Timestamps

00:00:00: Introduction
00:00:50: Dorie Clark
00:03:51: Reshaping Dorie Clark
00:06:32: Security and stability
00:07:55: Mindset barrier
00:09:50: 20% time
00:12:21: When to find 20% time
00:15:59: Relationships
00:18:26: Infinite horizon networking
00:20:17: Remote working connecting
00:23:34: Dorie's career advice
00:25:43: Final touches

Interview Transcription

Helen Tupper: Hi everybody, you're listening to the Squiggly Careers podcast.  This is a weekly podcast where we dive into the ins, outs, ups and downs of your working life and try to help you with your development and support you to take action.  We are driven by a mission to make careers better for everyone and the weekly conversations that Sarah and I have are one of the ways in which we do that.

Today, I'm not actually joined by Sarah, instead today I'm joined by a guest and the guest is Dorie Clark and we're going to be talking about how you reshape your role.  There are a few different elements that we'll cover in the conversation, a little bit about your skills, a little bit about your relationships, a little bit about the job that you do today; but if you haven't come across Dorie, maybe let me start by just giving you a bit of an introduction to who she is and what she does.

Dorie Clark was named as one of the top 50 business thinkers in the world by Thinkers 50, I think I came across her work in Harvard Business Review, that was probably the first time I saw Dorie's work.  Then I started to realise that almost every article that I was reading and nodding to and going, "Yeah, good point, I agree with that", I would go up to the top of the article and then look at who it was written by, and it was always written by Dorie Clark.  She's not just a contributor to Harvard Business Review, she's also written a number of books, so there is a book called Entrepreneurial You and there's also a book called Reinventing You and her new book is called The Long Game.

She's described by The New York Times as an expert at self-reinvention and helping others to make changes in their lives, which is why we thought she'd be such a good person to speak to on this topic of reshaping your role.  I think the thing that Dorie does really well is she takes a really entrepreneurial approach to how you reshape your role, so what you can learn by entrepreneurs to do in perhaps not an entrepreneurial career, if that makes sense, so in a more traditionally corporate role, how you can apply some of those insights into what you do.

Some of the things that stick out for me in the conversation that you're about to hear, she talks a lot about how side bets or side projects, whatever you want to call them, how they create options for you and the point that really resonated with me was she was talking about in careers full of change, which you could call Squiggly, when you only do one type of work in one place, you're perhaps more exposed to those changes and a bit more vulnerable.  But when you have side bets, whether that's volunteering or some stuff that you do on the side, it increases your resilience.  So, I thought that was quite interesting, how you could proactively reshape your role to give you more resilience.

She also talks about the benefit of 20% time, which I know is something that lots of you probably will be familiar with, because I think Google has really popularised this term; but we take it a bit further, which is 20% time might exist in your role if you have quite a progressive employer that allows you to spend 20% of your working time on something else.  If that's not possible, you can still apply that principle to your time more generally, so how could you take more of your time and spend it in a way that could help you to upskill, reskill, develop different skills in different areas; so some interesting conversations that we have around that.

The last thing that I think you might useful, I hope you find useful, was all about reshaping your relationships and we talk about the difference between reactive, reciprocal and random relationships and why investing in all of them is really helpful in reshaping your career.  I hope that you enjoy listening, I hope there are some things in here that would stick for you.  Would love to hear from you as well, so at the end of the episode I'll come back and just give you all the contact details and let you know what Sarah and I are going to be covering next week, because it's an interesting topic we're going to be covering in next week's podcast episode; so hopefully this will be useful, and you'll be listening to that one too.

Dorie, welcome to the Squiggly Careers podcast.

Dorie Clark: Hi, Helen, great to talk with you.

Helen Tupper: Thank you so much for joining us.  We met relatively recently on a panel that we were both on and I was reflecting a little bit on everything that's happened for us in our business over the last 12 months, and I was thinking about you and your career and I thought a good place to start with talking about reshaping roles and careers in light of all things COVID, was to talk to you about what's your reshaping with your career looked like over the last 12 months.

Dorie Clark: Absolutely, so over the COVID period specifically, probably the biggest change for me, like a lot of people, is that because travelling had completely subsided, a lot of my business actually came from speaking at conferences and associations and other gatherings, so that stream of income just completely dried up.  It was very ominous for a while about what my income was going to look like, was I going to be able to earn any money?

