The Hindu Business Line : Blinded by focus

While I was preparing for my school-final examinations, I was advised to aim for a specific score, with a collateral warning that otherwise I would lose focus and not do well. I could not see the point behind the advice, so did not follow it and escaped with an average performance in the exams; of course, the reasons for this could have been many others besides failure to heed this advice. I have been hearing of the importance of developing focus time and again at various stages of my academic and professional life. But this focus-centric paradigm seems to be detrimental to the all round development of personality. There are many fallacies and dangers in this approach to career management. The first one is the inherent impossibility of the assumptions in this strategy and the second one is what we stand to lose if we adopt it.

Developing a focus typically means identifying a particular (fairly specific) goal and pursuing it relentlessly till we reach it . This strategy is supposed to lend meaning, direction, yardsticks for measurement and, importantly, the energy and intensity required to achieve something/anything. All this is beyond dispute. However, when we apply this to long-term career planning at an early stage in life, we stumble upon the very obvious question — is it so easy to identify a career goal at that stage? This gains all the more importance given the way our school and university education systems are designed, demanding major decisions at very early stages in a student's life.

Let me explore this in detail. By fifteen or so, a school student has to make a broad choice among the science, commerce and arts streams. While this need not be irreversible always, in many cases it is. The student normally makes this choice based on second-hand advice from family, friends, teachers and other role models at that point in time. If I were to look back at the decisions I have made during my student days and the methods I have adopted for the same, I can't but get stunned at the magnitude of the problem. More so if I add the kind of experiences I have had in the near four years of my career in human resources management and the alterations in perspectives I have undergone during this time about the core concept of career itself.

Firstly, the decision to adopt the science, commerce or arts stream has to be made by students without (in most cases) a serious opportunity to explore their strengths and weaknesses, likes and dislikes and the many more dimensions on which such a decision has to be thought through . The problem is exacerbated by the value systems that exist in our society about careers. Suffice to say that had I joined history or literature in college, I would have been considered a serious loser in life. Given these inherent flaws in our education and value systems, what do we advise students to do — focus! Become a doctor or a software engineer. A typical case of encouraging a runner to run faster and furious when the track he/she has chosen to run on is decided through questionable methods.

Secondly, and even more fundamentally, the idea of long-term goal setting early on in one's career followed up with undivided focus to achieve it pre-supposes that it is — possible and advisable to zero-in on end states in our career fairly early. It appears that once this is done, all that remains is to get there. Let me analyse this by conducting a post-mortem of how my own view of a career itself has changed in the time I have been working post-MBA.

During B-School days, the vague dimensions on which a student decides on a career track are — functional expertise (HR/marketing/finance), take-home salary, growth opportunities (read speed of promotions and change of job titles) and a general buzz in the campus on what the "in-thing" to do is. Let's take each and see how the change in my perspective has occurred.

Functional expertise: In a classroom, it is important to classify and teach subjects as HR, marketing, finance, but this is not always the way a business is organised. Even if it is, such isolation and exclusivity will quickly eliminate a participant from joining the party. More and more, I realise that the success of a manager lies in her ability to see her own job in the larger business context and also to gain and utilise knowledge and experience from various disciplines that impact the business.

Take-home salary: Your first salary is no indicator of how it is going to change. Also, you may take home a big salary, but in that case you will spend more time in the office than at home!

Growth opportunities: I will be emphatic here. It is impossible for a student to understand what growth means. In B-school, a student typically looks at growth as pace of promotions and acquisition of job titles. While these are practically relevant and important, growth is as much horizontal as it is vertical. It includes, amongst other things, criticality of the role an individual plays in the organisation, the long and short-term impact of the role, exposure and collaboration with senior management in the execution of her role, scale and scope of responsibilities handled and last but not the least her own personal growth in terms of what she learns and the perspectives she builds about business and career.

The `in thing' to do: It is quite regrettable that even B-School students who are supposed to be more rational and sensible decision-makers get carried away by the general mood on campus. The fizz, quite naturally, disappears once the bottle in uncorked.

The most important variable lacking in this entire exercise is the individual's internal vectors on what he/she likes, can do or would cherish as meaningful. Once into the business world, the "encounters" one experiences are as much a factor of his/her disposition as of the circumstances he/she is in. This does not figure anywhere in the equation! Even if it does, one discovers so many aspects of oneself during the course of his/her career he/she was previously unaware of. A student does not have the opportunity, information or perspective to think about these aspects during campus days. For example, on campus, there is no way could I have realised that I enjoy responsibility and independence, am process-oriented, do not particularly like handling clutter and so on. I presume similar issues exist in other career tracks as well.

The larger issue here is that the "world out there" is much bigger and more complex than what we can perceive before we step into it. So it is well nigh impossible to identify long-term career goals as precise end states at an early stage, given the way our education and social systems and decision-making processes work.

Now to the second aspect of this article — what do we lose by focusing too much early on in life? By focusing too much, we fail to give due importance to the journey as against the milestones. By focusing too much, we get blinded to the many opportunities that might come our way on course to a pre-established milestone; opportunities which are not part of our "original" scheme of things. These opportunities could either be for a shift in career or discovering aspects of oneself that can enable us to steer our career in better directions.

Of late, I have begun to wonder about so many aspects of career and personality and what one should do with both; hitherto un-thought of aspects like how much of physical body should be involved in the activities one does in order to enjoy them (for example, would I not enjoy sports or dancing more than sitting in front of a computer, dabbling with Excel), what should be the mix of thought and skill the work we do should have (for example, would I like to become a painter where my thought and skill play an equal role or a research professor who is happy playing in his mindscape), would someone prefer his/her ideas and goals to be expressed by himself/herself or through others (for example, would I enjoy acting more vis-à-vis directing) and so on and so forth.

When we thus see how impossible it is to arrive at precise long-term career goals early on in life, the danger of this blindness gets magnified. Add to it the social and cultural limitations that exist in our country compared to the relative freedom in the West to pursue one's esoteric interests, we realise that ironically, we leave too much to chance by focusing.

Given all these seeming complexities what should a student or a youngster stepping into his/her career do? It is important that he/she attempts to evolve a holistic vision of life and situates his/her career decisions within its context. It is pertinent that he/she endeavours to discern the larger drift of his/her career journey, but does not get stuck in or limited by details. It is important for him/her to ask questions and keep asking them irrespective of tasting success or failure. It is critical for him/her to revisit decisions and be bold enough to challenge the assumptions and schemes he/she has about a career and, if required, make a fundamental shift, even if only in a gradual manner. (I for one believe this is certainly possible given the economic success many youngsters in our country today taste early on in life. Gone are the days when a family man bought one house in his mid-thirties and paid for it the rest of his life).

Closer home, it is also important that he/she sets short-term targets and pursues them with energy and yes, focus, for although one must be open to change, the first thing always is to do well what one does. As Scott Fitzgerald said, "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function."

(The writer, an alumnus of IIT-Mumbai and XLRI, currently works as an HR professional)

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