Creating a Meaningful Second Career

Anita Brick: Hi, this is Anita Brick, and welcome to CareerCast at Chicago Booth. To help you advance in your career. Today we're delighted to be speaking with Anita Hoffman all the way from London. So thank you for making that time. She is the managing director of Execute Diva. Is that how it's pronounced?

Anita Hoffman: Yes, it's a Spanish word. Execute means female executive.

Anita Brick: Wonderful. It's a boutique executive, career transition, coaching, and search firm. She's a visiting fellow at the Cranfield University's Doughty Center for Corporate Responsibility and author of a wonderful book, Purpose and Impact. She has held senior executive positions at Exxon, Dow Corning, Deloitte Hydrocarbon Struggles and a few others as well. She's a fellow of the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, which is a society to enrich the world through ideas and action. And certainly, Anita, your book is doing that.

Anita Hoffman: It was a real labor of love, and it's really the book that I would have liked to have several times over in my three career changes, the principles of how we do this applied to everybody. The only thing that is different as we get later in our careers, is to be aware of the fact that when we leave our corporate jobs, often in our 50s, we are closing professional doors.

We should be aware of that. The other thing is, I don't think most of us realize just how long we're going to live and how long we will have to work, both because we need to finance a much longer life. Many of us who don't live close to a hundred. And also how are we going to enjoy our lives? Think about how many different possible positions you've had, even if you're in your 30's. You of course want to go on to develop. Also as you go through your life, to learn these skills is really important going forward.

Anita Brick: Well, I know you talk about in your book and we actually had a question about this. You talk about living and putting our career in a permanent beta state. Yes. So this one says the question for me is who has the time? How can you advise me to maybe make a low time investment so that I don't get caught 10 or 20 years from now? Not being prepared?

Anita Hoffman: Yes. And it's a very good question. How did your students make time to do a part time MBA? It's my question. We have to prioritize some things, obviously, but it isn't necessary a lot of time. Many of the people I've coached, but I ask them when they have time as adults because of family and this and all the things that, well, what do you do on the train going to work in the morning.

And they go, oh, I read the newspaper so well, could you send a few emails to people or read the different articles? I'm just the general news and then go off course at home. So they take the commute time because they can't do confidential work anyway. Another one of my clients, because he flies around Europe, he takes his morning flights at least once a week, an hour, thinks about what people are going to meet, etc. people find an hour here and there and it isn't really an enormous amount of time.

It's more about the continuity. This is not a sprint, it's a marathon. If you skip a little time, I will, you know, read one article, send one email and whatever a day, and maybe meet somebody new once a week or every two weeks. It will add up to learning how to do this. And once we start to do it, it doesn't feel like it's a chore. It is just really interesting and exciting and it's not a different thing. It's just part of how we live our lives.

Anita Brick: And to that point, there are a couple of questions. One from an alum and one from a student about how do you do that in a practical way, when you're working full time? So the alum, she said, I read that people lay the groundwork for a second, meaningful career through experiments at their current employer. How do you advise someone like me to start without looking like you're using your employer's resources to leave?

Anita Hoffman: And I thought that question was so beautiful. There are really two parts of this. One is, if you're really planning to leave, that's a different project. We should do those external things in our own time. If it's really a project to leave because we don't want to be where we are. What I talk about in the book, when we start to figure out what they're passionate about, often there is a way of incorporating this into the company's strategy and therefore into our jobs, which means it's perfectly legitimate to spend time on it.

You can't, of course, sell to the organization. That's something that has no value to them. So it's about doing all the pre-work upfront and figuring out what am I going up? What am I passionate about? Could this fit into the organization and what value would it bring and sell that inside the organization? Just like with the cell and the other change? And it should say basically that's an example. Maybe just MacDonald at Unilever, who was one of the good picture directors. He's very passionate about mental health and he was very open about this. He has suffered from depression himself and the good health he got from Unilever. And he realized that externally we're talking about improving the wellbeing of half a billion people.

