How to make smart career choices

As readers of my free and paid subscriber newsletter knew in November, I’m moving to a different state. Today, I’m in the middle of that move as I spent yesterday watching the movers fill the semi truck full of our stuff along with another customer — and ran out of room. And yet, as I talked about it to my wife tonight, thousands of miles away, the choices we’ve made about the move have been good ones.

Good choices lead to good options. Bad choices lead to poor outcomes. It is that way in moving and so it is with your job and your career. Let’s look at how to make the right choices.

Build a plan to compare events against

It does not take a long time to build a plan for what you want to do regarding some event — like figuring out the conditions when you know when your job will end. Yet, few people build the simple plan that says here are the X number of things that should happen and when I see these, I know there is only six months until my job is in jeopardy.

We built a plan for the move. Here is what should happen by these dates and if they don’t, we need to follow-up and figure out what happened.

One of those dates was moving into our new rental house (we don’t know where to buy, so we are renting a house for a year or so to figure it out…). Well, when we moved into our rental house, we were missing the washer and dryer that were supposed to be in place for us and there was a whole bunch of stuff the owner of the house left in storage in the basement where none of it should be.

Now, this is the owners first time renting a house, so this is understandable. But not acceptable. Because we had the plan in place, including verifying the house before all our furniture gets there, we have time to work with the property management company to get things right. And a good insight into how good the property management company will be as we rent through the year.

Without the plan, it would have been simple panic.

Build in flexibility to the plan

When you move and use movers, the plan is basically pack one day, load the truck the next day and then you leave. But we didn’t do the move that way. Instead, I’m spending an extra day so that a cleaning crew can come in and do a move out clean and have enough time to do some touch up painting in case we need to (and we do).

So today when the movers ran out of room on the semi to move our stuff and one other customer’s stuff — the other customer had way more than planned and our stuff was a bit harder to fit than expected — it could have turned ugly fast. No more trucks available at 3 PM in the afternoon, plus no more crew to load another truck.

Tomorrow morning? Well, suppose I had planned to fly out tomorrow morning (which is today) and had to leave at 10 AM. I’d have had to trust the movers to get it right, hope the cleaners would do it right, and then wait to see if it all turned out OK.

And even though I trust all of these people to do the right thing — because they have in the past — why would I risk it? Much safer to stay the extra day as part of the plan just in case things go the unexpected way. Like they did this time. I was able to be the gracious customer and work with the vendors to figure out what was right for all of us to get the job done.

On the job, if you are so rigid you never go outside your comfort zone or never take on projects that are “not part of your job,” you’ll never have the flexibility to go for opportunities or figure out how to overcome a problem. Building in flexibility as part of the plan makes good sense to get things done.

But, you stand up for what is right

So even though the owners of the house are new to renting, that doesn’t mean I just allow them to do whatever they want. I paid for all appliances to be in the house and I don’t have them. I paid for 100% of the space in the house and I want 100% of the space, not 97% of it. I’m not going to be liable for their personal belongings in the house. Period. They need to go.

But, since it was part of the plan to verify what was in the house before the furniture arrived, we were able to notify people about the problem. So while we have some time to resolve the issue — helping the property management company do their work — we’ve also made it very clear that it is not acceptable and we won’t be responsible for their stuff on our lease.

We’re flexible in the solution, but want the solution.

In our job, we have parameters around when we should stay in our job — and when it is time to leave. We want to plan around the work, we want to be flexible — but we have standards. Cubicle Warriors have standards around the work and what is acceptable to do the work. When it passes that point of acceptability, Cubicle Warriors go and get a different job.

Just because you have smartly built flexibility into your work doesn’t mean you are a wimp. You just want whatever situation resolved. But the situation is not acceptable, so fix it or the world changes.

Bad choices spiral to worse situations

Without the planning, flexibility and the ability to know what you want in a job, you will make poor job and career choices. Do the work to find out what is right for you. Then make your plan and work it from there.

Related posts:

1. Self-Awareness: Improve your career choices