Purpose & Impact

How Executives are Creating Meaningful Second Careers

Anita Hoffmann

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780815381310
• eBook ISBN: 9781351048927
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Purpose & Impact is the first book to provide guidance to senior executives and professionals on how to rethink and even relaunch their careers in ways that align with wider purpose and societal impact.

With our increasing longevity, the concept of retirement is becoming redundant; executives need, financially, and want, motivationally, to continue to work well beyond what is currently considered 'retirement age'. At around age 50, when we often leave our mainstream employers, we could be looking forward to around another 30 healthy years, equivalent to a whole second career. This book sets out a topic that is becoming increasingly important and urgent for governments, companies and executives alike.

Purpose & Impact is underpinned by extensive research, including interviews with over 90 senior executives. Many of their stories are included within the book and provide the reader with real insight into how very diverse senior executives and professionals have created roles that have enabled their own personal growth and development and had positive impacts on wider society. In addition, helpful tools and guides are used throughout the book to help the reader in their decision-making processes during the different stages of discovering and developing themselves and their career goals.

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Part 1

Why this really is the moment to create a Purpose-driven career

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Chapter 1

Introduction

‘One day in my early fifties, I realised that my boss, our CFO and I were approximately the same age and likely would retire at the same time’, said Sola Oyinlola, at that time Vice President and Group Treasurer of Schlumberger, and the only African corporate officer of this world-leading French American oilfield services company.

He continued:

This meant that I was not likely to ever become the company’s CFO and I wondered, what do I do now? Should I stay where I am for the next 10 years or I should I try to figure out how I could create a new career somewhere else? I was also passionately interested in African social and economic development issues, including education and women’s inclusion in the economy. Should I go and work for charities? Or boards? Where could I have most impact?

Many of us find ourselves in this situation in our late forties, fifties or early sixties, the ‘mid/later’ career stage. We thought we knew where we were going, but are suddenly forced to stop and take out a new direction. This can be driven by external factors such as downsizing, change of management and strategy, or, as for Sola Oyinlola, a succession planning situation, or it can be personal factors such as our or a family member’s health issue, or simply a yearning for ‘something else’ – work with meaning, Purpose.

The answer to Sola’s question above is, surprisingly, that it is not about jumping anywhere in the short term, if you don’t have to.

The most effective answer is staying where we are and going on a learning journey about ourselves and how we can contribute to solving major issues. A journey to find Purpose, ‘a calling, in our business roles’, as Professor Andrew Hoffman at Yale describes it.¹

This book is about how to go on this learning journey, becoming leaders that know how to affect change in society and our organisations and creating new career options for ourselves, with Purpose, for as long as we need or wish.

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We do this by ‘job-crafting’ – adding Purpose-driven projects to our roles that fit with the company’s strategy. This way, we acquire knowledge while helping our organisations change and impact societal issues. Crucially, we build new cross-sector networks that can affect large-scale impact in our area of interest – these are also the route to our future career opportunities.

In this introductory chapter, we will set out the rationale for why learning to develop our careers is a vital skill that we all need going forward, the general structure of the book, and why now really is the time to create a Purpose-driven career.

The ‘mid/later’ career stage is now age 50–80

This eyebrow-raising statement is due to the fact that what was physiologically considered old a generation ago is now merely considered middle-aged.

The statistical mortality research by John Shoven at MIT shows that men now transition out of middle age at age 60 (versus age 44 in the 1920s) and women at 65. Men and women are considered ‘old’ at age 70 and 73, and ‘elderly’ at age 76 and 80, respectively.²

There are three vital pieces of insight hidden here. First, we are now ‘middle-aged’ into our mid-sixties. Second, there is a new, hitherto unnamed, life stage of 10 to 15 years between ‘middle-aged’ and ‘old’ – the stage from 60/65 to 70/73 – where we are still healthy and energetic but beyond traditional retirement age. Third, the ‘elderly’ stage only starts in our late seventies – which means another decade where we normally have good health.

