To Reinvent Your Career, Start by Dreaming Up a New You

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0:37What propels you? Propel with Gatorade Electrolytes.

0:54Herminia Ibarra:Welcome to Harvard Business Review's The New World of Work. I'm Adi Ignatius, Editor-in-Chief of Harvard Business Review. Each week I put on the white shirt and the blue blazer and I interview a CEO, a thought leader, or somebody else who can inspire and educate us on the changing dynamics of the workplace. Our viewers come from all over the world, and they work at everything from Fortune 500 corporations to fledgling startups, from family businesses to nonprofits. The aim of this show is to provide insights for everyone as they navigate this transitional moment in how we organize ourselves in the business world.

1:28Herminia Ibarra:On today's episode, we have another great guest, Herminia Ibarra, a professor of organizational behavior at London Business School. I'm going to come back with a proper introduction for her in just a moment. But first, let's hear from our good friends at KPMG, who are our sponsors for this season of The New World of Work. At KPMG, it's our people who make the difference for our clients. Talented teams leveraging the right technology to uncover insights that illuminate opportunity. Ready to make the difference together?

2:05Herminia Ibarra:Now, before we get started, if you're an HBR subscriber watching this, you can head to hbr.org slash newsletters to sign up for the New World of Work newsletter, where I offer an inside look each week at each of these interviews and talk about some of the most interesting takeaways. Also, if you like content like this, please consider subscribing to our magazine and website. The address is hbr.org slash subscriptions. And if you like hearing smart people talk about some of the same issues we discuss in this show, be sure to check out our flagship podcast, IdeaCast, available wherever you get your podcasts.

2:37Herminia Ibarra:And remember, you can watch previous episodes of this show on YouTube or right here on LinkedIn and Facebook. So my guest today is Herminia Ibarra, a professor of organizational behavior at London Business School. Her work has focused for years on leadership and organizational transformation, and she is increasingly becoming the go-to person on the topic of career transitions. Herminia is a prolific author, and two of her books are coming out next month in updated editions. One is Act Like a Leader, Think Like a Leader, and the other is Working Identity, Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career.

3:16Herminia Ibarra:Full disclosure, HBR Press is the publisher of both books. So, Herminia, welcome. Thank you so much. Hi, Adi. It's great to see you. It's great to see you as well, and great to have you on the show. As I said, I want to talk a lot about career transitions, but I want to give a little context first. And, you know, I know your view is that this is an era of constant career reinvention, and I want to hear you talk a little bit about why you think that's so. Yeah, and you know, I've been studying career reinvention for over 20 years now, the first edition of Working Identity was 20 years ago. And the trends just keep accelerating.

3:54I think, if anything, we are reinventing ourselves and reinventing our careers more so. Just really quickly, there's four things that are really contributing to this. We're living longer and longer. And so as we live longer, we don't want to have a kind of a long slide from age 40, because we could easily be working another 40 years. And so we want to make the most of it. That's one. Two is technology. I don't have to say much about that, but it is changing everything. It is disrupting jobs. It is creating new jobs. It's allowing us to work from anywhere. And so it creates a very interesting context for being able to reinvent yourself.

4:33The third one is our companies, organizations, our workplaces. They are constantly disrupted, too. This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome? That's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required, compatibility and availability varies 18+. Propel Fitness Water.

5:08With Gatorade electrolytes, zero sugar, and vitamins, Propel hydrates better than water. to help you get the most out of your workout and get back to your best self. What propels you? Propel with Gatorade Electrolytes. It creates opportunities, but that also creates challenges. We've seen a huge wave of layoffs recently in the tech world, for example. Now people in the financial sector are struggling with high interest rates and what that means for their products, and the list goes on. And so we don't stay in jobs as long as we used to, either by choice or by necessity as we are asked to leave them.

5:45And the fourth of the trends, and this one's been going a long time, is that what we expect out of a job has changed a lot. It used to be providing a stable living. We want everything from our jobs. We want passion. We want purpose. We want self-fulfillment. We want flexibility. We want so much from them, and we're increasingly impatient and wanting to move on if we don't get those things.

