Is That Stretch Job Right for You?
Executive Summary
Stretch jobs are great opportunities to accelerate your professional development. But how can you tell if a role is going to be the right fit? The author offers six factors to consider, including whether you are able to craft a clear, coherent story about where you’ve been, where you are now, and where you plan to go next — with the targeted stretch job fitting nicely into the arc of the story, showing a logical career trajectory.
During the course of our careers, there are job opportunities that arise — either internally and externally — that seem appealing but may be a stretch, taking us beyond our current level of knowledge, skills, or experience.
Research from Hewlett Packard shows that women tend not to apply for jobs unless they are 100% qualified, whereas men apply when they are 60% qualified. Subsequent research shows that this difference is not so much about women’s confidence in their abilities as it is about their beliefs about the “hiring rules” — that the required qualifications are actually “required.”
Knowing that job “requirements” are essentially a wish list from employers and, given that our personal and professional growth is a function of how much we stretch and challenge ourselves, it’s worth applying for stretch jobs. But, how do you know if you are applying for the right position and the right amount of stretch? To make this assessment, consider the following factors.
Other people see you as a credible candidate.
It’s possible to have blind spots around your strengths, where others see qualities, talents, or potential in you that you don’t readily see. Further, in attaining higher-level positions, you may suffer from impostor syndrome and question your abilities or qualifications. Yet, if current or former colleagues, managers, mentors or friends who know you well believe that you can do the job and encourage you to apply, despite your own self-doubts, they may very well be correct that you are capable of doing the job. Francesca was a director of people at a start-up when her boss, the head of HR, pulled her aside to say that while he’d love her to stay at the company, he thought she was ready for the top spot and would support her in pursuing these opportunities elsewhere. She was completely surprised, as it hadn’t crossed her mind before, but it was just the right vote of confidence she needed to go for the top HR role at another start-up.
It scares you just a little.
Any new challenge comes with a bit of anxiety. If you feel this slight twinge of fear, but mostly get excited thinking about the prospect of getting the job, then this is a positive sign that this is a good step-up opportunity for you. Francesca found a great opportunity to not only be head of HR at another start-up, but to build this function from scratch. As she interviewed for the role, she found herself scared and excited at the same time. The scary part was that that she would now have the responsibility and ownership for making the high-stakes decisions, versus solely providing input into these decisions. It was her excitement about the company’s mission and the chance to build something new that helped her to move past these fears and know that it was the right role for her.
You can tell a coherent story.
In crafting a narrative around your career to date and desired future career progression, you are able to tell a clear, coherent story about where you’ve been, where you are now, and where you plan to go next — with the targeted stretch job fitting nicely into the arc of the story, showing a logical career trajectory. This is what Herminia Ibarra, author of Working Identity, refers to as “making sense” — re-framing or re-interpreting past career moves and creating compelling stories. If you are not able to create such a compelling story that makes sense to you and others, it may be that it is too much of a stretch for your immediate next role.
You’ve shown the ability to step up to new challenges and succeed in the past.
Having a track record in taking on new challenges and being successful in doing so, not only makes you a more compelling candidate to the employer, but also will help you assess your ability to “bridge the gap” for a prospective stretch job. The bigger the prior challenges you’ve tackled, the more you can feel confident in your ability to tackle the challenges of the stretch position to which you are considering applying. Francesca drew confidence from her prior move from management consulting to HR at her current start-up. Despite having neither HR experience, nor start-up experience, she was able to be successful in her role. Her boss had hired her because he saw her as both strategic and smart and knew that she was capable of learning the rest.
You have confidence in your resourcefulness.
While you may have little to no experience with certain aspects of the job, you have confidence in your ability to reach out to the right people and ask the right questions and are not bashful about leveraging your network. A phrase I often share with my clients who are facing a big, new challenge is “Nothing is rocket science, except rocket science.” So, unless you are applying for a technical job at NASA, you can likely figure it out. Francesca had no experience in employment law and other selected aspects of HR, but she knew she could outsource the specialties in which she didn’t have experience, and she had other relationships and advisors whom she knew she could engage to ask her “dumb questions.”
You have the right support to set you up for success.