As it turned out, a bright lining was that since 2014, I have been experimenting in various ways with online courses and that has been a consistent side bet that I've been pursuing over the intervening years.  That was an area that boomed during COVID and so I feel very fortunate.

Helen Tupper: I wondered in looking back over the last 12 months whether there any things that you have reflected on, going through that experience, which could also be helpful prompts for other people to reflect on in terms of their career to help them reshape their roles and careers going forward.

Dorie Clark: Yeah, absolutely.  One which was really a major theme for me, and I think was exemplified by that example around online learning, was actually something that I talked about a lot in my most recent book, which is called Entrepreneurial You.  The whole point of it is, it follows a hypothesis that I've been exploring for a number of years.  I started my career as a newspaper journalist; I was young, I was in my early 20s and I had only done it for a year and then I got laid off.  It hammered home to me how even this steady stable job, this purportedly stable job, can suddenly evaporate and then you go from one stream of income, filling all your needs, to zero basically overnight.  They gave me a week's severance pay and so I had to find something else really quickly.

Ever since then I wasn't able by any means to operationalise it right away, but as I settled into my entrepreneurial career, I really became obsessed with trying to play this out and to realise a lot of things can disrupt you.

Obviously if you are an entrepreneur or a freelancer, in some ways you're better off because most often you don't have one client, you have multiple clients, so if one leaves it's not quite so devastating.  There's also a problem that can occur when we do only one type of work, because if for some reason there's a change in the marketplace or whatever, just things we can't expect, all that really could be wiped out; and so thinking about how do you create multiple revenue streams, I think of it just more legs on your table, is really helpful.  The Pandemic certainly showed it; that was nothing anything that we expected, but if one or two legs of the table gets knocked out, we're able to be much more stable and secure.  When things are good, it enables you to capture the upside much more.

For any professional, whether you have a full-time job or whether you are a freelancer, whatever it is, thinking through just ways to explore even in tiny ways to start; how to create multiple revenue streams for yourself, whether it's a rental income off of a property or it could be things like starting to do some coaching or consulting on the side; maybe you are starting a blog and if you build up enough following you could get money for sponsored posts.  There's a lot of ways to experiment with that, but it all adds to our security and stability, which I think is pretty important these days.

Helen Tupper: What do you think is the biggest barrier?

Dorie Clark: I am a little biased I will admit with this, because I sort of take umbrage at the idea that anything is like you have it or you don't have it sort of thing.  I am much bigger fan of just focusing in on mindset, because I believe that for anybody who wants to learn and is actually willing to commit themselves and say, "Yeah, sure of course if I study it, of course if I practise it, I can do it", I really respect that and admire that, because there is certainly a group of people out there that say, "Oh, when it comes to entrepreneurship, you either have it or you don't".  It's like, "What are you trying to do there?"  Is that trying to make yourself feel better or some sort of passive aggressive way of dissing people, like come on; it's ridiculous. 

People can learn to do a lot of things.  This is not rocket science, this is just, "Okay, come up with an idea, you test it out, you see if people want the idea.  You tweak it until they do want the idea and then you do it".  Come on, it's not that hard people can absolutely do it.  I do think that mindset is the crucial part.  If people believ that and they're willing to be humble enough to take the process of learning how to do it, then I definitely think they can be successful.

Helen Tupper: If people are listening and they're thinking, "Okay, [either] because something's happened to me, I need to reshape my career, [or] because I proactively want to", one of the ideas we've talked about is think about how you diversify yourself and your career and also how you can have multiple streams of revenue from your career.  Are there any other things that you would say, if you're in this place now, you're like, "Okay, I need to reshape my career", or, "I want to reshape my career", are there any actions that you would say to people that, "This is a really good thing for you to do next"?

Dorie Clark: One of the things that I actually talk about in my newest book which is coming out in September, it's called The Long Game: How to Be a Long-Term Thinker in a Short-Term World, is I have a whole chapter devoted to 20% time, which is a concept of course popularised by Google.  It was originally created by the company 3M, which invented post-it notes.  The idea is that they allow employees to devote, in 3M's case it was 15%, in Google's case 20%, of their time to experimental projects.

Now, one interesting thing, I have talked to some people within Google, and they say, "Oh that's not really a thing anymore, etc", and then I talk to other people within Google and they're like, "Oh yeah, I do that; I do that all the time".  I think it's so telling because the truth is even at Google, which is supposed to be the epicentre of this 20% time, there's still plenty of people that are not seizing the opportunity for something like that.  So, you do have to be self-motivated in order to make it happen, but it's like that in our own careers and I think that we have to be the drivers of that.

