What Are Your Career Anchors?
The chart below with various “Career Anchors” helped me clarify my career in a way I never have before. Before, if someone asked me about my values, I’d say words like “freedom” or “autonomy,” but those concepts were too broad to be truly clarifying.
Take a look below at the different anchors.
What jumps out at you for yourself?
From Career Anchors by Edgar Schein and John Van Maanen. Shout out to Taylor Elyse Morrison for sharing this with me.
Internal vs. External Career
Your external career is everything people see on the surface: titles, companies, and industry.
Your internal career has more to do with what matters to you and your motivations, aka your career anchors.
There are a lot of people with similar external careers, i.e. sales, marketing, tech, software, etc. But when you combine your external role with your internal motivations, now you have a unique signature for who you are in your career.
Career Anchors In Action
I’ll give you an example of how career anchors have been playing out in my career. I’ve only recently gotten very clear on mine through trial and error:
My Lowest Anchors
Security and stability: I find it easy to throw away a salary in pursuit of something bigger. I’m built for risk
Managerial competence: Although I’m capable of managing people, I don’t enjoy it
Pure challenge: I like challenge, but it’s not what gets me out of bed in the morning
Service and dedication to a cause: I used to feel bad about this not being higher for me, but I’ve found more peace about it over time. Not everyone’s career is strongly dedicated to one cause. I’m guessing that’s actually quite rare.
Technical / functional competence: I like to be good at a wide array of skills, and I wouldn’t say that technical competence is what gets me out of bed in the morning
My Highest Anchors
Lifestyle: Hello, #1 priority! I need work to fit into my life and not the other way around. I like putting my personal life first, whether that means my family, home, self care. To me this feels very luxurious and bougie to get to do, but it’s also how I was raised. I was surrounded by lifestyle entrepreneurs my entire life. To start, my parents were lifestyle business owners. My mom was a quasi-working-quasi-stay-at-home mom. She built her own schedule and was home with me several days per week. Same with my dad. Before I was in school, I remember entire weekdays spent with my dad at home and that’s so special to me. We used to pretend to be asleep when someone came home as a joke. And when my dad was at work on other days, he was done by 4pm to pick me up from school and cook dinner. Our time together was always more important than his career and those values bleed into mine. Another example is my grandfather. He owned a business, but in his later years especially, he always put his lifestyle first. He would check his emails and then swim in the ocean. On other days, he’d go to the office in the morning and then meet us at a fancy ocean-view restaurant for lunch, his treat.
Autonomy and independence: I don’t think many people can work entirely alone and I find that to be something strange and wonderful about myself. Most people need a social aspect. They need the camaraderie, the happy hours, and the feeling of being a part of a team. Those are all fun to me and I’m glad I’ve experienced them, but there are things I like even better: no meetings on my calendar, full ownership of my time, space to go deep and get into flow….pure bliss.
Entrepreneurial Creativity: I like choosing my projects and building them up myself. I like the ownership and creativity that comes with it. I found it really interesting with career anchors that “entrepreneurial creativity” distinguishes itself from “autonomy and independence” by saying that you don’t mind working with others to bring this vision to life. This is something I’ve had to test out for myself. For example, when I built Feminist Thriller Club, I loved building it out entirely by myself. I liked owning every step of the process from the website colors, copywriting, and marketing strategy. I liked owning all of it. At the same time, I thought: well, I could outsource some of this work like writing all the blogs and doing a few of the marketing campaigns. So I outsourced, and what I found out was clarifying. I started to wish those meetings weren’t on my calendar. I started to feel like I wanted to be in my own energy again, making my own decisions, and sinking into deep work. So while I enjoy entrepreneurship, I’d say I’m more of a lone wolf.
The Ecosystem of Anchors
I’m so glad people have different anchors than mine because we need all of these different motivations to keep the world going around. Knowing my anchors makes me feel at home in myself and my career.
How about you? What are you career anchors? I’d love to hear from you at kasia@kasiamanolas.com.
