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Risk: How Much Are You Prepared To Take On?

Making career choices: some safe, some very risky

Some of my career choices have been safe, but some have entailed a good level of risk.

In my work as an Executive Search Consultant we look for diversity in our candidates, some risk-taking, the extent executives and managers have been prepared to take on stretch roles, experienced very challenging situations or market conditions, or perhaps started a business, led a turnaround, or had to close one down.

My career might look at bit meandering to some. To me, it was always important to be growing and learning in a role. The initial threads were about education and managing information sources. This shifted over time to working with executives, initially in areas related to advising, coaching and coaxing. And later, leading services that did all those things.

I took on new roles as a bit of a stretch, and sometimes because they gave me the opportunity to do something I had not done before.

Let me share with you some of those career choices—the inherent risks that had to be assessed, and the career inflections they came to provide—so that you may hopefully gain some insight into the types of things that can occur, and to think about what direction you might have taken, given the same opportunities.

Generally, I stayed six or seven years in the one organisation taking on different or broader roles within it before moving on. It is really important to stay long enough to have built a solid track record of achievement, or in the words of a colleague of mine, ‘To clean up the mess you might have made the first time around’.

Inflection number one: Ready for a stretch role

As General George Patton famously noted, ‘Take calculated risks. That is quite different from being rash’.

I had quite deliberately remained in the teaching service throughout most of the 1970s, although I knew that there were other things I would want to do in time, in order to focus on having our four children and completing further study.

As chance would have it, while on that fourth short maternity leave after the birth of our daughter (following three sons), I received a call from the head office of the NSW Department of Education. Would I come in and have a discussion with them about a project they were planning? My name had been recommended to them as someone who might be able to provide them with some advice. They wanted to be able to capture a lot of the unpublished materials teachers were developing themselves, organise and make them available to others.

I realised about halfway through that this was a job interview. It was not a teaching role—it was creating a new information service from scratch, as the Department’s first Curriculum Information Officer.

There were a few challenges inherent in this scenario: first, encouraging teachers to share their material; second, putting them into a form that could be shared (whatever that meant); then, providing some sort of readily accessible listing so other teachers knew what was available.

This was at a time when computers were at their most rudimentary, with no such thing as the sort of databases and searching capabilities that are available today, or even by the mid-1980s. This was over fifteen years before the most embryonic form of the Internet.

I mark it as my first experience of considered (calculated) career risk taking.

Re-use, rejig and redeploy

I like new roles, ones that no one has done before, that you can sort of make up as you go along. But the risk is that you can’t really deliver what people are seeking, or you misjudge was that is.

I was able to employ a colleague to work with me, another teacher with graduate library qualifications whom I had met and thought would enjoy the challenge too. She was somewhat cautious.

I remember her asking me how we were going to figure this out. It was September and we were committed to delivering our product, whatever it was going to be, for the new school year in January.

My response was that I didn’t really know but it was important and there must be a way. We would figure it out together, engage some others in a few brainstorms and workshops—and we did.

In the end, we delivered what was needed and probably more than what was expected: a guide and index to hundreds of unpublished curriculum materials across the two pilot regions in NSW—one metropolitan and one rural. It meant trips to Dubbo and Orange and other places to get buy-in from teachers, principals and bureaucrats.

We solved the technical issues through that age-old approach of looking at who had done something like this before. Don’t re-invent—instead, re-use, rejig and redeploy.

Back then, the Australian Education Index was one of Australia’s first ‘databases’ providing access to a range of materials. We convinced the head of that service, Margaret Findlay, to include our data in that index. Margaret was very obliging and, in fact, thrilled that we were using what she had developed.

Our service was duly launched and did well over about a sixteen-month period. But then politicians started to hear about it—that you could actually find out what was happening in schools at the classroom level. In the end this was seen as rather subversive and the service came under threat.

I have learned many times that good ideas sometimes threaten the way things are usually done, so they might then go through a pause phase, before their real value is realised five or ten years later. This is what happened to the Curriculum Information Project in NSW. It became the approach used nationally about seven years later.

Inflection number two: Taking on a real leadership role

Around this time we were moving our family to Melbourne in order for Robert to take up a new job—one that I had seen advertised and thought he was just right for. I had figured that at some stage we would move to Melbourne, as that is where his family was and his father was not well. We met at a student conference when we were each involved in the Students’ Representative Councils – Robert in Melbourne at La Trobe University and me at Sydney. He had moved to Sydney to marry me but, for reasons I still find hard to fathom, he was not keen on Sydney’s humidity. While, initially, the timing was not great, in the end it worked out quite well as it seemed like the innovative Curriculum Information Project, despite its success ‘on the ground’, was about to be put on hold.

In Melbourne, after a few months of freelancing and part-time work, I joined the teaching staff as a lecturer at what became RMIT University’s Department of Information Services.

A few years later I was promoted to Senior Lecturer and, with the Head and my colleagues, led significant program and curriculum changes. We could see that components—and professional studies—of information, information technology, business information systems, library services and information management were starting to merge. Our programs needed rethinking and reworking—a task we accomplished with success.

Our Head of Department, Mike Ramsden, was made Acting Dean for about eighteen months. This was about the same time that we had started renewing our programs. And while he was Acting Dean, I became Acting Head of Department.