6:07Herminia Ibarra:Okay, so that's good context. And by the way, if you're watching this, if you have questions, your own questions for Herminia, put them into the chat and I will try to get to as many as possible later in the show. Right. So if career reinvention, if the need for reinvention is such a sort of standard aspect of the contemporary business world, why are we having so much trouble still trying to carry it out? Yeah. And that's the one thing I've learned. It's really hard. It's really hard. It takes longer than people think. A couple of things. One is most people, this is what I learned first. Most people know what they don't want to do anymore, but they don't know exactly what they want to do instead.

6:45And since they don't have the answer, and I'm going to come back to this, they don't know what to do. They don't know how to search when they don't know exactly what they're searching from. So that's one. Another one is what we do is who we are. It's such an important part of our identity. And even losing a job that we didn't like is a huge loss because it was what we did. It was the people we spent time with. It was what structured our time. We built up to that. We invested in that. And so the sense of psychological loss is a big barrier. The last one we can talk more about if you like, but increasingly, particularly from mid-career on, when we change careers, we're moving into something different.

7:25It's not a kind of a linear, more of the same at a higher level. it's something different. And those transitions, I call them under institutionalized. And what I mean by that is that the steps are not clear. It doesn't you don't know how long it's going to take. You're not doing it with other people in long step is not clear who the role models are. You know, if you want to be a partner in a law firm, you know what the steps are might be hard, but you know what the steps are in the timeframes. If you're a law, a lawyer who wants to be say, an entrepreneur in the arts, that's under institutionalized.

7:58There isn't particularly an educational program that you go to or specific different people move into that in very different ways. And so it's not clear. It's more uncharted. It's unclear how to go about it.

8:12Herminia Ibarra:So I want to come back to the first point you talked about, which is that we're not that good maybe at figuring out what our possibilities are. And I identify with that. I mean, you know, most of the jobs I've had have, have, you know, somebody has, has come to me and said, would you like to do X? And even when it's a career shift, it's like, I didn't think of it, somebody else did. And so, you know, it's worked out fine. I love my job, but, but, you know, there's a lack of agency that I think a lot of people feel in terms of getting control, what I want to do with my work life, with my career.

8:44Herminia Ibarra:And, you know, is there advice on how to, how to kind of think clearly about possible next sets? Yeah, I've got loads of it. One of the things is we've got to get away from the thinking that if you don't know the answer, if you don't know the goal or the target career, you should just wait and reflect until you've figured it out in your head because that's actually not how we figure it out. I mean, it's great when people come to you with propositions. It can be dangerous, too, because sometimes those things are too close to what you were doing already. And if you do want to make a change, they may not be the best fit.

9:19but much, much more important than... This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required, compatibility and availability varies 18 plus. propel fitness water with gatorade electrolytes zero sugar and vitamins propel hydrates better than water to help you get the most out of your workout and get back to your best self what propels you propel with gatorade electrolytes trying to figure it out is to experiment and to instead of thinking what's the one ideal job for me what might be 10 or what might be six organizations or what might be five different pathways I could take and start exploring them in parallel simultaneously because you learn as you go along.

10:21Sometimes the things you thought you wanted are not exactly, don't pan out to be all you dream them to be, for example. Sometimes it's harder and it takes longer. You've got to do something else in parallel. So the first clear bit of advice and way of doing this successfully is come up with a list of possibilities. I call them your possible selves and start exploring one, two, ideally more than one in parallel.

10:50Herminia Ibarra:So I had a conversation with a headhunter at one point and they were asking me about my job. And I said, well, you know, it ticks all my boxes. I like this aspect. I like this, you know, I feel good about it. I feel like I'm doing something important. And I said, and everyone feels that, right? And the person said, nobody feels that. So if you're in a situation like that, you're you're very lucky. I'm interested, and you sort of hinted at this before about the extent to which people feel satisfied in their work. Like, like how much satisfaction can we expect from our work? It is work and it's not necessarily our life, although it's a part of it.

11:27Herminia Ibarra:You know, from your experience, your research, you know, how many of us feel generally satisfied in our jobs? And, And, you know, is that the norm or do we have to accept something less? Yeah, I mean, you know, the general surveys show a lot of dissatisfaction and that comes and goes. There's periods of that and there's sectors. It's important to think that every, you know, a job is not monolithic. A job comes with my job. I love my job. It ticks all my boxes, too. But there's parts of my job I really don't like that feel like grunt work. And there's parts that I love and every job is like that.