This means we now have 15 to 20 years when we can still be very active from age 60. The question is: How will we use this gift?

Choosing age 50 as the starting point for the new ‘mid/later’ career span is due to the fact that the job market discriminates – it should not, but it does – from age 50 onwards. It is also the time when we often start contemplating significant career changes.

This means that at this point, we need to prepare for a whole new 20- to 30-year career, not merely planning for the next 5 to 10 years of promotions up the corporate ladder, as when we were younger. This mid/later career stage is very different to what we have experienced so far. Making informed decisions for our future at this stage is clearly vital.

Retirement is a redundant concept

When the retirement age of 65 was set in Germany in the early 1880s by Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, very few people reached this age.³ Now, at 65 we have just exited ‘middle age’.

This means that the old life model of ‘study, 35 to 40 years of work, and retire to leisure’ clearly will no longer work. Financing 30+ years of retirement from a 35- to 40-year career is difficult, and the thought of spending what is in effect a whole second ‘career span’ at leisure sends chills up many people’s spines.

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With the prospect of two-thirds of the extra 2.2 billion people on earth in 2060 being in the 40–79 age group, and the number of 60- to 79-year-olds increasing by 1.1 billion (five times the increase in the number of children and teenagers),⁴ there is every reason – from personal economic, physical and mental well-being, to not being a burden on the next generation – as to why we should stay economically active for much longer, and no good reason – apart from ill health – why we might not.

There is an increasing realisation in many countries that job markets need to change, to adapt to these changes, but much more needs to happen, and faster.

Knowing how to develop our careers will be vital to flourish over the long haul

To be able to continue to work to supplement our pensions or to have a role in society, we need to learn how to create career opportunities for ourselves. This is a vitally important investment for our future well-being.

Yet there is little knowledge among individual executives or organisations about how to develop our careers. Organisations normally train us to be ready for the next promotion in-house, not to own and manage our careers inside and outside our place of employment.

Understanding of how to find Purpose – a direction – to pursue for life and work fulfilment is even more rare. How to combine the two is the ‘sweet spot’, and the aim of the research for this book and its companion organisationally oriented research paper.⁵

Many organisations have large cadres of senior leaders in the ‘baby boomer’ generation at the ‘classic retirement ages’, peaking over the next 10 to 15 years. Helping them learn these career development skills is a good investment, as we will see, as it also helps them become more externally effective leaders in their current organisations and roles. In Chapter 11, we will see how some leading organisations are already benefiting from this way of working.

Why now really is the time to pursue a Purpose-driven career

Speaking to thousands of senior leaders over more than a decade, it is clear that there is a real yearning for having Purpose – impacting societal well-being – in our lives and work.

Yet with the unprecedented upheaval we are seeing in the technology, political, cultural and international landscape, and the lack of trusts in institutions, we could be forgiven for wondering if our best strategy would be to hide under the bed for the foreseeable future.

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Luckily, there is a new narrative rapidly developing in society and business. No matter the political rhetoric of the day, there is a growing understanding that we need inclusive growth and new thinking for how to collaboratively address wider societal issues.

Businesses, with their knowledge, large-scale reach and resources, are being called on to help. They are increasingly realising the risks to their business models, and the potential opportunities available in addressing them, estimated at more than US$12.2 trillion.⁶

This points to a ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Praise
• Purpose & Impact
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Lists of Figures, Tables, Pictures and Exercises
• Foreword
• Preface: It’S Time to #Lovelikejo
• Acknowledgements
• Part I Why This Really is the Moment to Create a Purpose-Driven Career
• Part II Career Development: How Does it Work?
• Part III Creating a Purpose-Driven Career in Practice
• Part IV What Leading Organisations Are Doing
• End Word
• Afterword
• Appendix 1: Externally Oriented Leadership Competencies
• Appendix 2: Discovering Your Transferrable Skills
• Appendix 3: Linkedin Cheat Sheet
• Index