I realised that if I was going to stay in academia for a while, I really needed to get a PhD, even if they were still unusual in the field in which I was working at the time. Somehow, amongst everything else, I thought I could fit that in. After all, I expected Mike would eventually resume the role of Head of Department, which would lighten my load, and that suited me just fine.

I asked one of my contacts at the University of Melbourne for advice regarding my PhD studies. He steered me in the direction of Melbourne Business School (MBS), where I presented my case to the Dean. I was eventually accepted as a part-time student, though there was no one on staff then who really had a background in what I wanted to do.

I learned many years later that my contact at the University of Melbourne also happened to be Chair of the Academic Board at the time. When he rang the Dean there, the assumption was that it would be a very good idea to accept me. Sometimes you can get lucky!

The day I received my acceptance papers from MBS was the same day that the Head called me in the evening to say that he had finally agreed to accept the role of Dean. All of us in the Department knew what that meant—whenever you lost your Head, you were without one for about eighteen months while someone conducted a review to see if the department and its programs were really needed.

So, when you are at your lowest ebb, without the most senior person, and most understaffed, you also have a very heavy review burden. Again, it was one of those decision points: should I apply for the Head’s role when it became available in about a year’s time? What would this mean for the PhD about which I had become very enthusiastic?

I did get a lot of encouragement from some unusual quarters—people I didn’t know well who were keen for me to go for it and in the end I did. But first I decided I should hand over the Acting Head role to another likely internal candidate so he could have the opportunity to demonstrate his approach.

Meanwhile, I started planning a sabbatical, as the only way to kick-start my doctorate. After all I was a trained librarian so I knew how to do a literature search, and I would just have to figure out how to get things done over time.

I have given many workshops on how to do a PhD part-time when you have a lot of other things going on in your life. The secret is of course to outsource what you don’t have to do, both at home and in your research.

But I have probably dissuaded, rather than persuaded, many people from doing a PhD, especially in what was the arcane British/Australian model. What I always looked for in a PhD student is a real passion to investigate an area, someone who has a very good dose of discipline, and might have a supportive (enough) partner or environment. Completing a PhD is not essentially about being a smart person. It is about being persistent, with dogged determination, and researching an area that is absolutely fascinating to the one person that matters—yourself!

Outsource what you can

In deciding to pursue my PhD and concurrently take on the Head of Department role, I knew I might have finally taken on just too much. It was a ridiculously busy time—heading a department going through major changes, working on my PhD, co-parenting our four children (aged nine to sixteen when I took on the Head role) and of course managing multiple other relationships.

Back then, the first part of any PhD required a substantial literature search, which was later synthesised to create a great topic—or something the student would be prepared to spend the next few years researching.

My studies were relevant to what we were doing in the department, but we did not have funds to pay a researcher to assist with the leg work. After agreeing to lead a series of workshops with the Australian Institute of Management on Strategic Information Services, I was given approval to use the payment for these workshops to fund my literature searching. (Remember this was still before the Internet.) I approached one of the really good students, Carey Butler, to see if she was prepared to be my paid research assistant, and, fortunately, she said yes. I did the conceptual work and initial literature searching then Carey followed up on these, found the relevant articles, helped index things and generally gave me great support.

I also set the expectation that I would work from home most of each Tuesday, and I did. Sometimes I did catch-up work for the department, and other times I worked on the PhD.

My kids knew too that if they needed something attended to, a parent permission form signed or anything else like that, then that should be done before 8.30pm. From about 9pm to 11pm many nights I was working on the doctoral work, or sometimes other Departmental work.

But I was not sequestered away—to this day, my study just has a light Japanese screen instead of a door and is next to the kitchen.

Making that decision to get some help, or to outsource, is hard, but most people do say that, with hindsight, they should have done it sooner.

Share your challenges and ask for help

Always be willing to talk about what you are doing with others, to share some of the challenges, as you never know what might eventuate.

I took a few months sabbatical in the first year of the doctorate to travel, met other researchers in the US, and participated in some conferences. My data gathering included interviewing dozens of senior executives in Australia’s major banks and it required some time to synthesise the findings. This led to the decision that I would need to take a few months off to complete the rest of the writing for the PhD. I was intending to take it as Leave Without Pay, which would also be a great incentive to get it done quickly.

However, one day I was discussing the timing dilemma with an acquaintance who had just been appointed to run a new commercially-focused research centre. He thought having me on his staff for a while would be a good thing as I understood what the centre was trying to achieve, had a relevant academic and professional background, and was part of a university with whom the centre was making linkages. We came to an agreement that I could spent eighty to eighty-five percent of my time on the PhD writing and about fifteen percent helping them get established. For that, he would pay almost my current salary. RMIT was happy about it as they had a link to the centre and so it was a bit of a win-win.

Getting the PhD done required discipline and drive. It also required an ability to compartmentalise what I was doing, which is something I have learned to do over time. It can be annoying to others as it means I might be overly focused and that level of persistence or focus can be off-putting or a bit of a mystery to others. People might call it selfish or self-centred, but I can live with that. After all, I had earlier supported Robert in many ways through his doctoral studies and, over many years, we have each supported each other to achieve what we wanted to do.

Many of the MBA students who have been in my classes have had similar experiences. If you have people to support and who need to support you, just figure out how you might get things done.

With open minds and wills it is amazing what can be jointly achieved.