1008: The Nine Steps for Making Career Progress with Ethan Bernstein

Pete Mockaitis
Ethan, welcome.

Ethan Bernstein
Thank you, Pete. It’s great to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m so excited to hear some of your wisdom. And I’d love to know, you are teaching and researching organizational behavior, and that was a field of study that I did and I love it so much. Can you share with us a particularly surprising or fascinating discovery you’ve made about us humans and organizations that has really struck you and stuck with you?

Ethan Bernstein
So, I spend my days and sometimes nights studying workplaces, particularly trends in workplaces, like increased transparency, increased connectivity in workplaces today, the way that affects employee behaviors, and the way those behaviors affect performance. And one of the things that’s captured my attention, I suppose you call it a surprise, is that we’ve been two-plus decades in the field of organizational behavior telling people to chart their own path, find their own way, create their own journey, and people still don’t really know how to do it, and it shouldn’t be a surprise because we really haven’t told them how.

And so, that’s what led to this interesting bit of research that we’ve been doing around how people hire jobs for the job they want to do in their career as opposed to just being hired by organizations.

Pete Mockaitis
How people hire jobs. That’s a fun turn of a phrase right there.

Ethan Bernstein
Well, Clay Christensen, who was one of my dissertation advisors, created a theory called Jobs to be Done Theory, which Clay used to solve one of the key frustrations he had. He saw great organizations, great people, creating new products that didn’t sell, and for him, that was frustrating because it just seemed like a waste. All these great people, all the material and time and everything else that went into it and then ultimately didn’t work.

And the Jobs to Be Done Theory suggested that the reason for that was that people don’t just buy a product, they hire a product for a job to be done in their life. And so, if you sell a product based on attributes, like an apartment has granite countertops and an open kitchen, that’s not actually why people buy it. People buy it because they can imagine themselves cooking in that kitchen, talking to people.

That the experiences, not the features, are what matter, and that if you really understood the experiences people were looking for, the struggling moment that led them to hire that product for a job to be done, then you could create other products to solve that job to be done better. And if you think about why people move jobs, that’s oftentimes why they move jobs. They realize that they’re struggling, they want to make a certain kind of progress, that progress isn’t being delivered by the organization or the role they’re in, and so they seek a different role that could do that.

And that was the surprising moment, I suppose, for me in 2009 when I saw Bob Moesta, who worked with Clay on the protocols behind Jobs to Be Done, do one of his investigative journalistic interviews of a consumer who bought a product to understand the causation behind why that person had bought that product, what job they’d hired that product to do.

And I sat there thinking, “I gave some advice to somebody on their career this morning. I should have done this because then I would have been able to provide better advice.” And 15 years later, that’s what we’ve done over and over again, over a thousand times to collect the data for this book.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. That’s cool. And when you say, with regard to the data in the book, any really striking themes, patterns, insights that just pop off the page for you?

Ethan Bernstein
So, as an academic, I expect there’d be huge variation in the causation. People, it seems, choose different jobs for a whole variety of reasons. When we actually took all these interviews, these 60-plus-minute interviews, coded them, all the rigorous research that keeps me fully employed, we actually found that the things that push people away from a particular role and pull them towards a particular role, that there’s actually a lot of commonalities.

We clustered it all down to 30 pushes and pulls, which is a remarkably small number if you think about it. Now, I will say, to me that’s a small number. To the outside world, 30 was too many. So as publishers said, “Wait, wait, 30, that’s too many for us to remember,” we then went back and looked at patterns across and found even more so that if you look at the patterns across those pushes and pulls, people are largely just on one of four quests.

And what stage of your career you’re in, what stage of your life you’re in, can have impact, but people will filter through each of those four quests over the course of probably their career. But understanding what quest you’re on then provides a person with the ability to make them more awesome at their job because that’s when the advice matters. You can give great advice to a person on a different quest and it can be bad advice because they’re on the wrong quest for that advice.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s really resonating, and I’m chewing on this. Could you perhaps bring this to life for us with a particular person and a transformation that they saw as they were thinking through this stuff and coming up with fresh insights by thinking about it this way?

