, here’s your list. You may rank order the things that mean the most or matter the most to you, but which one or two of them is really going to drive your decision making? Because my list might be: I want time with my wife and I want time to garden, and I want a good retirement, and I want to do work that has meaning in the world, and I want to be my own boss. Well, there are other things on my list, but that’s a pretty close approximation of my top five. That whole financial security versus time is attention. And so how do you reconcile it? And that comes down not to what job I choose, but how I organize my calendar for the day. And so, you’re rarely going to have all ten things on that list, but you choose what to focus on.
I take it a step further and I suggest to people, figure out who the adults and anybody over nine or ten years old in your life are and ask them to make their list, but not together. Do it separately, and then compare notes with all your stakeholders about what’s the top ten list for each one, and then figure out what the joint decision making is that needs to happen.
That may seem kind of touchy-feely to operations executives. Sometimes the decisions are about money. Sometimes it’s about geography. Sometimes it’s no, we’ve got a senior in high school. We’re not moving till they’re done. Or we have college tuition benefits. We’re not leaving this place with those benefits until everybody’s through college. There are lots of things that move to the top for a decision, but you still have a number of things that matter to you, and they change with the season.
They shift, and I suggest to people that they make a new list every year. They could do it on their birthday, they could do it on whatever holiday they choose to but be ready to make a new list when the world changes. And I have two examples of when I think that was really important.
One was on 9/11, and that’s been a while ago now, but that day, what mattered to people changed in a moment, right? And so that’s an example of a world event. An example of a world event that was very local, was the pandemic. And what mattered to people changed.
Laura:
Wow. Toilet paper mattered a lot.
Dr. Hull:
Yes! And I have to tell you, I didn’t go to business school. So, I didn’t know about supply chains and how they actually worked. I learned about supply chains. Toilet paper was one example. But it’s like, oh, there’s this whole mechanism out there that’s broken that I didn’t even know existed.
When the world shifts, you got to make a new list. In the book, there are five “hip pocket questions”:
- What’s your top ten list?
- Who are your stakeholders, and what’s their top ten list? What matters most?
- What matters to your company, the place where you’re working now or the place that you’re thinking about going to work. What are their top priorities?
- Are there any misalignments between one, two, and three? (Sometimes there are, and you need to make a shift.)
- What, if anything, are you ready and able to do something about in those misalignments?
If you have the answers to those five questions in your hip pocket at all times, you can make just about any career decision you need to.
Laura:
And if you don’t yet, that’s a great time to talk to a coach, a mentor, a trusted colleague.
Dr. Hull:
Yes. And it’s also a way to help young people figure out how to make sense of the work world. I think give them a tool and a framework that’s that simple. What are the hip pocket questions? Can you answer them? Use that to make your first career decision, and then you’re next. And then you’re next.
Laura:
Speaking of your next and your next and your next career decision, I’m curious about what advice you might have for operations leaders who are considering an encore career, if you will, or some sort of significant pivot a little later in their professional lives.
Handling Career Misalignment
Dr. Hull:
I see people pivoting, usually either at mid-career, kind of the second half of their mid-career, or toward the end of their senior career, as they approach what I call the capstone. And for Boomers, most of us go one time through that cycle of a career, early career, mid-career, senior career, capstone. I think younger generations will go through four or five times through that cycle. But people pivot when they realize that something is mismatched.
Remember the hip pocket questions? If there’s real misalignment and you start doing the inner work of what’s misaligned, you may find that it’s the profession that’s misaligned with you, or you that’s misaligned with the profession, or it’s the organization.
My challenge to your operations professionals is to be willing to ask yourself what really is behind any misalignment that I see. If you understand what’s the misalignment, you can understand more about what you want to pivot toward.
We can talk about pivots as getting away from something, but you’re going to be more successful in a pivot if you know what you want to go toward rather than what you’re getting away from. That’s probably my biggest piece of advice about pivots.
Laura:
I’m thinking about the conversation around the phrase misalignment. I tend to go into Where have you outgrown where you are? Often operating executives are really great at “MacGyver’ing” solutions. And it’s easy to sort of get dug in. Like, I’ve just got to make this work. There’s got to be some way to make it work. It must be. That’s what’s missing. And sometimes it takes a moment to go, oh, actually, I’m in a flowerpot that’s way too small for my skills, my experience, my passion, my interests. And so that can look like misalignment or show up like misalignment. It can show up a lot of different ways, but misalignment is certainly a big one of them.
Dr. Hull:
The reason I chose that word, and my word choice is often very intentional, even though people are really frustrated and sometimes in a very toxic situation, they are in distress. If you can think about it as misalignment, nobody has to be broken for something to be misaligned. It’s just the relationship between the parts that are misaligned has come to the end of its useful life. And when the relationship has come to the end of its useful life, if you can make your transition to better alignment, you don’t have to rupture the relationship unless it really is toxic. And you do need to set a hard boundary, and that does happen. You know that. But it’s a way to see the arc of your career as a series of stories. I did this for a season, and this was why it was a really good fit.
Laura:
I love the season concept. There’s a lot of grace in that. There’s a lot of room for movement and cycles.
Dr. Hull:
And there’s a lot of room to not have to blame anybody, yourself or the other side. It’s, the season has come to a close for this role.
Laura:
Well, thank you so much. I want to thank you so much for being here, here today. Sharon, it’s always a delight to have these conversations with you, and I want to thank everyone for joining us today.
Connecting with Dr. Sharon Hull
You can find Dr. Sharon K. Hull on LinkedIn or via the Metta Solutions website. Professional Careers by Design, is available on Amazon in paperback and for Kindle.
Four Steps to Gain Control of your Mind, Time and Career So You Can Love Your Work Again and Advance
For more great resources for operations executives, check out “Four Steps to Gain Control of your Mind, Time and Career So You Can Love Your Work Again and Advance”, a free PDF download.
Invitation to Share Expertise with Operations Executives
If you have expertise to share that you think would benefit other operations executives and would like to be a guest on a LinkedIn live session like this, please just connect with me and we’ll explore what might be possible and bring even more value to our community.