12:02So it really is a matter of proportion is by and large. Are you mostly doing the things that you find fulfilling? There's lots of people out there who are not satisfied. They may have been, but over time, either they have changed or their organization has changed or the people with whom they work have changed. and they're no longer happy about those elements. They don't feel as challenged. They don't like and respect the people they work with. They don't align with the organization's mission. All of those things create a dissatisfaction. And my sense, from talking to my students, from doing my research, is that there's a lot of people who are dissatisfied out there today.

12:43Herminia Ibarra:So I want to build on that, actually, with a question that's come in from Hassam in Rotterdam. And the question is, how do you envision the evolution of the, quote unquote, employee experience in a world increasingly dominated by hybrid work models? You know, it's so funny. I was also looking on the website that was announcing this talk. And that's all anybody wants to talk about is how is it going to play out with hybrid? And the thing is, I do not have a crystal ball. I don't know. All I know is that organizations are still trying to figure it out and they're still playing with different ways and trying to understand the employee experience.

13:24But I really that's a that's a question I can't I can't answer.

13:29Herminia Ibarra:Yeah, well, it's we'll we'll we'll keep talking about it show after show and eventually we'll we'll get some knowledge. So, all right. Here's another here's another question from a viewer. This is from Ellie from Switzerland. So it's an interesting question. So how should we think about the balance? If you switch careers, you jeopardize some of the seniority you've built up and the benefits and positives that you've accrued. How can we avoid that or how can we think about that tradeoff? Yeah, I mean that's another big question. Am I going to have to start at the bottom?

14:12like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required. Compatibility and availability varies 18+. Propel Fitness Water. With Gatorade electrolytes, zero sugar, and vitamins. Propel hydrates better than water to help you get the most out of your workout and get back to your best self. What propels you? Propel with Gatorade Electrolytes. A way not to do that. It depends on what you go on to do next, right?

14:49You know, one person I've been interviewing extensively over the last couple of years was chief compliance officer at her organization, and she's become a documentary filmmaker. She had to start at the bottom as an apprentice, right? So it depends. Other people move into something that's more adjacent, maybe doing it more entrepreneurially, and they don't have to. they can really leverage the skill set and the experience that they've had, albeit in a very different role and setting. So it depends a lot. People try to solve this by going back to school, and that can help a lot by kind of rounding you out.

15:28But what everyone forgets is that there's also, it's not always up and up. So you're saying, okay, I'm here. If I make a change, I'm going to be here, whereas I could continue moving up. And that may well not be the case. The world is changing. Jobs are disappearing. And if you're not happy and productive in what you're doing, the curve could well be declining too. And you've got to take that into account.

15:54Herminia Ibarra:So the other topic that seems to be on everyone's mind is AI and specifically generative AI. And I don't, you know, you don't necessarily have a view on this, but, you know, this feels like one of these existential, I mean, we're always wondering, will technology take our jobs? And sometimes it does. You know, with generative AI, we're all asking it at a kind of heightened, with a heightened sense of concern. And, you know, are you thinking about this and how this, all these topics that you research, how this changes or doesn't change or accelerates, you know, everything you're thinking about?

16:29Yeah. I mean, we're thinking about it as an institution at London Business School. I'm trying to use it as much as I can. I'm interested in how it's changing people's jobs. You know, it's funny today, right before this, my 18 year old walked in and said, you know, mom, we're talking about this in school. And I think I'm always gonna remember this day because it's gonna be like, you know, for you, if you remember the first time, you know, your first cell phone or, you know, it's gonna change everything. And that was in the context of his school trying to contain it and not allowing them to use it in any which way, which of course he felt was not in keeping with the future.

17:06But it's another one of those. From my perspective, what I'm interested in is how's it going to transform how people work together? Who does what? What organizations emerge? We don't know the answers to those questions. We know we need to be asking big questions about alignment with values. We know from the whole wave of digital transformation that there's the technological part, but then there's the whole other part, which is how is it used? And is the organization able to use it? Are people able to adapt and make the most of it? All of those things remain to be seen, but certainly it is worth experimenting with, keeping an eye on it, studying, asking the good questions.

