Early in one’s career, you are learning new skills, language, and the industry. More importantly, you are developing values, a mindset, and a decision-making compass that will have a lasting impact throughout your career. These latter sets of “imprints” are harder to recognize, and if you are not explicit about them, you may not realize what’s holding you back from advancing, finding the right company/job fit, or becoming a great leader.
Consider a scenario where your manager constantly prevents you from speaking in public. Such behavior could lead you to believe that all managers are like this if you have very limited or no professional experience. Even if you manage to improve your public speaking skills later, you could still exhibit the same harmful conduct of keeping your team members back if you don’t acknowledge that your previous manager’s actions were unacceptable.
This is not unlike the child development paradigm. Although personality does play a role in determining some outcomes, it is widely accepted that even minor and disruptive experiences in the early years can have long-lasting effects. One can overcome unwanted traits or ways of thinking by acknowledging the impact of negative experiences and taking necessary measures to alter one’s habits and decision patterns. We now understand through extensive research on child development that the experiences during the formative years can significantly influence an individual’s approach toward future challenges and opportunities.
For example, General Counsels can come from a variety of backgrounds, such as corporate development, compliance, transactions, and litigations. If your company is engaging the legal team to enable advancing solutions and needs to take some measured risks for innovation, lawyers that “grew up” in transactions may be a great fit: trained to think about the upside as well as the downside, focused on closing the deals by incorporating both sides’ agendas, and have some appetite for risk. Conversely, if your company needs to prioritize risk mitigation above all others, say a legal and compliance team at a hedge fund, you may want to select a candidate with a strong background and early training in risk mitigation and compliance. While over the years, one can gain a variety of skills and experiences, how they were taught to define success early on often determines one’s inclinations.
Career imprinting is not something that can be caught up over time like skills. It is more about how you approach problem-solving, leadership and measure success at work. This is not only shaped by the type of work you repeatedly do and how your performance is defined but also by your manager’s influence and the company’s culture that initially calibrated your professional compass.
What does this mean for you?
For early career professionals
If you are early in your career and don’t have many examples of what great looks like, you need to actively seek them out: calibrate what you see with people outside your team or company who you respect. Your intuition should help you become more explicit about what habits you choose to adopt or leave them behind as “what not to do.”
Define what long-term happiness and success look like for you outside of titles and compensation. What types of problems do you want to be solving, and what principles do you want uphold, and what do you want the guardrails for your decisions to be (e.g., maximize innovation, optimize impact, minimal risks)? You should choose companies and jobs that prioritize these values.
For managers of early-career employees
Especially for early tenure employees, contextualize what you are teaching them: are the ways you communicate and want them to communicate unique to you and this company, or is it industry standard? Recognize the burden of responsibility you carry for early tenure team members for whom you may have an outsized impact on how they view their career success.
For leaders of departments and companies
Hire not only for the transferrable skillsets but also discern what experiences have shaped their mindsets, values, and decision-making compass. Most skill sets can be learned, and you will want to have managers and leaders in your company whose guiding principles fit the goals of the company. If you are looking to grow robustly, take risks, and disrupt the industry, you need to look for those for whom this approach is the “normal way to be.” A candidate with the right list of skillsets, a prestigious company on their resume, or even having done a similar role may not be the right person for the role if their decision-making was calibrated very differently.
For all
Take a moment to think about your career’s early years. Consider the habits you developed, the managerial style you adopted, and any biases or preferences that influence your decision making. It’s possible that you’ve carried these mindsets with you without questioning them. While some may be beneficial to keep, others may require you to decide if it’s time to unlearn them.
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