Ethan Bernstein
So, let me explain the four quests a little bit, and then I’ll do what Michael Horn, my co-author, made me do in the book, which is I put myself in the book, and I’ll write myself into the framework as well in a prior role, not in my current one, just in case the dean of Harvard Business School is listening to this podcast.

So, the four quests. One is, get out. These are people who genuinely find their energy drained by the role they’re in and find that the capabilities they want the organization to be drawing on aren’t the capabilities that is actually being asked for. So, they are both not happy with how their work is going and the what of their work. And for them, they’re just looking to reset both those dimensions, they’re trying to get out.

Think of the opposite dimension. If you’re trying to build on both things, you’re actually quite happy with the work environment and you’re happy with the capabilities you’re asked to deliver, you just want to take the next step. So, for some reason you’re ready for that next step and you want to take it, and the organizations of the world and the world in general is pretty much designed for the take-the-next steppers. That’s so-called progression in most organizations.

The off dimensions are more interesting. So, if I love what I’m asked to do, the what, and some of us are out there right now thinking, “I love being what I am, like, what I’m asked to do. I’m respected for the work I do, and so forth, but I hate the how. I don’t want to commute anymore because it wastes my time. I’m working too hard because I have a new family. I’m not working hard enough because I’m an empty nester.”

“The manager that’s now managing me because that person switched doesn’t respect me for the way I’m doing my work, and so they’re asking me to do work differently for their purposes, whatever the case might be. The work drains my energy more than drives it. And so, I want to reset the how, I want to regain control.”

The people who, on the other hand, love the work environment they’re in, everything about it, or most things about it, but they’re being asked to do things, that the reputation they’ve got, the work they’re actually being asked to deliver, is not drawing on the capabilities they either thought that they have or want to have, those people are trying to regain alignment. And so, once upon a time, Pete, I was a consultant.

Pete Mockaitis
Me too.

Ethan Bernstein
I thought we might have that in common. And I had been asked, at a firm I loved, I really actually, I loved the job, and I had been asked to step in for somebody who’d left a project midstream, and it was a restructuring project. And I stepped in, we delivered the product to the client, we delivered the project, all was good, and then another such project came along, and because they needed someone with that expertise in the local office, they asked me if I would do it, and I said, “Okay.” I mean, I was still at the stage of my career where I was like, “Sure, of course, I’m happy to help where I can.”

So, now I had two projects in restructuring under my belt, and we all know that restructuring projects oftentimes involve certain amounts of layoffs, and so that was something I was, apparently, getting good at. So, when the third time around, right, a client came to ask for this and wanted the same team that had done the previous projects, I got called and brought into the conversation with the client even before the project began, and was introduced as the expert on that.

And that was the moment I knew I needed to regain alignment because that had never been my intention. And this happens to a lot of people on project-based work and other work. You just develop a reputation and expertise that wasn’t what you wanted to do, and you love the how, but the what? And that’s how I ended up at the Harvard Business School doing a doctoral program.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. Well, I can’t help but chuckle, here we are, former consultants, and we find ourselves discussing yet another 2×2 matrix. We can’t help ourselves.

Ethan Bernstein
If it weren’t an actual 2×2, it would have to be a 2×2 in the sky that we would be seeing in our own imaginations. But yes, and I will be clear though, this is not categorical as a 2×2 typically is.

So, get out, take the next step, regain control, regain alignment. These are like poles on a map – north, south, east, and west. There’s a lot of space between the North Pole and the South Pole. There’s a lot of space between regain alignment and regain control, and people are in that space. So, these are just likelihoods.

In fact, we offer an assessment based on the pushes and pulls so people can try to figure out where they might be on the quests using an assessment at JobMoves.com. It’s available for free. But the assessment will just give you likelihoods and then you ultimately have to pick based on those likelihoods.