How about the wellbeing of our own people? So he built his own passion around mental wellbeing into his job at Unilever. And you could say this is an HR person, but it could have come from somebody else. It's about sitting there, what you're passionate about, delivering value to the company, then it's not taking time from the company or looking as if you're leaving. And when you then learn how this works, you build networks on the outside and you start to become a contributor to whatever community that you're interested in. So Jeffrey was mentally healthy, right? You become a natural person that people come to, and one day somebody will say, how about the job over here? And it's often not necessarily to say, I'm going to change careers. Most people just have a passion for something and incorporate it in the job, someday they realize they want to make it their full time career. So there is nothing actually underhand at all.

Anita Brick: About this, I would agree. I think that the bigger message in the book, all of these new related skills actually enhance us where we are right now and prepare us for the future.

Anita Hoffman: Exactly. We become better leaders for where we are, and we become much more relevant for the world we live in.

Anita Brick: Sometimes people can, and it doesn't really matter how many years of experience they have or their age. They can kind of get stuck in a rut and without that perpetual learning. You talk about that in the book too much, and certainly I'm a big fan and personal proponent of that. Without that, you can be obsolete early in your career, not just later in your career.

Anita Hoffman: You can, if you're too need to specialize in a let's say, a function not as needed any longer, it's very easy to get the bitter end to a dead end, and they don't want to be that. That's why we want to always be working on plan B. As Reid Hoffman says in the startup of You with a beta testing, I'm doing a, but I'm also developing new things D for the day when I might need. It's an author incorporated in my job, or I leave when I don't leave. But I've learned a lot of things that make me a better leader too.

Anita Brick: Well, there is a question related to the point that you've been making from a student who said, I pursued a meaningful subject matter with deep cross-functional and specialty knowledge and 13 years of experience. How can a second career allow me to use these skills more broadly? Tackling bigger issues not day to day, but systematic issues? I have great perspective but know where to use it.

Anita Hoffman: We should come back again to you know, what I talk about in the book that we call the Transformational Career Assets, which sounds very fancy, but it's really knowing about yourself what you do. And would you like to do all these things? Being open to new experiences and building strategic networks for somebody who is a functional expert or built up, really the subject matter expertise, a lot of this is about learning to work cross-sector.

That's where the systems change work. In these coalition collaborations between sectors, you learn how to work with the other sectors, so you develop what we call the tri-sector scale. Ideally, if you can work in all three sectors, but two people managed to do that. But by working like that and going out to work on projects with people or meeting people, you start to become the player that they want to draw on and gradually you can have a much bigger impact on system change.

Anita Brick: I really like that, but it takes courage and I think it also takes an ability to have people around you comfortable with this modified identity, because if people are used to you being a certain way, a couple things can happen. When we begin to change. Either they reject that or they just feel uncomfortable or, you know, in some cases ill embrace it. But how do you help people come along with you?

Anita Hoffman: Two part two. This one is where most of the discomfort goes on inside ourselves. It's about learning to become comfortable with being uncomfortable as you are on your journey, because it takes quite a long time before you feel completely established in a new identity or a new type of work or whatever. But when we start out, it's not about declaring to the world what we are doing before we know what we are doing, so to speak, because it talks about this job crafting, like to do things that are just a part of your job.

In the beginning, nobody normally has an issue with doing a normal job in a part of a job is something else, is not wildly, crazily different. And gradually, if they see value, they start to accept that, oh, I missed those doing that as well. That's interesting. It's really valuable. But it's to not declare big things suddenly because that never works very well. People need time to adjust to your new identity, and just taking step by step over time is what I see how work.

Anita Brick: But it goes back to those experiments that we talked about earlier. Sometimes we project onto other people the discomfort that we actually have. And the question I asked about the change of identity actually came from an alarm. He was concerned about other people coping with his new identity. And maybe the truth is that he was having challenges coping with his own life.

Anita Hoffman: Flux.

Anita Brick: Identity.

