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 They wanted to be able to capture a lot of the unpublished materials teachers were developing themselves, organise and make them available to others.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
