As you'll see, the shift from dependency to self-direction results in a substantially different set of beliefs leading to a new perspective on one's career and employer.
Stepping Stones
Regardless of when these attitudinal shifts occur in one's career, they invariably form a foundation upon which the soon-to-become portable executive creates her own job. From this perspective, comes to view her employer as a vehicle that enables her to gainfully employ her skills at the highest level, regardless of whether she is working on an interim basis for a short period of time or on a long-term project for one organization. The executive learns to focus on the content of the assignment, consistently doing useful work and building value regardless of whether she is compensated or is working as a volunteer.
I view each new assignment as a stepping stone to improving her skill base and, as part of this commitment to constant learning, evaluate potential assignments or jobs in terms of what learning opportunities they offer and whether they will increase her qualifications for future assignments.
Thus, each step along career path is both rewarding and helps to lay the foundation for the next step. Michaelita Quinn has taken a stepping stone approach throughout her career. While she sensed early on that she had the talent for running a company, she approached each new position as a learning experience and a testing ground for her capabilities.
Quinn, who once held management positions on the nonprofit side of educational organizations, first recognized that she was better suited for the fast paced, results oriented for profit community. To pursue her goal, her next job involved starting and managing a profit center for a for profit education company that was opening in a number of major markets:
The company I worked for had an excellent training program, and I was on a steep learning curve. I captured the business end of the business particularly the marketing and sales area. I put all of these new principles into practice and competed successfully.
While there, Quinn was recruited by a competitor to become a corporate vice president. "For me," says Quinn, "that was the first step in expanding my scope and professional level." Over the next four years, she managed that company's field operations, human resources department, purchasing, and capital expenditures. Quinn then searched for and found a company that would offer her opportunity to advance to the next level of responsibility in the management structure that of executive vice president and chief operating officer. These moves were all made to increase her knowledge and responsibility as she moved toward her goal of becoming president of a company.
Quinn's step-by-step process enabled her to continually expand her core capabilities to the point that she reached her goal and became president and GOO of Stanley H. Kaplan Educational Center, Ltd., an $80 million subsidiary of the Washington Post Company. Armed with this wealth of experience, Quinn then started her own company, which specializes in business consulting to companies, colleges, and entrepreneurs. Quinn's story amply illustrates the advantages of operating with a portable executive mind-set: She carried her accumulated skills from one position to the next, in each instance adding specific experience that allowed her to advance to the next level. Those who become comfortable and successful as portable executives often engage in a continuous process of merging what they like to do with what they want to do in their work lives and use the stepping stone method, as Quinn did, to realize their vision of themselves as self-directed business entities.
While each executive evolves differently, as seen in the previous chapter's discussion of the searching period, a common process eventually emerges one of evaluating past experiences in terms of one's attributes and core capabilities and recombining those elements to meet the demands of the current marketplace. Executives often extend this process through some form of experimentation, which allows them to test these new combinations in developing a new, rewarding, fulfilling career. Allen Grossman's tryout period included numerous and varied assignments working in the not for profit sector on a pro bono basis- in order to add to his demonstrable skill set before interviewing for and getting a permanent position in the not-for-profit sector nine years later.