This is not about telling you what you are. This is about helping you be more aware of where the pushes and pulls are so you can understand if those forces are aligning enough that they overcome the habits of the present and the anxieties, the new solution that might keep us in our role feeling stuck, maybe silently quitting, I don’t know quiet quitting, I don’t know, but it’s understanding the alignment that might be drawing us to something new.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, that’s handy. So, we can think about things in terms of “Do we have a fit on the what side and on the how side?” You’ve got a juicy teaser, I can’t resist, there’s a mindset shift that helps us love instead of regret a new job. Is this it or is there another one you want to unpack for us?

Ethan Bernstein
So, that’s the broad one. So, if Clay’s frustration was around new products that didn’t get sold, my frustration is around people who disrupt their lives, sometimes their family, certainly their career trajectories, in order to take a new role only to find, six to twelve months later, they’re unhappy with it, which, if you just asked a room, “What’s the fastest you’ve ever gone from taking a new job to knowing it wasn’t right for you,” over three-quarters typically say between a month and a year.

That’s my frustration. And that’s not leading anybody into a good place. It is causing us a huge amount of disruption and it’s an indication, I think, of a process that’s broken. And so, my goal here is to try and help people do that better.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. Well, I’m curious then, on the outside looking in, it could be a little bit tricky to know, “What’s my experience going to feel like in that month to year in which I go, ‘Uh-oh, oopsies.’” Do you have any pro tips in terms of, like, top research methodologies or questions to ask or steps to take to prevent this regret?

Ethan Bernstein
So, let me offer you a few a few thoughts from the book and from our research and from my course “Developing Yourself as a Leader,”

So first, I think having the pushes and pulls is helpful. That list, you ask somebody, “How do you do it? How are you feeling about this job?” they have no idea how to answer. You give people a list of 30 items and ask which ones are operational for them, it’s much easier. It does prime them, but given the data, suggests that most of those are going to be covering what people are feeling, it’s just an easier place to start with a menu as opposed to start with a blank slate.

Then, once you’ve got a sense of your quest, you know which dimension you’re on and where that likely is, then you start asking yourself the question, “Okay, so what drives my energy and what drains it?” And this is, again, not about attributes. It’s not about the granite countertop and the open kitchen. These are experiences. In the job world, those are titles.

Titles have a huge return to ego, and you’ve got to get a better one. Those return, that return does not last long. What you really want, actually, is to think about what you’re going to do, not what you’re going to be. That has a much longer life cycle in terms of its return to you.

On the capability side, similarly, we talk about strengths and weaknesses. I’m sure, Pete, when I talk about strengths and weaknesses to you, you have a sense actually, those are sort of ingrained in you, what we’d say their trait instead of state. Instead, think of something like a balance sheet that describes you in the current moment in time. Just like a company, you have assets, things that are acquired by you at material cost, that you are hoping will deliver future value in your career, acquired, by the way, and funded by liabilities, usually the expenditure of time, effort, and potentially money.

Those assets depreciate over time. If they depreciate without you replenishing them, thinking about the next role, you’re not staying relevant. So, you can think about a much more deliberate approach to building and keeping, maintaining, your capabilities, given the change of the world around you, than strengths and weaknesses really gives you permission for.

And all of that begins to then shape up what it is you’re hoping to achieve. Once you’ve done that, I have another set of five steps after that. So, we’ve gone through steps one through four, five steps of advice for how you actually get what you’re looking for.

Pete Mockaitis
Could you give us a few examples of assets to help shake off static strengths, weaknesses kind of a framing we might be operating with?