I have done this in my own career, and I really believe it's important for other people as well.  What I love about 20% time is you need to have the freedom to experiment and that includes the freedom to fail, because of course when you're trying something new, you have no idea how it's going to come out; it could be an amazing success, it could go nowhere, we don't know.  But if it's only 20% of your time, it is not going to cripple you if it doesn't work. 

You never want to put too much on the table and then, "You can't afford for it to fail, because the results would be catastrophic".  It's not like that.  If you feel a freedom to play around and to experiment and to find the thing that might be the right thing for you, whether it is, "I'm going to start an online class", or, "Maybe I am going to start real estate investing on the side", or, "People seem to like my photography, maybe I can do some headshots or some portraits of people on the weekends", whatever it is, but you have enough bandwidth to try it out.

That's where you actually can really be successful because the place where a lot of people go wrong is they jump too quickly to a solution and then they try to shove it down the throat of the marketplace.  If the marketplace doesn't want it, the marketplace doesn't want it.  You need to take the time to find the product market fit and then when you do, that's when you can lean into it.

Helen Tupper: Often people might think, "Yeah, my company's not Google.  My company's not going to give me 20% of my time to go and do my photography business on the side".  If you think about it a little bit more broadly and you think about it less of 20% of the time of your day job and more 20% of your time, in 168 hours a week, what would that look like?  I think that everybody has the 168 hours and so if you can't get the 20% time in your day job, I think look a bit more broadly into how you're spending your time and could you create some of it in the weekend or the evening time to go towards those things.

Dorie Clark: Yeah, I think that's exactly right.  Nobody is going to hand this to you, your boss isn't going to hand it to you.  You're not even going to hand it to you, you have to fight for this.  I remember very early in my career when I had that first job as a newspaper reporter and I had a colleague, this woman Nina.  I was six or eight months into working as a journalist and I felt so busy, I felt so bedraggled.

Helen Tupper: Good word.

Dorie Clark: Thank you.  Yes, I was just reporting all the time, doing stories all the time, they always wanted stuff.  So, I felt, "I'm so busy I couldn't possibly do another thing".  Meanwhile, one day Nina announces she has a book that's going to be published, I'm like, "What?"

Helen Tupper: "Nina!  When?"

Dorie Clark: It was crazy, and I went over to her I'm like, "Nina, how did you do this?  How do you have the time to do this?"  She said, "When I got home from work, I would just make this my second job".  I guess, she would eat dinner at her computer or something like that, but she said, "As soon I got from home from work, I would work on the book until about 9.00pm every night".  I just thought, "Whoa", because to your point Helen about understanding what is possible, it's not what I was doing.  I was going out and having dinner with friends and I didn't feel like I was wasting my time, I thought I was stewarding my time, but to see what other people were actually doing when they were applying themselves.

Of course, everyone's circumstances are different.  That's not the time you're going to pick if you have kids for instance, probably you'd have to go the other end and do it first thing in the morning or whatever.  People have different circumstances that they're working on, but just for me to understand that during a time when I felt like I was busy to the brim, and I nonetheless had a colleague that was able to make slightly different choices and bang out a book during the same period of time, was a bit of a wake up call for me about what was possible.

Helen Tupper: Interesting you were saying that you weren't doing it, you were going out and having dinner and fun with your friends.  I see this as an insight in that which is that, if you do this sort of thing that you might do around the thing that energises you and that you love, like I happen to love helping people with their careers and that's how I chose to spend my time; Nina may have loved writing, that's what she chose to do; but if somebody loves going out for dinner and drinks and going to restaurants with their friends, that in itself could still be an idea.  Maybe they become some kind of reviewer and that becomes a blog that they can monetise with advertising, and then it's always time well spent.

Dorie Clark: It's true and actually to your point, I did do that a little bit.

Helen Tupper: Did you?

Dorie Clark: Yeah, I was a political reporter, but I managed to convince my editors, because we had a Cheap Eats column for the paper, so of course it was a rather coveted gig to review the nice restaurants.  I never got to do that, but they would give me $25 and so I would not infrequently as an extra work thing, I would write the Cheap Eats column, because they gave me $25 to buy myself and a friend dinner.