Anita Hoffman: Yeah, I'm just using myself as an example. You know, when I was in industry and I decided I wanted to go and work in management consulting when I had never met a management consultant so far in my life, I don't really know what specialty consultants I spent time with, friendly friends of friends, or in consulting and talked about, you know, what do I do? And most of what I do today when I was marketing director for that corner, and a lot of the stuff I do is so useful for consultants. And how should I talk about this? What's the language of consultants? They helped me to re-articulate what I was doing so that when I spoke to consultants, they could see that even if I came from industry, it was only a small gap for what they needed to teach me, for me to become an effective consultant.

So it's about that articulation of what you're trying to do for the audience you're aiming for. But internally, you're you and what you've been doing. And then gradually you add the new things. After a while, you get quite comfortable with being uncomfortable. Also, on the outside, sometimes people say, no, how do I present myself? All you need to do, they're not present, but I'm an investment banker, but I'm really interested in impact investing and I'm trying to do some projects to learn more about that. And that's all you need to say to people you know. They are perfectly clear. Well good.

Anita Brick: Point. There was a student who was concerned about making some kind of transition without actually leaving his company. There's a few questions within this question. There's a second career. I mean, the same thing as creating another stream of income. Or are you talking about completely changing careers? My job has strict rules that prevent or severely limit my engaging in other work. How do I make a second career? And more importantly, how can I create time since I'm so busy with my current career?

Anita Hoffman: That is a good question. So first of all, no, I'm not talking about a second income stream. It's about how do we continuously develop ourselves to grow and grow and do things that we want to do? The question about restrictions, and I understand that very well. When I worked in Deloitte, you almost audits every company in the world, so you can't go and do things for companies to be on their board or whatever.

It's forbidden. However, most companies allow you to, for example, to work for a non-profit system as a trustee. Many firms also have bono work, can do so many hours of pro-bono work a year, etc. and that's a way of finding the way to learn new things and incorporate that into your career. Because as you say, we are old.

They say it can be incredibly hard in the beginning to even think about it. If you ask yourself if you're so busy in your current career, and if you're happy with that, it's not clear that maybe it's time to start looking for another career. But if you really don't like working 24 seven and always being on, maybe it's time to think about taking some of your time. Only pay you for so many hours a day, some thinking about what you want to do going forward.

Anita Brick: I think this is a tricky thing. I believe it's more common to have people doing a side gig, as long as it is not competing with conflict with using employer resources and all of that. I like the idea of the nonprofit. Do you think it also applies to the startup world? As long as the startup isn't a potential competitor of your employer?

Anita Hoffman: Yes, I do, as long as they're not the competitors these days. There's so much going on that you should be able to find startups. And even here there are social enterprises that are startups as well, right? Right. So they should be able to find something that fits within the company's rules.

Anita Brick: Got it. So speaking of startups, a student said, from the studies you reference, purpose positively correlates with greater profitability. As I am launching my own startup, how do I infuse it with more purpose?

Anita Hoffman: How many days do we have to talk about this? That is a very big question, but let's.

Anita Brick: Start with a.

Anita Hoffman: Few minutes. One thing is about the startup and then adding purpose. I would suggest just starting with your purpose and creating your startup. Because purpose is really about why do we exist? What is the social problem we're actually solving? To take a concrete example of big companies. So when Unilever started out many years ago, their purpose was to bring hygiene to home to lower the illness rates in the UK. This started in the UK. So that's how they built a company. Over time. They also add things like making this product, selling it to the public. How do we also make it good for our own work? There's something about hygiene, so the principle of that is all you need to put into your company. So what problem solving, what social good of a bringing.

And also look at the business model, also your internal culture and all the rewards etc.. And if you want to quickly start to look at some of these things, if you go and look at the criteria for becoming a for benefit corporation, a, B Corp, there's a lot of these things in there. What I see sometimes is, you know, you have a startup, some kind of them people try to bring on purpose, but it's really about why you exist. If it didn't exist, would anybody care? Are we doing something good for everything? Like they say, you're building a mental health app. You know, that brings real benefits. And then. But also if you don't have a company that's really infused, its purpose is like, that's how you build your whole company, how you deal with people, your customers, your employees, and everybody build into that purpose.

Anita Hoffman: So that was a very big question.

