If you apply the emphasis to different words in that title, you can completely change its meaning. I’ll leave you decide which you think it should be.
A portfolio career is what I have now. In a piece for Forbes.com, Rhett Power writes that “…a portfolio career offers a mosaic of opportunities, allowing individuals to explore different industries, roles and professional identities” (https://shorturl.at/9Kwfp).It too changes depending on where you apply the emphasis.
I recently left a law firm I had worked at for over 34 years.
About five years ago, my team needed a new strategy to enhance its revenue, build, improve its market position and to deliver an organised succession. The “succession” bit was pretty much all about me leaving, the structure required to address that and, most importantly, significantly move the team forward. Once you put that sort of thing in a strategy, you are more or less making a public decision and have, albeit implicitly, given notice. I was 55 years old. I figured that, at 60, provided I remained healthy, I could expect to give a good ten years to a whole new career.
The big question (which was not a novel one to me) was: Doing what?
I had already explored some options and, by giving myself five years, I allowed myself plenty of time to explore some more. Two years into the plan, I moved to a four-day week. That helped with the “time” thing.
Across the years, among other things I looked at teaching, being a counsellor, being a paramedic, caring for those with dementia, floristry, and being an academic. I even did some basic training in some of those things.
I also committed to a six-month Level 7 (i.e. Master’s level) diploma in being a non-executive director, during which I prepared a 15,000-word case study and sat my first proper exam in about 30 years.
Having done all of that, eventually I worked out I could do several things: continue being a mediator, formalise and continue the coaching/mentoring I did at work, be a charity trustee and become a non-executive director.
And that is what I am doing.
But I have to admit, I did not really think too much about how those things would fit together, or even whether they needed to. What I did know is that they would give me some flexibility about how I used a lot of my time and some of them would earn me some money.
I was right about that flexibility.
But I have also learnt a couple of very important things in the few months my portfolio career has been supplanting my lawyer career.
The first is an important mental logistical issue. I put it like that because what I have noticed is that, if, say, all of the component parts of my new career are active at the same time, it could be a struggle. That contemporaneous alignment of my roles has already happened once with my attention being required for all three on the same day. I found it hard to manage mentally – metaphorically, I had to take my coaching head off, and then put my director one on and so on to ensure I had the right focus for the particular issue in hand. I suspect (and hope) that won’t happen too often, but if it does, I am going to have to devise a strategy to cope with it. As it is, I have already learnt that, when I know my attention is going to be required for a particular role, I need to schedule time the day before to mentally prepare.
The second can be summed up in one word: cross-fertilisation. You might think this naïve of me not to have thought of it before, and that it is obvious to you, but I have seen some real benefits from my chosen combination of roles – with ideas and learning from each positively impacting the others.
As I wrote in another blog recently (https://shorturl.at/SF1Su), a key element of my coaching course at Henley Business School is “learning by doing”. Part of that involves reviewing recordings of coaching sessions I have conducted. What I noticed in one was that I was asking long, or stacked, questions. I am conscious I have also been doing that in my board work, which is not great when there is a lot to get through and time is precious. Addressing that is one of my “development” points to work on in my HBS course, and my collateral objective is that it will beneficially feed into my board work too.
But the most marked example of cross-fertilisation came to the fore recently. Reflecting on a mediation I had conducted, I realised I had used my advancing coaching skills to ask differently posed questions and I used silence a lot more, both of which, I think, possibly led to the resolution of a dispute which might not have otherwise come about. I am not going to share the detail of it here, that would be inappropriate, but what I can say is that the feedback I received from one of the parties to the mediation was perhaps the most effusively positive I have had as a mediator. I think that is not coincidental.
Back to that title.
If you put the emphasis on the “what”, you can see what I have done in a short space of time. Among other things, gained some important learning.
And if you put the emphasis on the “have”, well, I am sure I have made the right decision and, whether by accident or not, achieved a great, complementary combination of roles in my new, portfolio career.
And already I am loving it!
© Jason Hunter
July 2024