Helen Tupper: I love it, that was brilliant.  The last thing I really want to talk to you about was about relationships.  If we are reshaping our roles and our careers then it also might be the time that we need to reframe how we look at building relationships, and also particularly during COVID, that we are all building relationships in different ways.  You and I met on a virtual panel and other people will be meeting people in other ways.

I just wondered if you've got any thoughts for people who might be rethinking about their career and how they invest in the relationships that can help them; any thoughts to support people with that?

Dorie Clark: Relationships really are a part of playing the long game.  You probably heard the saying that the only thing that changes us as people are the books we read and the people we meet.  That's the lever that changes how we develop as humans and I think it's very powerful.

One of the points that I make in The Long Game is that ultimately, there's three types of networking; and for people who don't like networking, what I think often happens is that one kind, one variety steals all the oxygen and is what gets talked about and we miss talking about the other two types that are much more valuable.  The kind that seems to dominate the conversation is what I will call short-term networking, which is basically like, "I need a thing, so I'm going to meet someone who can give me a thing".  I mean that's just distasteful for obvious reasons, like who wants to be on the other end of that?

Helen Tupper: So, true.

Dorie Clark: I can completely understand if that's what you think networking is then, "Yeah, it makes sense to not like networking".  What I suggest is that there's two other varieties that are much more important, much better frankly and when it comes to your long-term, to your Squiggly Career, these are the kinds that we should be cultivating.

The second type is long-term networking, and that is the kind of relationship with people that you’re not precisely sure how they can be helpful to you, but you just have a pretty good sense that they will be.  Maybe they're in your field, you have common connections, common interests, etc, it sort of makes sense.  We are doing the same thing, it's not, "I know that in 2024, Dorie's going to do this for me", but it's a general --

Helen Tupper: I have got that written down on a post-it note, so if we can just come back to 2024 at the end.

Dorie Clark: Amazing all right, we'll get that taken care of.  So, we know in general they'll be a good person to get to know.  I think that's valuable, because it's a networking with good intentions.  We don't know how they can help us, we don't know how we can help them, but there's going to be a real relationship and reciprocity over time. 

The kind of networking though that I think is perhaps most interesting, it's like wildcard networking, I call it infinite horizon networking.  Those are the relationships with people that honestly on the surface make no sense.  This is where it gets fun because most people, most rational people, probably wouldn't invest a lot of time in these relationships because it's like, "They're an astronaut so what can they do for me?  I'm not an astronaut, I don't want to be an astronaut". 

The truth is the relationships that we build with people that are really outside our field, just different random things, this is where it gets interesting because number one, they are probably going to be more likely than other people to spark new ideas, new perspectives, new possibilities; number two, things actually change a lot over time.  You might be completely convinced you are going to have your entire career in finance, let's say, and something happens.  Maybe you get laid off, maybe you have a revelation at a certain point, "No, no, I don't want to do finance, I want to do flowers".  Guess what?  It's those random people that can help you, because if you over-index too much and you build your entire network in your existing city or your existing field, that's nice for a while but it becomes a liability if you ever want to or have to change.

Having that diversity in your network actually becomes quite powerful and so I really advocate taking the time to cultivate those wild cards.

Helen Tupper: I guess a question that comes into my mind is, how do people, in a world of work where I don't know what the future's going to look like, but let's say at least half of your time is going to be sat in your own property doing your job from your desk in your own house or maybe the kitchen table, how do I go and cultivate some of those more random relationships that could really fuel that particular network?  Is there anything that you think people could do to do that?

Dorie Clark: Yeah, absolutely, there's a lot you can do; there's a surprising amount you can do.  One that's actually a favourite of mine is alumni organisations, because you obviously have something in common with these people you went to the same school, but the whole thing about colleges or universities is you end up in radically different places.  That's why they have 20 or 40 majors, is you're all doing different things. 

So, it's very hard of course to connect with someone if you literally have nothing in common with them, but if you can find someone where it's like, "Oh, I also went to this school", or something along those lines, being involved in that association basically gives you carte blanche to connect with other people because of a shared tie, but you've now ended up in different worlds.