Anita Brick: That was a very big question. You were right. I don't know. This is a smaller question, but it's another leadership question. This one said, I really like the idea of incubating ideas and handing them off to a team to scale. In your experience, how do you find the kind of team who is willing to and capable of doing that?

Anita Hoffman: So this is no different than when you start up a company and build your team. If you have in mind that not many people have this, startups do. So say, I'm going to build this to a certain level because that's what I'm good at. And then I'm going to step back as chairman, which means you recruit the team or collaborators around you. That can take it over when you think it's time to take a step back. and it's also really good because you will attract people who would like to run with it once you step back. Whereas if you're really in the driving seat and saying, know I'm going to be here, and maybe one day I will hand it over, it's different. People will join you more because you are the driver, but if you're from the beginning, very clear about recruiting a team that is going to take this over, you can really find the people who will run with it once you step back.

Anita Brick: Okay, that makes sense. There is a concept in the book that you talk about, which I think is a really important one. And like I said, I will talk about it a little bit. I find that people who want to make a shift or a pivot or a career change, regardless of the stage of their career, falter if they don't have sufficient in what you call contextual intelligence. Maybe you can tell us a little bit about what that is and have that, or how having that makes a person more agile and enduring.

Anita Hoffman: Yes. Just like the person who talked about how I move from daily work to the systems change? You have to understand systems change to be able to be effective, so that in the sense with contextual intelligence, means to understand both in the same subject matter. But how can change happen in this space that I'm working in? So it's about reading, meeting people, talking to people and understanding how change is achieved. Or when you start to understand that you can suggest solutions, you can work with people on solutions, and you become a very valuable member of whatever constellation you're in. But if you don't understand how decisions are made and how change is made really won't work.

Anita Brick: It's a little bit tricky because I think sometimes people get impatient. I was chatting with someone not that long ago and I said, well, tell me what you know about this new field. And it was not that in-depth. But I asked him, I said, how can you take this deeper? He was like, I didn't know that I needed to go that deep, but I think in order to meet people and not sound like an outsider, you do need to dive a little bit the both in terms of the content that you need to know, but also the context in which it is used for your new you're your new field. I'm so glad that you talked about that, because it seems like it is a crucial, crucial component of an effective change.

Anita Hoffman: It is. Absolutely. If you think about the example I used about, you know, how I talk to consultants is to understand what's important to other people, but then also have a special way to bring them. The consulting example is quite a good one because they have a concept called ZT, the top of the TS. It's shallow. You need to know a little bit about lots of stuff, and the stem of the T is your particular unique expertise. It's important to have something that you're really knowledgeable about so that people come to you, say, you know, this person really knows about that aspect of the problem we're trying to solve.

Anita Brick: It really is so important to simultaneously be a generalist and a specialist. An expert.

Anita Hoffman: And that's a bit unique when you start to work with, I think with societal issues, especially as we go up higher and higher in organizations, we've become more and more generalist. We are not used to consuming as much expert content. We have to kind of rediscover our love of studying again, which is great for most people, but it's just the muscle we haven't used for quite some time. But we do. Even if you're a CEO of a company and you want to go and work in another field, you really have to study this to get on top of the content and you try to work between sectors.

Anita Brick: Oh yeah. Absolutely. I found that I really found it when I was reading the book. Quite interesting that, you know, you talk about how in most companies, people are viewed as assets for what they can do. And there historically have been little or no career development for people to look at, why do they want to do and all those kinds of things. And I think that there have certainly been leaders in this area, McKinsey being one of them, to help employees develop career development skills. And so the question from an alum, which goes right into this is what are a couple of career development skills that will be important for me to actually have when I am 50, 60 or even 70?

Anita Hoffman: Yes. And it's one of my particular soapboxes, as we call it here. What companies do or organizations do to teach us promotion skills? How do I get promoted in this organization? They don't teach us how to actually think of and develop our careers. So we learned about all the skills for how you can do good internal change. But we don't learn how to develop our careers.

