The Power of Reframing To Change Your Career Trajectory
Actions are based on perceived possibilities. When you shift mindset, you end up with entirely different actions that drastically change the trajectory of your career and your company.
One of the most powerful skills I coach my clients in leadership doesn’t involve strategy, communication, or influence. It turns out that the biggest growth area for most aspiring executives is mindset — what information they take in and how they make sense of the situation. When mindset shifts, their approach and actions change, leading to drastically different career trajectories from the same starting point.
This week, I will share with you two clients where simply reframing the situation had a significant positive impact on what they did next and their long-term career potential.
Joe: Reorg and Getting Layered
Joe is a Principal PM who has been an expert in his space for 15+ years. He has earned the respect of his team and his leaders. Recently, with GenAI, the company did a major reorg across PM, engineering, design, product operations, and more. Joe was layered under a peer. He came to me in distress and worried about his future at the company. This is what he focused on:
His previous peer is now his manager. His previous manager was given a title promotion and is now his skip manager.
His scope and team size are unchanged but he is no longer sure whether the charter he had for the past year is still valid
He is unable to guide his cross-functional partners on priorities as the strategy for the new organization has not been settled
Based on the inputs Joe perceived, he felt angry, unappreciated, and lost. With the layering, he felt like he had done something wrong and capped his career trajectory. Joe wasn’t motivated in his day-to-day work in the new organization. He considered a team switch or interviewing for a new job.
A Different (Growth) Perspective
In the same conversation, here’s what I picked up from him:
He was brought into the reorg conversation before it was officially announced. His new leaders made an effort to give him advanced notice and get his opinions
He is one of a few thought leaders tapped to drive strategy development for the new organization
He has a strong personal relationship with his skip manager and the new overall SVP of the organization. They often come to him for opinions and include him in executive-level conversations.
From this lens, Joe has a great opportunity to be a critical decision-maker in the new strategy, establish his influence in the new organization, and accelerate his career. I saw the current organizational structure as a temporary bandaid for a few months until a more long-term strategy and set of initiatives were better defined. Joe is in a position to shape higher-level strategy, strengthen relationships with the new VPs and SVPs, and go beyond his current scope. Where he saw limitations on his value, I picked up on the trust and expertise he had spent years building up.
Yue’s Coaching Corner
I sat down with The Career Breakers podcast to talk about my transition from CPO and CTO to Executive Coaching, and all the other “breaks” in my career along the way. Listen on Spotify or Apple.
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Madeline: What’s my role?
Madeline is a Director of Product at a public consumer software company leading multiple disparate product teams covering a huge surface area at the company. One day, Madeline came to me with the following concern:
One of her top performers was hungry for growth. She felt like he was increasingly doing her job in his area and was concerned he wanted her job.
The company hired a new VP of Revenue, who began to increasingly ask about problems and areas she oversaw. She worried he was trying to steal scope.
She saw a drop in interactions with one of her strongest supporters on the executive team. They finished an ongoing project and the executive was tapped by the CEO to take on a brand new role in GenAI.
Madeline was worried that she wouldn’t have a job in a few months, with the new VP and top performer “eating away” at parts of her current role. She was also worried that less time with her sponsor meant was additional signal that her reputation was on the decline. As a result, Madeline started to micro-manage her top performer, asking to be a part of his strategy conversations. She has also been avoiding 1:1 conversations with the new VP, fearing he would steal her ideas.
The Possibility of Growth
I have been working with Madeline for a long time and know her manager and sponsor well. She has a stellar reputation as a relationship guru and a high performer “She’s the one I go to when I need something tricky across functions done”, her leaders would say. Here is how I interpreted the same situation:
She is a great manager who has built a strong bench for herself. Her team is willing and able to step up to cover parts of her role, freeing up her time to focus on higher-level strategy and relationship building. She’s done a great job of “giving away her legos”.
The revenue problems that she had been shedding light on and advocating for have finally gained momentum with the executive team. She finally has a strong thought partner in this new VP and the ability to ask for more (different types of) resources across engineering, sales, and marketing.
Her sponsor has a fantastic new role and can open doors to work closer to the “hottest project” in GenAI at the company. Even if she doesn’t want to change teams immediately, she now has close access to the latest thinking and top priorities of the CEO.
With this lens, her next steps looked very different. Rather than trying to “protect her current scope” and acting from a place of fear, Madeline should jump into empire-building. With her teams operating smoothly, she can extract herself fully from the day-to-day, and instead, join her new partner to bring new energy to some big problem areas that have been neglected. She has the opportunity to make business cases for new streams of revenue and perhaps bring GenAI work into the mix as well. She is uniquely positioned to connect the dots between GenAI product work and new revenue streams from enterprise customers — what a critical role!
These are two examples of how reframing completely changed the narrative for these two leaders and their companies. All of us face situations like this daily and our actions then define the outcome — a self-fulfilling prophecy. The biggest area of work is how to reframe their inputs to generate different possibilities of outcomes.
How To Reframe
We filter out the majority of information we receive from our environment. Our senses send ~11 million bits of information per second to the brain. However, the conscious mind can process only about 50 bits per second (source). That is 0.00045% of everything that is happening.
On a regular day at work, we do tasks on cruise control — running a sprint planning, doing brainstorming sessions, writing and sending meeting notes, or conducting customer interviews. This ability to replay patterns helps us "be more effective and efficient” and increases our capacity to deliver more work. However, it also traps us into one default lens through which we view most of our decisions.
What we allow through the filters (aka pay attention to) is formed by our early development and conscious learning in school and the workplace. We take in a set of signals, process them, take action, and then receive positive or negative feedback from our environment. Over time, we form biases, shortcuts, and theories that help us process information quickly and with less effort. These then become the narratives in our minds that define our identity and actions.
To Reframe, Notice Differently
One of the best ways of reframing is to intentionally notice the opposite. In the first example with Joe, rather than simply taking his read of the situation at face value, I probed with open questions for any positive signals (and it turns out there are plenty). When you find yourself seeing all the negatives of a situation, remind yourself to actively look for the positives. Perhaps it is true that there aren’t any. But in many cases, clients find alternative viewpoints that are equally valid and lead to very different conclusions.
The same concept applies to when you feel like someone else is intentionally trying to sabotage your career, or when your leader seems to have no idea what is happening. Take a step back and open up your mind to other possibilities. What else could be happening here? What other signals are there that I am not actively noticing? How else could I interpret this situation?
Another tactic is to start with reframing your mindset. When you are in a mindset of fear and worry, you’ll pick up more of those signals (confirmation bias) and interpret all the signals negatively. When you are in a positive mindset, you’ll notice the positive signals and tend to interpret even negative situations more positively. Practice popping between these modes of thinking. Some clients like to give them different nicknames — “I’m going to Positive Bunny or Worried Eeyore for a few days”. Others go for long walks, spend time with loved ones, or watch inspirational movies — to boost themselves into a positive frame of mind. When you find yourself too stuck to one mindset, try the other one on (play devil’s advocate with yourself) and see what you notice differently.
That’s all folks. See you next week at 3:14 pm!
Yue
Very timely article given some recent topics “taking up space rent-free” in my head.
I have seen the biggest changes in my career when reframing a situation. Thank you Yue for sharing these examples, this post reminded me of one of the main messages from "Man's Search for Meaning" where he emphasizes the importance on how you react to a situation no matter how negative it might be or feel.