Ethan Bernstein
When I do this with my students, a couple typically show up routinely. There are skills out there, hard skills, technical skills. If you’re a software engineer, then your degree of knowledge about a particular platform of engineering, that’s an asset. These platforms, these languages change. That’s something you need to reinvest in if you want to stay relevant. And there are many other kinds of technical. For market analysts, your knowledge of the market, any one of these pieces of technical knowledge, that’s certainly an asset.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m thinking about marketing too. It’s sort of, like, things are constantly changing in terms of, like, just the rules for Google ads or Facebook ads. And then it’s like, “Oh, yeah. Well, that strategy worked three years ago, but, oh, you’re doing that now? Oh, wow, that’s really out of date.” And it’s funny, these, it seems like some skills have a short shelf life and some almost seem eternal.

Ethan Bernstein
There are some evergreen skills, but there aren’t very many. We want there to be more than there actually are, I think. And so, most technical skills today depreciate much faster than they used to. So Boris Groysberg, who once upon a time, he’s a faculty member here on the Business School’s faculty. Boris explained to me this exercise, and his favorite example is mechanics, an auto mechanic.

An auto mechanic of the 1960s, you learned a car, you leverage that for 20 years. You learn a car in 2020, 2024, how long does that really last? Things are changing much faster, especially the degree to which it’s about coding and not about the actual mechanical skills. It’s different. It’s changing. And part of the reason people are so so desperate for progress, on a daily or weekly or monthly basis, is because they’re just trying to remain relevant. So that’s one, technical skills.

Another one that comes up frequently? Relationships. Networks. Network might seem evergreen. My friends will always be my friends. My contacts will always be my contacts. Weak ties will remain weak ties. That’s, oftentimes, the way we find information. Not by the strong ties, not the people that we’re closest to, but the friends of friends, if you will.

And yet, really think about it. If you don’t invest in those relationships, how long do they actually last? Maybe a couple years? Maybe you can go back to someone five years, ten years down the line and say, “Hey, remember those great times we had? By the way, I’m looking for a job. Do you know any interesting openings?” But a network depreciates, too. Most things depreciate.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s heavy, and you’re right. We wish more stuff lasted longer, because just the way we wish our roof lasted longer. We didn’t have to spend the money to replace it as often. So, I would like your thought then, what does really, really last?

Ethan Bernstein
Well, my own view is actually what lasts is the constant effort we put into refreshing our assets. So, remaining relevant is a deliberate act, and the more deliberate you are, the better off you are on that capabilities dimension. Now, if you’re in a build, not a reset mode, you’re just trying to refresh what’s on there.

The good news for most of us, though, who are oftentimes finding ourselves on the reset capabilities front, where we’re trying to, for example, regain alignment, if all assets do depreciate over some amount of time, there’s actually quite a bit of flexibility as long as you anticipate it. And so, our advice, our core advice, is not to go for the evergreen product, but instead to think about where you want to be in five years’ time.

Worry a little bit less about your income statement, if you will, today, and a little bit more about your balance sheet tomorrow, because that’s what’s likely to be able to influence what you’re going to be considered for on the next job.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And do you have a general approach by which we attempt to deduce, “Okay, what assets do I need in the future? And how shall I prioritize the cultivation of them?”

Ethan Bernstein
So, we find that most people enter a move, either because of pushes or because of pulls, either they’re being pushed away from something, or they’re being pulled towards something. It’s an opportunity that looks too good not to consider, or, “I’m frustrated with my current situation.” Whichever one you enter in, the next step is to think about the other side of it. What are you leaving behind? What might draw you in?

We have not written a book about finding your dream job because we don’t believe in dream jobs, we believe in good tradeoffs. So, we encourage people to not answer the question, “What do you want to do next?” We, instead, ask people to answer the question, “What are three to five prototypes of what you might want to do next, given the quest you’re on?” It’s a much easier question for people to answer. And the more contrast you create across those prototypes, the more contrast creates meaning for you and you understand the relative nature of these things.

And that conversation then, combined with your energy drivers and drains of past jobs and the capabilities you have and the balance sheet you might have or might not have and want to build, help you begin to think about how to prioritize certain tradeoffs over others for your next move. So, it is about choosing, not about designing from scratch.