17:56Herminia Ibarra:So here's a question related to technology. This is from Bhaskaran in Bangalore. As I said, we have viewers all over the world. And Bascarone says, after working for 21 years in HR, they decided to move to a smaller organization, expecting it to be nimble, agile, and all that. It turned out to be highly toxic. So the question Bascarone is saying, they long for a new role in organization, but have this constant fear of uncertainty. How does one deal with this inevitable fear of uncertainty when one is thinking about making a move? completely understandable. And unfortunately, often the process of making a career change can be one step forward, two steps back and so on.

18:42Now you've learned something. And I think part of what you've learned... This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required compatibility and availability varies 18 plus. Propel fitness water with Gatorade electrolytes, zero sugar, and vitamins.

19:16Propel hydrates better than water to help you get the most out of your workout and get back to your best self. What propels you? Propel with Gatorade electrolytes. is that you need to really research much more carefully the context in which you're going to and get a flavor of them as much as you possibly can. Now you've learned to inquire much more about culture, to talk to the people, to research the organization. All of that is really important. It's one of the reasons why in the studies that I have done, oftentimes the uncertainty of, I don't know what I want, I don't know how long this is going to take, starts to get at people.

19:55And then all of a sudden an option comes up, an offer, you know, with the smaller, more nimble firm. And it seems it's the savior. So I'm going to take it because otherwise, you know, I'm still in the throes of what am I going to do without researching it as much as we might, without really looking into what is it that matters to me. And it's really important to make time for that. So you're going to need you're going to in any case, you're out of there. And so by necessity, you're going to deal with uncertainty, but maybe research a bit more carefully.

20:29Herminia Ibarra:And I feel like we're talking about two things. One is how to think about a career transition moment, you know, how to be proactive and smart about that. But then about, all right, you've made the move. How do you transition successfully into this new role? And, you know, I'd love to hear you talk a little bit more about that. OK, we've made the move from a company to B company. You know, then how do we how long should we give ourselves? How tough should we be on ourselves? Should we read the first 90 days? I mean, you know, how do we how do we transition? The first 90 days remains the Bible on that topic.

21:01So that one I give to Michael Watkins. And it's it's really and what he says to start with, with the first 90 days, which also goes to the previous question, is the first 90 days actually starts way before with doing your homework and talking to people and finding out the stakeholders. Michael has this lovely idea about the, I think it's the five conversations that you need to be able to have with your boss or wherever your key stakeholders are about what the expectations are, about how you're going to be measured, about the key topics so that you're going in recognizing the interdependence between your success and that of other people in the organization.

21:43Herminia Ibarra:So I want to shift gears a little bit, although it's all sort of related, and to talk about authenticity, another topic that you have researched and written a lot about and are kind of an expert on. I feel like most conversations that I have about leadership, at some point it evolves into a conversation about the need for total authenticity at work. My sense is you have a more complicated take on all this. So how should leaders think about the authenticity question. Yeah. And this total authenticity stuff drives me nuts. What is total authenticity? Is it say whatever crosses your mind? Is it dress how you might dress at home on a Sunday to go take a walk in the park?

22:26What does that mean? I think there's a lot of fluff in all of this. What's the definition of authenticity? Is it a trait? Is it an outcome? a process of learning about yourself and trying to be as much yourself as possible. I don't think it's a trait. I think it is a process of learning. And for me, the question is, how can you, we want to be authentic. Nobody likes a fake. Nobody follows a fake. It's bad for your mental health. So, you know, I'm all for it. I'm just, the question I ask is, how can you define authenticity in a way that doesn't condemn you to being as you always have been. We grow, we evolve, we're multiple, we have different facets, different aspects of who we are that play out.

23:15And we need to be able to express that complexity and also ask, what does it mean to be authentic when I'm learning, when I'm learning? This is great when it's habitual. Queen Carvania stood haloed by the morning sun, an army hung on her every word. My champions, I have sold my chariot on Carvana. It was a lovely SUV, an inexplicably queenly offer. They're even coming to the castle to collect it. Tonight, we feast. An offer you can feast on. Sell your car today on Carvana. Pick up fees, Mayfay. Starting a business can seem like a daunting task, unless you have a partner like Shopify. They have the tools you need to start and grow your business.