The question about 56 to 70 is it’s no different than when you're 30. And it's back to my little trilogy of self knowledge of being open to new experience and to build strategic networks. As I say, you know, you will not discover your new career, your purpose by sitting in your office talking to the same people and doing the same things you've been doing for a number of years. That's not how you develop or learn new leadership skills or figure out new things.

Anita Brick: The challenge, I think with any of those with self knowledge being open to new experiences and developing strategic and diverse networks is it's hard to keep the momentum around doing those things because there is no end point. They are goals that are without clear end points just by the very nature of them. So when you think about the things that you mentioned, which I think are absolutely crucial, how do you create an internal incentive to actually do that?

Anita Hoffman: It's really different for each person. But what I said earlier about not setting too big goals for yourself, you know, take one step at a time. Many steps. First, for your target. Like I will talk to one new person a week or something like that. I will read a couple of articles, you know, every week that in the new area I will book one event, you know, at a lunch time or breakfast or whatever to learn some new things a month or whatever work for your schedule.

So when you contact people, when you meet people, when you have emailed somebody, things come back to you and you have to do something. And I coached a lovely lady a few years ago who really hated networking. And she's very introverted, beautifully introverted. What I've learned is myself, I like to talk to people. The first thing I do in the morning is see who has written to me and I write to them.

But I hate administration, so I do my administration before I'm allowed to contact anybody because I naturally pivot to going and talking to people for her. They said she was not allowed to look at her spreadsheets or on her computer, you know, on anything administrative. Before she had done her three emails in the morning, she started laughing. Was in the beginning. She enjoyed networking as much as, you know, she would rather have had a root canal. Literally. We were joking about it. If after a few months, two months, she realized how happy people are to talk to you and share advice and contacts, now she contacts anybody you know, then just took a few months and she loves it. And The White Lotus, afraid of this is nothing sleazy. Thinking about networking is finding other kinds of friends or friends who are interested in solving the same problems as you are. Then it's completely natural when you're trying to solve a problem as well.

Anita Brick: You're absolutely right when we do that, it's not about us anymore. In the book, you talk about understanding the risk to the other person, but when it's not all about you and it's about us, it reduces the risk overall because we either find that shared purpose and continue the relationship. We don't have a shared purpose, and we move on.

Anita Hoffman: Yeah, it's about us and the joint problem solving session. Absolutely. It's not about, you know, you having to be either somebody you know or selling yourself, which a lot of people feel very uncomfortable about this really about, you know, we are both interested in the same area. So let's see what we can do together.

Anita Brick: I totally agree. Do you have time for one more question? Sure. Okay, good. You've given us a lot of things to think about, and I think you've given us a lot of things to think about. Well, rather new perspectives. So thank you for that. What are three things that you would advise someone who wants to create this meaningful second or third or fourth career that they can begin doing today.

Anita Hoffman: In, three simple steps do take time each year to contemplate where you are in your career. Do I like what I'm doing? Do I want to continue doing this? Or if I want to do something else, where should I be focusing over the next month and year? The other thing is take small steps. go out to meet new people, read new things.

There's nothing magical. This is really a marathon, not a sprint. As you said. don't feel disheartened that your process doesn't arrive with heavenly trumpets and rendering skies because very few people have been blessed with that, plus a phone going on. don't get this fast. And because you don't quite know what you want to do, it emerges over time. Purpose is sort of created, discovered and developed. It isn't found. If we get interested in an area, we will find something where we can really contribute. And it's not about thinking we have only one purpose in life. think they have failed? This is fine.

Anita Brick: I love that because it takes the pressure off sometimes when we discover without being too strategic or too focused on it, we actually find something that we really want to do that will really motivate our hearts. Exactly. Thank you Anita so much. I love the book. I think it is a very important book, and thank you for making the time for us today and isn't it wonderful that we can do this even though we're thousands of miles apart? I feel like you're sitting with me right here today, so thank you for all that you've shared and the work that you're doing.

Anita Hoffman: Thank you very much. Always like to share what I've learned and seen from all these wonderful people I interviewed. So thank you.

Anita Brick: Thanks again and thank you all for listening. This is Anita Brick with CareerCast at Chicago Booth. Keep advancing.