KEYANNA SCHMIEDL: When I say career development, what do you think? You're probably thinking of something like a ladder or something that is very linear, and that's pretty much what we've been taught for a very long time. For me, I actually think there's a different way to think about this. I think the right analogy is career development as a rock wall—lots of options.


How do you get on the wall and just get started? Ladder—there's really only one kind of direction that you can go, and that's either up or down. For most people, it's step by step. But it can't just be that there is one path and one way to find success and navigate your way throughout an organization in order to feel like you're successful.


Essentially what we want are options and opportunities to define what success looks like for us. When we think about the rock wall, success may mean moving out right, broadening your scope, not necessarily moving up in terms of leadership. Success may look like, hey, I'm going to take a little bit of a step back.


Maybe that looks like moving part-time. Maybe it looks like actually moving something off of your plate. How can we make sure that all of those pieces fit together to say, there are lots of opportunities here up in along this wall in different paths that folks are on, and that's OK, we can all be on this wall at the same time? You may be sitting there and in your mind staring up at this rock wall going, how do I tackle this? I know that I have certainly been there many points in my career and actually standing in front of rock walls. Start with strengths. For me—and again, in this analogy, going up the wall—I know that the lane that's going to be easiest for me is the one that allows me to power up using my leg strength. The second that I need to use my arms, forget it. I am off that wall. I'm not going to successfully navigate it.


Now translate that to what your strengths and your opportunity areas are. Maybe I've been in the workforce for a while and I have a really strong sense of where I know I knock it out of the park, and the places where I know I don't like to spend a lot of time there, because it's not a natural strength of mine. And then look again at what are the opportunities that are in front of me. Ideally, if we're thinking growth mindset, if we're thinking strength-based leadership, then what we're saying is, we want you to play to your strengths. And as your manager, they're down here, looking out for those opportunity areas for you, but you're just allowed to use your strengths to navigate your way up and around that wall.


If you don't know your strengths—maybe you're a little bit newer to the workforce or you're in a completely new lane that you haven't navigated before—you can think about how kids naturally go up the wall, which is not necessarily looking for one route in particular, just looking for what's the easiest way for me to get started and to start to figure out what does this feel like to navigate my way up here? And as you start to move up, you might realize, actually, it makes more sense for me to move out a little bit.


And when I move out, I'm actually really strong over here. When I need to move up—I've got some opportunity areas here. I'm a little bit weak here. OK, what do you think about working on those opportunity areas will help you to achieve your goals, and how can we make sure that you can do that in a psychologically safe environment where it's OK for you to fail? But as an employee, I also feel like, all right, I'm excited about this challenge that sits in front of me now because I have an understanding about how I tackle this in the first place. Some of this development might look like a step back. I did do rock climbing, and for me sometimes, as I'm making my way up the path, there are some sections where I'm going a little bit faster. And then I would pause, and I would go, nope, I missed something. And you backtrack a little bit.


But when you're backtracking, you have an opportunity to see a slightly different route, take a slightly different approach. In my own career, I have certainly decided to take a step to the side, a step back and down. I had done some amazing things, had an opportunity to open new offices and the first Office for Diversity and Multicultural Affairs and really get into some work that started, for me, aligning what I ultimately wanted to do with what I believed to be possible.


At the same time, I realized there were skill sets that I was missing that I knew if I had those that I could be even better in my role. It was a hard decision to make, for sure, but ultimately the right one to say, I'm actually going to move into another industry to work on that skill set, to make it a strength of mine, to say I'm going to do facilitation full time.


But because I hadn't done that before, technically, on paper, it looked like a step down, but for me, I knew I was just trying to add to my toolkit to be able to get up that wall and actually a bit back on that path that I was just a little further along it. There are lots of ways to kind of define success in your career.


It could be simply taking on more scope or stepping into a space that you haven't occupied before, and that's not necessarily moving up. We hear it a lot in the tech space as well—I want to be the best engineer that I can be, and I don't necessarily want to manage people. That doesn't mean that you don't care about the organization, but it also shouldn't limit the career success that you can have.


It has pushed a lot of organizations to consider, well, what is up? And is it actually out? That then allows us to say, this is the equivalent of this. If success was, you go from being an individual contributor to managing one person to managing a team to managing a department, can we kind of scope a parallel path for an individual contributor that's, I go for managing my work to I go to managing a set of projects to I go to managing a set of key initiatives that allows for folks to kind of see that scope growth in a very similar way. It allows for us to say, yes, you are taking on more, and therefore we can recognize this career ascension that doesn't look exactly the same as it does over here, and that's OK. The rock wall analogy allows for folks to step outside of some of the more traditional landscapes, step outside of some of the more boxed-in feeling that we tend to have around what does success look like and how can I define that success.


And it allows us to get a little bit more creative in thinking about, hey, actually, if I define success like X, then here is how I can make that happen.