This is not just a two-by-two or pie in the sky, but it is about choosing wisely based on your particular progress, the kind of progress you want to make. Because what we saw in The Great Resignation, when people want to make a certain kind of progress and the world offers them progression that doesn’t match, what do they do? They leave.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Now, when you say three to five prototypes, could you articulate, like, “Here’s what I mean by a prototype, like how someone might articulate that sketch?”

Ethan Bernstein
It’s three to five versions of a job you might want to have. Just like if you’re a new product developer, it’s three to five versions of the product you think that people might want to buy. I’m not going to ask you, Pete, what you’re looking to do next, but…

Pete Mockaitis
I might do this until I die. We’ll see.

Ethan Bernstein
But maybe there’s a version of this. Maybe there’s another podcast around the corner. What does that look like? How is it that you would change this or change that? Would it be within an organization? Would it be outside an organization? A side gig? Is it a set of side gigs? Is it a part of my portfolio? What dimensions could I change? Could I change geography? Could I change role like a functional role? Could I change any one of a number of aspects of this?

If I took the core central quest that I’m on, let’s say it is regain alignment, and wanted to change some of the capabilities I’m being asked to do, okay, what are the three to five versions of that role I could imagine that would allow me to do that, that would still take into account the fact that I like the way my energy is driven currently by the job?

Those pushes and pulls don’t exist for me. And also took into account the capabilities I might want to keep, I might want to build on, so that I’m just focused on changing the dimensions that would allow me to achieve what I’m trying to achieve in the next round.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, I think I hear the conceptual idea of what you mean by a prototype. Could you now say, for yourself or someone, students that you’ve encountered recently, how they would articulate all of that in a conversation?

Ethan Bernstein
So, here’s an example. One story in the book is of somebody who believed the next job she wanted to have involved working with scientists and travel. So, a travel coordinator at a top scientific magazine sounded great, until she discovered that actually a travel coordinator neither works with a scientist nor travels. But the job description sounded fantastic. The party material was great, but what she was going to do wasn’t what she ultimately wanted to do.

But that’s where the prototypes come in, so that would be one potential prototype. And you can go out there and find these roles, if you need to, but most of us have the ability, especially if we have one or two or three jobs in the world, to get a sense for, “Okay, so based on what I’ve done, which are the pieces I keep, which are the pieces I don’t?” But that’s an example of it.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I like that. I like that a lot. And I think, so often folks get the wrong idea about a job from the outside. And I’m thinking about sort of early career or picking majors, and our folks will say, “I’m going to go to law school because I like arguing, and in the courtroom, I could do that.” And so, hopefully, they’ll learn pretty early in the research process that, “Well, hey, most of the work of a lawyer is not that most of the time, and you’re mostly researching stuff and writing stuff and talking about why this paragraph or clause needs to go or be adjusted in such a fashion. So, you want to know that earlier rather than later.”

Ethan Bernstein
And once you’ve specified five prototypes, you would do what any new product developer would do. You’d go ask people about them. So, you can actually learn before switching if you have the material to go have those conversations, and we’re not talking about just people talk about informational interviews. That is part of this.

But you’re not actually looking for a person’s job, or a job like theirs. You’re actually looking to truly understand that lawyer, “What does she do on a daily basis? Does it match this prototype or not?” Because if it doesn’t, then you’ve been sold a bill of goods by the world that doesn’t actually exist, and it’s good to know now before you switch than after you switch and discover that you’re one of those people who, one month to 12 months in, took a role that you didn’t want to take.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. Thank you. Okay. Well, you say we got nine steps, and you say we’ve covered some steps and there’s more to be covered. Just so we get it on the record, could you enumerate, “Step one is this. Step two is that”?

Ethan Bernstein
So, nine steps, and you’ll notice in the book, it looks like a little bit of a Chutes and Ladders view. But step one, we’ve talked about, understanding the pushes and pulls. Once you’ve understood the pushes and pulls, we’re going to try to start putting those on the dimensions. So, step two is understanding the energy drain and drivers of prior jobs, and then the capabilities, doing a balance sheet exercise, a career balance sheet exercise, step three.

