During this searching period, portable executives must come to understand themselves as "personal service business entities" rather than "employees of business entities." This is true even if they have already taken a short-term position to generate cash flow, or think that they would one day like to return to work for a large organization. The individual will learn, as he or she passes through the searching period, that employers today are simply vehicles through which portable executives deliver their skills. Every executive must be prepared for a marketplace where work assignments last finite, predetermined periods of time and individuals take full charge of their own career paths. To arrive at this new view of the relationship between an organization and an executive, individuals need to reconsider their attitude about themselves and those they work for.
Valuing Your Skills
Long-term employees often fail to recognize the value of their skills outside of the context of the organization they work for. Portable executives, on the other hand, perceive their skills as valuable assets that belong to them and are separate and distinct from the organizations they are currently servicing. While it may be relatively easy to accept this shift in attitude intellectually, the actual process involved requires a reevaluation of one's self-confidence, one's need for security, and one's risk orientation. This reevaluation gives emerging portable executives an opportunity to explore other applications of their skills that they might not have considered while working for their long-term employer. When Ed Burrell evaluated his own skill set, for example, he discovered he could take the chemical and treasury experience he developed while with Union Carbide and create a consulting and investment-banking boutique that focused on the chemical industry.
Relations with the Organization
The second attitudinal shift portable executives need to make is toward the relationships within the organizations they have worked for and those they will work for in the future. This is the shift from viewing oneself as an "employee of a business entity" to one of being an independent "personal service business entity," and while this shift may be subtle, it involves accepting the idea that one will work for multiple employers throughout a career, and that work on the basis of short-term projects will be a routine part of doing business and a way of life. Portable executive Sam Marks says:
I think there is even a criteria for ending a short-term assignment. The first part of completing an assignment as a portable executive is that whatever you agreed to do is now over. You walk away saying, "I've been paid a fee," and the CEO or whoever is rating you says that you either have or have not accomplished what you were supposed to do.
During this period of adjustment, portable executives must wrestle not only with the loneliness of working alone or in small groups, but also with the additional responsibilities of running their business, a task once handled by their employers.
Probably one of the more significant shifts in attitude concerning relations with organizations and those within them is that they seek cooperative, rather than competitive, relationships with those they work with. This is a result of the fact that the content of the work and completion of the task assigned are their primary motivators, rather than, as in organizational set-tings, rank, title, or status.
Measurement of Success
As portable executives move toward self-direction, they must reexamine their definition of "success," which can initially be very troubling. Must first see herself as independent of any organization she is currently servicing. Then she must come to see that success is not measured by the organization, but is based on the quality of the job done and the results actually attains. It is no longer enough for an executive to satisfy the organization she is servicing; she must now satisfy the standards of quality she has set for herself. Adopting a set of self-imposed quality standards may require a significant shift in attitude.