As with any new opportunity, one way to know that this is the right stretch job is that it also provides you with the resources for you to be successful. This includes your ability to build the right team, as well as sufficient budget and decision-making authority to be successful. You likely won’t know these things until you are in the interview process but discerning these things will be a clear indicator if this is the right stretch opportunity, or if you’d be thrown in the deep end without a floatation device. The support needed to set you up for success also extends to your home life. If the job requires relocation, significant travel or long hours, having the right support at home can determine if it’s the right stretch opportunity for you right now. Francesca started her new role four months after having her first child. She could not have taken on this new position, and the long hours that came with it, if she didn’t have great childcare and the support from her spouse who took on extra duties at home.
Stretch jobs are great opportunities to accelerate your professional development. Before making the leap, use the above strategies to assess if the job you are considering is the right one for you.
One Common Personality Trait That Crushes Leadership Success, Value And Reputation
Part of the series “True Leadership Today”
Arrogance as a leader will thwart your success and impact, and your positive reputation
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Type in “bad boss” on your internet browser, and you’ll see well over one million references, including articles, videos, episodic shows, and more all about terrible bosses who make our lives miserable. Our pop culture seems to love the bad boss, and we also love to share hilarious memes of bosses like Michael Scott from The Office. And we cheer while watching the demise of terrible managers in box office hits like Horrible Bosses. I’ve written my fair share about terrible bosses, and had several in my corporate life and understand the challenge they pose to employees and organizational success. And in my work as an executive and career coach over the past 15 years, I’ve fielded countless queries about how to handle a destructive and even narcissistic boss.
Egregious executive behavior can play well on the silver screen, but it’s fraught with real-world consequences, as we all know. According to leadership experts Bill Treasurer and John Havlik, bad-boss behavior stems from all-too-common leadership tendencies (or seeds of those tendencies) that many of us carry within us: hubris, arrogance, and a proclivity to abuse power. If those tendencies go unchecked for too long, our leadership capability, reputation, value to the organization, and positive impact will be severely impacted.
In their new book, The Leadership Killer: Reclaiming Humility in an Age of Arrogance, the authors share that there is an antidote to the prevailing do-anything, say-anything, “because I can” culture today, and it’s humility. Retired U.S. Navy SEAL Captain John Havlik and leadership development expert and author Bill Treasurer compile decades of insights from advising global organizations and leading elite military special operations teams to pinpoint precisely where good leaders go bad, and, more importantly, how to recognize your own hubris and become more effective and humble. The book shares important information that will help leaders thrive by understanding:
To learn more about hubris and how it’s a top leadership killer, I was excited to catch up this week with Captain John "Coach" Havlik, U.S. Navy SEAL (Retired), who led special operations teams around the world during his 31-year naval career, including the Naval Special Warfare Development Group, the SEAL’s most elite operational unit. Captain Havlik was a nationally ranked swimmer and is a member of the West Virginia University Sports Hall of Fame and Mountaineer Legends Society.
Here's what Havlik shares:
Kathy Caprino: What inspired you and Bill Treasurer to write this book?
John Havlik: Bill and I renewed our friendship at a college swim/dive team reunion soon after I retired from the military in 2014. It was there that Bill invited me to speak about my SEAL leadership experiences at several of his Courageous Leadership workshops and seminars that he held around the country. As we prepped for these presentations, Bill and I would frequently talk, and almost always we found ourselves discussing a recent news story or headline about some leader in the military, business, corporate, or academic world being fired or relieved from their position because of doing something "bad" or "unprofessional" (i.e. stupid) in their job.
During one discussion, Bill mentioned that he was thinking of writing his fifth book and asked me if I would be interested in co-authoring it with him. Once we figured out that the theme of the book would be about the traits and actions that make good leaders go bad, I was on board.
Caprino: What are your 3 takeaways for readers on how to remain a humble, but effective leader?
Havlik: The top 3 takeaways from our book and experiences are:
Have a check
It's hard to self-manage your ego, so you need to have a "check," or someone you trust that has your back, and can call you out when you start acting or stepping out of bounds.
Walk the Deckplates
Learn to push away from your desk, "walk the deckplates," and talk with the people that work for you. In the Navy, the deckplate is where the actual work is done. The sailors on the deckplates are smart, and they'll give you honest feedback about what's going on around the command and unit. As a leader, the "ground truth" is almost always filtered as it rises up the chain of command through middle management (department heads) to the executive suites. I found if I really wanted to know what is going on around the command, I'd ask the sailors directly.