Step four, then, identify your quest. It doesn’t have to be exactly right, but at least getting an initial sense of what your quest might be. You can always go back and revisit these later. Step five, then you develop those prototypes, those three to five prototypes, because it’s a much easier answer than what do you want to do, to say what are the three to five things you might consider doing.

Step six, to pick the prototype. Here’s where we look at those priorities that you’ve made, the decisions you’ve made in the past, what you prioritize in your energy drivers and drains, what capabilities you might want to focus on and see if that can inform us to go towards at least one prototype, maybe two. Then check those prototypes against real jobs out there to ensure that these prototypes are not just dream jobs, they’re trade-offs, they’re ways of deciding on things that actually exist and matching them to those real opportunities.

So, now you’ve been through seven steps. At some point, someone is going to ask you to describe those seven steps so that they can have a compelling reason to hire you, and that’s step eight, to create your story spine. We’re not talking about an elevator pitch. Part of what we’re trying to do is encourage people not to sell themselves into a job that’s trying to sell them something about the organization, but instead go for match, go for fit.

So, instead of an elevator pitch, which is typically a sales pitch, we’re asking people to use the Pixar Story Spine to come up with the progression, the narrative, of how you ended up deciding that this is what you needed to do next and be able to do that quickly in short order. And only then, step nine, is to apply for jobs.

You only actually apply for those jobs once you have all those pieces because, especially in a talent environment like today, if you’re one of a hundred, you might have trouble finding the job. If you’re one of three, and you’re really compelling about the reasons why you’re one of three, and it’s a great fit, you’re much more likely to be successful in making that move.

And if we are, indeed, in a world, which we seem to be in, in which people will move jobs, that could be internal or external, once every four years on average, more frequently for certain generations, people make progress by moving. And if you’re going to do that, you want to make as much progress as you can within a single move.

Pete Mockaitis
And can you   a picture for what a one in a hundred candidate sounds like versus a one in three candidate?

Ethan Bernstein
So, I am the person around here who spends a lot of time thinking about HR. So, here you get to hear my pet peeve first.

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Ethan Bernstein
Job descriptions. Job descriptions these days have everything packed into them, and there’s a good reason for that. You mentioned lawyers earlier, Pete. Lawyers want us to be able to hire anyone so they put everything they can into the job description. And what it ends up sounding like, you’ve seen some of these, right, “Entry-level job. Five years of working experience required.” It’s just, no one can fit into a job description these days because it looks like they’re asking for unicorns.

So, what do we do as individuals in the workplace who want that job? We take our resume, we put it all in there, we pack everything we can into it so that we can be the superheroes who will fill that role. So, we’ve got a matching process between superheroes and job descriptions. It’s not doing anyone any good to find fit. It’s just two people trying to sell each other on a fit. Sales is not fit.

So, that’s what the one in a hundred looks like. You’re trying to convince somebody that you’re better than the other 99 on the dimensions you’ve read about in the job description using the lines of your resume. The one in the three? That’s the person who doesn’t just have the resume with all the stuff in the words, but actually can explain the spaces in between the roles, can talk about the trajectory.

It doesn’t have to be a line. It can be a zigzag. Most of us zigzag all the time. That’s how we make progress. If it looked like a straight line, then it’s just progression, which is fine, but most of us don’t look like that, and we haven’t written a book for people who are on a progression because they know where they’re going next. That’s the one in three, though.

The one in three is the person who actually has an explanation, a story spine that makes sense for the zig and the zag, that makes the person who you’re talking to convinced that actually this is the right role for you because you will grow in the role and the role will grow with you, and the organization and the individual will both benefit.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. So, we’ve got the story, the context, the whole picture, it fits together, and there seems to be a real deep congruence or rightness about it. That’s cool. I want to follow up on what you said about the lawyers. The lawyers want the job descriptions to sound like anyone could do them. Could you expand on that? What’s this behind the scenes for us that we should be aware of?