I am also a really big fan, I talk about this a lot in my first book, Reinventing You, of when it comes to the organisations and associations you're involved in, go deep not wide.  And so, instead of just like, "Oh well I went to a few meetings over the alumni association"; no, join the board.  It is so easy, because most people are busy and they don't really want to do volunteer things; but it's so easy if you basically say, "Guess what, I'll be the membership chair".  This officially gives you licence to contact whoever you want, this is very powerful; or, "I'll be the programme chair", guess what, you can invite whoever you want to be as a speaker.  They want to get back to you because it's an honour to be asked to speak for the alumni association.  These are really amazing ways to do it.

Another suggestion that I'll share, Helen, which I have done many times with a colleague, is to organise either a real-world dinner when that is possible or a virtual one, equally possible, and I will pick a colleague that either knows a wide variety of people or maybe is in a totally different field from me and we'll divide the responsibilities and I will say, "Helen, I'll invite three people and you invite three people".

Helen Tupper: I love that.

Dorie Clark: The goal is just to cross-pollenate our networks.

Helen Tupper: I love that idea of cross-pollenating networks.  I've summarised in my own mind, I've kind of gone, "Okay, so there's the reactive relationships which are really tactical, and we shouldn't spend too much time doing; there is the reciprocal relationships that you want to invest in ,because they will support your career in the future in ways that you might not even know yet; and then there's the random relationship which are full of unexpected consequences, and you just have to believe that to be true".

Dorie Clark: Yeah, absolutely, it's like pinball.

Helen Tupper: Thank you so much for sharing your insights with us, I think it will really help people to think proactively about how they reshape their career.  How they don't become dependent on only one employer; how they find their mindset for the possibility of doing something else now in the future; and how they build a network of people around them that can help them in lots of different ways.

One of the very last things that we ask our guests before they leave us on our Squiggly Careers podcast is for a piece of career advice, maybe something that has helped you or something that you think would help our listeners; but I wonder if there's a piece of career advice that you would share with us?

Dorie Clark: One of the things that I feel like sometimes gets short shrift in the world of entrepreneurship at least, is it seems like a lot of the conversational momentum has gone to limiting your information.  For me actually, having been a journalist, I am a big fan of reading a paper and I spend a huge amount of time and it's very pleasurable for me reading books, reading magazines, reading newspapers.  Part of the reason that I find that so helpful is that it gives me a base of knowledge that I can use to connect with a lot of people quickly.

I think there is really something to be said for being well informed about a lot of different things, because it enables you to create rapport and to be able to have a more intelligent conversation with people if you understand even a little bit about the geopolitics of what is happening in their country, or about certain industries or certain trends or things like that.  If you imagine a world that somebody is in; if someone is in the world of cryptocurrency, it's a really different conversation if you start with, "What's a Bitcoin?" as compared to, "What do you think about the differences between compound and the graph?"  It's like, "Okay, let's dive in".

Similarly, if you meet someone who's German and you can say to them, "Tell me your thoughts about who's going to succeed Angela Merkel and what that's going to mean?"  Immediately you're able to have a good conversation and so, I think I just always get troubled by a bro-ish push towards philistinism.

Helen Tupper: Thank you so much for listening to the conversation with Dorie.  I hope it sparked some ideas for you in terms of reshaping your role.  I think reshaping sounds quite dramatic, like something has to happen in order for you to reshape your role, but the thing that I took away from the conversation with Dorie is that our roles and us are continually work in progress.  So, whether it's investing in those side bets or really reimaging your relationships, this is a useful continual investment to do in our career to increase our resilience rather than a one-time only or a triggered event that needs to happen.

We would love to know what has been useful for you.  You can email Sarah and I; we love reading your emails and hearing what stuck.  Our email address is just Helen&Sarah@squigglycareers.com and that will be in the show notes as well.  We'll also be talking about this topic on PodPlus which you can join us with live, so on the week that this episode comes out, on the Thursday of that week we will do PodPlus and we will be sharing different tools and things that have resonated with us on this topic of reshaping your role.  You can also watch that back if you can't join that session, you can watch that back.  All the details again are in the show notes or just go to our website amazingif.com and you will find the details there.

Next week, we are going to be talking about ego at work.  I feel like "ego" is quite an uncomfortable conversation, because no one really wants to admit that they've got one or really like to deal with anyone who might be displaying one at work, but we all have an ego and sometimes it helps us and sometimes it hinders us, so we're going to be diving into the topic about ego at work and looking at what we can learn and how we can help ourselves and others to manage their ego in hopefully a productive way at work.  Hopefully, you will join us then for a topic that we are looking forward to diving into.

See you all soon, everyone.  Bye.