Open your mental aperture
As a leader, you're foolish to think you know it all. Constantly seek new information and feedback to prevent getting stale or complacent in your duties.
Caprino: Can you please share more about what you experienced and then learned about yourself when you had to get out of the Navy because of your “failure to promote?”
Havlik: In the Navy, an officer gets two opportunities to be selected for promotion to the next higher paygrade or rank, and if you aren’t selected by either of those two selection boards, you are involuntarily discharged from the active duty ranks for “failing to promote.” Unfortunately, that happened to me.
Leaving the Navy hit me hard, and I headed back to my parent’s home with my tail between my legs, and had to figure out what I was going to do with my life after 13 years of living the high life as a Navy SEAL. I hit rock bottom (the book explains this in greater detail) but I was able to make amends and resurrect my naval career.
What I learned about myself was that I wasn't the cocky, bad-ass SEAL that I thought I was. But I also learned that I had more to offer the Navy, and to get back on active duty, I had a lot of hard work ahead of me. Most importantly, I was proud that I didn't quit on myself when things got bad, and that the internal resolve and fortitude that carried me through swimming and through SEAL training was alive and well, and I used that resiliency to get back on active duty.
Caprino: How did it make you a better leader and SEAL officer?
Havlik: It humbled me big time and made me appreciate how much I loved the Navy and the second chance I was given to be an active SEAL again. I learned to not take myself too seriously, to learn about my people and listen to them. It also reinforced the concept that it's always about the mission, and not the individual.
Caprino: What would you have done differently when you were a young junior officer in the Navy and the SEALs?
Havlik: I would have focused on doing two things better:
Listen better
I should've listened to what people told me very early on when I first got into the Navy, and that was to find a mentor or "sea daddy" to help me manage my career. Because I was young, cocky and full of hubris, I thought that I knew it all and that I could do it myself, and I "tuned out" advice from my seniors as I progressed through my career. Very bad move on my part!
Get smart about office politics
I should've gotten smart on office "politics." I learned the hard way that the best and brightest don't always get promoted/advanced, and the reality is it's very often who you know that gets you the key career enhancing jobs/assignments.
Caprino: What was the best thing you did as a leader to make you more effective?
Havlik: As I mentioned earlier, the best thing I ever did as a leader was learning to push away from my desk and my inbox, talk, listen and learn from and about my people. Your subordinates need to know that you value them, their input and their knowledge. They want to know that you are humble enough to admit you don't know everything, and that you want to learn from them, regardless of rank.
For this to be effective, I did "walkabouts" of the command every Friday when I was the Executive Officer of a special operations boat unit in Panama. Whenever I was local and not on travel or leave, I would use the weekly "Field Day" to visit every department assigned to me, check the work space cleanliness that was part of my duties as XO, but most importantly, meet and talk with my sailors.
It was very uncomfortable and awkward at first, but through commitment and consistency on my part, the sailors learned over time that my weekly walkabouts were an opportunity for them to talk directly to leadership. Eventually, an invaluable rapport and trust between me and the sailors was built, mainly because we were talking to each on the same level (eye-to-eye), and I wasn’t talking down to them, as is the norm in most organizations.
Caprino: What makes excessive pride or arrogance a top leadership killer, over other behavioral traits?
Havlik: To me, excessive pride or arrogance (a.k.a. "hubris"), is the root that feeds all the other negative leadership behavioral traits. In our book, Bill and I write that hubris is the silent killer of good leaders, waiting to strike when the leader least expects it.
Arrogance feasts on uncontrolled power and success, and will lay wreckage to all the potential good a leader could have done had their hubris been “checked.”
For more information, visit The Leadership Killer: Reclaiming Humility in an Age of Arrogance.
To build your leadership strength and impact, join Kathy Caprino’s Career Breakthrough programs, and tune into her weekly Finding Brave podcast.
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Measuring our success: Which voices count when the numbers are in? And why?
One Girl international programs director Erica Berthelsen considers radically participatory programming and how it’s challenging the status quo of how they work in-country and achieving better results/relationships.
How do we know we’re really making a difference? Whose impact are we measuring? To what end – and how? And are we measuring the right change?