Ethan Bernstein
Oh, so for years, organizations have structured job descriptions to allow the hiring manager as much flexibility as she or he wants to hire the person they ultimately find for the role.

Pete Mockaitis
In order to protect them in the event of a liability situation, lawsuit.

Ethan Bernstein
Right. Exactly. Well, I don’t know if it’s just to protect them, to ensure that they can say “This person fits within the job description that we ultimately found.” I’m not an employment lawyer so I’m not going as far as pretending to be one. My law degree did not take me that far. But there is a degree to which it permits them flexibility as a hiring manager, because there’s just enough in there that anyone could fit the job description.

That’s kind of the problem, isn’t it? Anyone can fit the job description. We actually suggest shadow job descriptions that the manager can share so that people understand what the role actually does require as opposed to what could potentially be the shape and form of the job.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. Well, it’s funny, this actually never occurred to me that the job descriptions are formulated with an intention other than clearly describing the job and who might flourish within it. Call me naive, Ethan.

Ethan Bernstein
Well, I’ll tell you, I, oftentimes, when I’m talking with people about this, will ask a poll question about how much jobs descriptions describe the work that people are ultimately doing in their roles. Some people come out in the 80 to 100 percent, but it’s a small number. Most of the time, most of what we’re actually doing, we don’t remember being in our job description, or we don’t think our job description really prepared us for.

And that’s because, if you track the history of job descriptions, where they came from and how they’ve developed, they really weren’t necessarily designed to do that over time. They’re designed to do something else. They’re designed to provide the hiring manager with the flexibility she needs in order to hire the people that she wants to hire.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, inside scoop, behind the scenes. Thank you. Well, let’s say that we’ve gone through a lot of these steps and it’s like, “Okay, wow. This is really clear. I need to make a change, and this is sort of what it looks like, and, boy, we’ve got an opportunity that looks appealing, and maybe we’re going to apply,” but there’s some just emotional stuff in terms of there’s some fears, some anxieties, there’s the devil you know. How do you advise folks when their head says, “Yeah, we got to get out of here and go in a direction like this,” but internally they’re feeling fear, anxiety, and really not sure about taking the steps, making the leap?

Ethan Bernstein
Development is a social process, we know that. So, therefore, is moving. If you’re not actively talking to people about your development goals, ideally people at work, then you’re going to end up in a situation just like you described, “I’ve gotten eight steps in and now I’m feeling very anxious because what I have in my mind and what the world around me thinks of me, we’re on two different wavelengths at this point.”

So, every step, of that nine steps, for us, is social. The pushes and pulls, we actually have a chapter in the book for mentors to be able to train up on how to do that job, that interview. What Bob Moesta, our co-author, developed with Clay in terms of the protocols for conducting an interview on Jobs to be Done, and then they do it together.

Each step, actually, involves other people. That should have a huge impact on reducing the fear and anxiety you’re talking about before it becomes overwhelming, before it becomes such a block that people simply don’t move forward. It is counterintuitive because most of the time, we don’t want to, don’t feel comfortable talking about this at work, but maybe that’s because we haven’t had a common language, we haven’t had a common framework, we haven’t had, Pete, the two-by-two.

But, more importantly, we haven’t had a process that we could bring to the table, that individuals could bring to the table, to make use of the assets, the people around them, because my field has been saying for decades. “Lead your self-development, this is great. It gives you all the flexibility in the world.” We were talking about this, to create your own journey, and we just haven’t given people the advice and the means for doing it. If we do, maybe they’d be more comfortable making this a social process.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, Ethan, tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention, top do’s and/or don’ts, before we hear about some of your favorite things?

