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Excerpt from the Conclusion
Lessons Learned
Look upon our narrators’ stories as raw material useful for informing career choices. In this final chapter we combine their stories as a way to look for such insight by considering three questions. First, what are the keystone issues behind career events encountered by natural resource professionals; i.e., what things determine outcomes even if they operate unseen, behind the scenes? Second, what personal attributes seemed to help the people in our stories grapple with these keystone issues; i.e., what does personal career development look like? And third, what premises underlie a natural resource career of meaning and purpose; i.e., what makes the professionals we met here useful role models?
. . . managing a natural resource career is less a monolithic application of
science or a one-size-fits-all success checklist and more the management of
multiple variables that are in constant motion in a dynamic environment.
Keystone Career Issues
Our narrators encountered nine keystone issues. While often operating behind the scenes, these were powerful forces shaping outcomes. Learning to recognize when these keystones are the real issues in play makes it easier to diagnose what is going on in a professional’s work environment and, thereby, devise effective responses.
Keystone 1: Incentive Systems and Goal Displacement. Keystone 6: The Burden of Proof.
Keystone 2: Social Need and Mission Drift. Keystone 7: Expect to See Logic Traps.
Keystone 3: Substituting Models for Value Choice. Keystone 8: Loyalty Conflicts.
Keystone 4: Human Psychology is a Trump Card. Keystone 9: The Professional is Always Advocating.
Keystone 5: A Bias for Passive Decision Making.
Career Success Attributes
What are the personal characteristics and skills that allowed our narrators and the people they admired to effectively manage the keystone issues? Taken together these qualities serve as a career development model for improving personal effectiveness. Besides staying current in their disciplines, two career development themes emerge from our narrators. First is study and reflection on the values behind career choice. This deep exploration of, “Why do I want this work?” is an important internal dialog about motivation, personal mission, ethics, social commitment, etc.—the topic of intrinsic rewards. The narrators worked hard getting clear about why they wanted to work with natural resources and used mid-career pauses to reflect, reassess, and re-direct their careers. The second career development theme is exploration of “What operational skills are needed to support my career choice?” These are the tools needed for effectiveness in a work environment and include skills like communication, conflict resolution, and program management. These are the topics of traditional management training. The narrators were willing to learn an array of skills far outside their chosen discipline to be effective inside their work environment. Beyond these broad themes the narrators observed or demonstrated a dozen specific career success attributes.
Work with an underlying sense of purpose. . . Be a boundary crosser. . . Preserve the ability to act. . . Agitate but be patient. . . Have a sense of history. . . Be persistent, optimistic, and realistic. . . Rebound resiliently using tough times as learning. . . Volunteer not victim outlook. . . Make clear loyalty decisions early. . . Be simultaneously independent and interdependent. . . Be an expert and novice simultaneously. . . Never surrender to others the responsibility of defining a better future.
Premises for a Career of Meaning and Purpose
Each narrator created a career as a
life’s work meant to achieve something. They did this by using premises that
animated their careers with both a vision about the desired outcome and a
willingness to take action. Choosing a desired outcome has no impact without
action. Action without choosing a desired outcome has little chance of creating
something useful. Both are needed in a career of meaning and purpose. The
narrators did this by building their careers on several premises.
Guiding Premise One-- Work that was true to their beliefs became both a method
and an outcome for the narrators’ careers. . . Guiding Premise Two-- The
narrators’ journeys included taking full responsibility for themselves and for
the task of creating a better future. . . Guiding Premise Three-- The narrators,
despite plenty of frustrations, talked about how they experienced in themselves
and the communities around them times of rapid, positive change— . . . Guiding
Premise Four-- The narrators committed to key values widely respected in our
society like honesty, responsibility, sincerity, equality, etc. . . Guiding
Premise Five-- Maintaining positive attitudes about their work . . . Guiding
Premise Six-- Satisfaction in a life’s work depends on being able to acknowledge
when things are out of your control yet not let these become immobilizing.
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Precisely what is the gap that natural resource professionals must close if
future stewardship is to be more successful? It is nothing short of
acknowledging that old assumptions behind a natural resource career no longer
hold true and then define a new purpose for the natural resource professions. .
. The contemporary management challenge demands a substantial burst of
creativity about natural resource careers to arrive at something totally new. .
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