Limiting our “is-it-working” barometers to purely traditional quantitative and qualitative measurements can really reduce complex social and cultural change to mere numbers – and we are far too nuanced for this to be humane or realistic.
For example, let’s say that this year, your New Year’s resolution is to get fit and have more meaningful relationships.
You decide how to measure your goals and make the following basic assumptions:
X number of gym visits = fit
X number of coffee dates = good relationships
Come July 2020, you’ve been going to the gym and have rekindled some relationships you’ve been neglecting lately by scheduling in one coffee date and two gym sessions a week. Hurrah!
But in reality, how do we know you didn’t just drive to the gym, get on the treadmill for 10 minutes and give up? How do we know most of those coffee dates weren’t really painful tinder-style dates filled with awkward silences and repeated life stories?
Yes, yes, because we also collect qualitative responses. But…does this really give us the full picture? It completely depends on whether you answered honestly.
What about your relationships and the potential consequences of your responses? Or imagine the person asking you is your trainer and offers you a free pass to the gym for a year if you succeed?
I think you might fudge them… just a tad.
In any case, it certainly casts a bit of doubt on the effectiveness of evaluating our success through set questions or simply counting participation numbers. Because it doesn’t reflect the true story, it doesn’t see the full picture, the individual journeys, worlds and intentions.
We must question our own intentions and ask: who owns this change?
Working with culturally and linguistically diverse groups, we have to respect distinct ways of being, knowing and believing – and be prepared to work outside our own traditional systems if we are to see the full picture. Because these intersect in all aspects of life, and mean different things to different groups of people.
Typically, evaluation and research methods perpetuate the notion of them versus us. There is a clear power differential – one person asking, and the other responding. It doesn’t leave a lot of room for collective knowledge and belief systems. And by using this method, we’re potentially measuring change in a way that those involved aren’t able to gain or see the value in it. And isn’t that the whole point?
At One Girl, we challenge the status quo and use radically participatory methods – alongside the numbers of course. We take time and we listen actively. We speak to those who are participating in the programs to find out how they see change occurring. “What is the impact you want to see in your own community? How do you define and measure when it is achieved?”
For example, in many indigenous and collectivist cultures, messages are often conveyed through storytelling and art. So this is often how we design the “is-it-working-o-meter”. By using activities such as storytelling or group mural painting, power dynamics are dismantled and people are able to express themselves in a way they feel comfortable.
It’s a pretty enlightening journey and allows for spontaneous and organic findings, that can be celebrated by all involved. We’ve also used a method called PhotoVoice, where participants take photos related to a central theme. In one evaluation, many girls’ responses to what their education means to them, linked this with nature and kinship.
“I will grow [to be tall, strong, flourishing] just like the palm tree. I will have many branches, they represent my family, and I will help my family.”
For many people, the world is seen through a collectivist lens. The sometimes overused Zulu word Ubuntu, often translated as “I am because we are” encapsulates the essence of interpreting the world through others. It calls into question the colonial and individualistic lens we use to conduct research or evaluations.
This is contrasted with individualistic methods (eg asker versus responder), which although useful in some ways, can fail to highlight the nuances of how education and notions of success are interrelated with the natural and social environment.
But perhaps the most significant impact of radically participatory methods is that individuals and communities no longer have to play the role of passive subjects – they are actively valued, respected and included.
At One Girl, the girls we work with have to present in front of parents, elders and peers which contributes to their confidence, leadership and public-speaking skills. We find that using these culturally appropriate and participatory methods gives power and voice and the people themselves define the impact, which in turn, leads to stronger programs that are owned and celebrated by community members.
And importantly, we still gain a deep understanding of what we’re doing, if it’s working and how we can do it better. In new year’s resolution terms, co-creating something that describes how it feels to be rekindling those relationships or getting to the crux about whether the gym is really the best environment for you to get fit in, might be a more effective way to measure your success in a way that you can really understand and celebrate it.
Using these kinds of uplifting and inclusive approaches is committing to the creation of a more conscious and connected world.
A world where we don’t just aim for self-improvement but we recognise Ubuntu and commit to learning, listening, and acting together with first peoples and those close to the natural world.
About the author: Erica Berthelsen is the international programs director of One Girl, an organisation that harnesses the power of education to drive change for girls and their communities. She specialises in gender-transformative programming, indigenous cultural revitalisation and asset-based community development.
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