Ethan Bernstein
Don’t talk about what you’re going to be. Talk about what you’re going to do. Don’t focus on strengths and weaknesses. Think about your assets and liabilities instead. Don’t do this alone. Be social in the process. I know it sounds very counterintuitive, doesn’t it, based on how people typically do this.

But I guess I would conclude with don’t keep expecting more from each other. So, this is a conversation, ultimately, in most organizations between the individual, the manager, and HR. Each of those parties has had a bit of a history for pointing the finger somewhere else. HR says, “Managers don’t have time.” Managers say, “I don’t know what the employee wants.” Employee says, “No one wants to listen to me.” This has to be a joint endeavor.

And so, top do? Don’t keep this a secret. People are very open, typically, to understanding what you’re trying to achieve. And the less you say as an individual, the more people think that what you’re needing in terms of progress is big rather than small. Whereas most people, when you really dive down, are just looking for little bits of progress over periods of time.

As a manager, don’t ignore the fact that we’ve given you 30 pushes and pulls. We’ve given you the reasons why employees quit. Many employees quit. So why not use those to have a conversation about which might be operating or not operating with the people that you’re working with, and see if you can’t start a conversation which people leaders are aware of how their individuals are feeling on those dimensions that matter for making them potentially move?

And then HR? Track it all. Because quests do change over time, but they don’t change over days. So, if you have a sense for what people are trying to achieve, you’re much more likely to both make them productive, as opposed to quiet quitters, and you’re much more likely to retain them than using the tools that we’ve been using forever, which include things like, frankly, money. Money’s great. Everybody would like more money. Everybody would like a better work life.

Everyone would like all these things, except when you give it to people, we, it affects us for a little while, and not so much after that, because in the end, we each have our own definition of progress. And if you’re not aware of what that is, either as the individual, the manager, or the HR person, you’re not actually customizing the employee experience to the person who you’re trying to keep.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, now could you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Ethan Bernstein
I’m going to go to a Mark Twain quote, given where I am in the world. “The two most important days in your life are the day you were born and the day you find out why.” And every time I hear that quote, I’d love to ask him a question, “What on earth am I supposed to do in between?” The answer is, make progress. And, hopefully, some of this advice helps everyone out there not just be awesome at their job but make progress in it as well.

Pete Mockaitis
A favorite tool, something you use to be awesome at your job?

Ethan Bernstein
Chalk. Believe it or not, at the Harvard Business School, we still have chalkboards. You know why?

Pete Mockaitis
Tell me.

Ethan Bernstein
As opposed to whiteboards, this is at least my understanding of it, at least as opposed to whiteboards, when you write with chalk on the board, people hear it. You’re actually working with the students to make progress together in the classroom. And that’s why I love chalk because the sound, and the work together, putting their comments on the board, because I’m not writing my own thoughts, I’m writing theirs, goes from blank slate at minute zero to full board at minute 80, structured in a way that we actually understand how we’ve all contributed actively to the conversation and the progress we’ve made together.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. That’s poetic. Yeah. And a favorite habit?

Ethan Bernstein
I have a six-year-old and a 12-year-old. My favorite habit is reading to them every night.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks; they quote back to you often?

Ethan Bernstein
Maybe I can answer that question and anticipate your question about my favorite book at the same time. I, oftentimes, will end my course with a children’s book that I then rewrite for the lessons of the course. It does turn out, though, you don’t need to rewrite that much. Yes, pull out the red pen, cross out some lines here and there, make it more focus to the course, but you can learn a lot from a book like Pooh’s Instruction Book.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Ethan Bernstein
I’m at e@hbs.edu, just the letter E.

Pete Mockaitis

That’s really cool. That’s one of the shortest email addresses I’ve ever encountered. Beautiful.

Ethan Bernstein

Seven characters without the period and the @ sign, yep.

Pete Mockaitis

And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Ethan Bernstein

Think about the next one now.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Ethan, this is fun. I wish you much lovely progress.

Ethan Bernstein

Thank you, Pete. This has been fun. I really appreciate the questions.