Is Your Job Your Calling (extended interview)

As directors of MBA career development programs at the Harvard Business School, business psychologists Timothy Butler and James Waldroop offer advice each year to more than 1,600 of the world's most ambitious and accomplished businesspeople. As cofounders of Waldroop Butler Associates wba@world.std.com , they provide career counseling and executive coaching to leaders at such blue-chip companies as General Electric, Citibank, Gillette, Hewlett-Packard, Philip Morris, and McKinsey & Co. And as authors of Discovering Your Career in Business (Addison-Wesley, 1997), Butler and Waldroop draw on their combined 30 years of experience in researching the psychology of work-and offer advice on how to make career choices that will provide both success and satisfaction. Fast Company sat down with Butler and Waldroop in their office at the Harvard Business School to get advice on the options facing people in the new world of work.

Most people sense that choices in business today are different. When it comes to people and careers, what actually has changed?

James Waldroop: People in business simply have many more choices today than ever before. Just a decade ago, when you took a job, you more or less did what you were told. The old saying was that IBM stood for "I've Been Moved": The company dictated the moves you made. When it came to your career, you had one area that you specialized in. That was all you did, and you more or less did it for your whole work life.

If you're looking for a visual model for change in people's work lives, first think of a tree: Ten or twenty years ago, you'd join a company, put down roots, and stay put. Today the image of the tree has been replaced by a surfer on a surfboard: You're always moving. You can expect to fall into the water any number of times, and you have to get back up to catch that next wave.

But the biggest change is in who is responsible for your career. Ten or fifteen years ago, a social contract went along with a job. Companies accepted certain responsibilities for their people. Today that contract is completely different. You are responsible for creating your own career within an organization-and even more important, between organizations.

It's frequently said that careers are over. Instead, you should expect to hold a series of jobs and to participate in a succession of projects. How do you see the evolution of the career?

Timothy Butler: There are three words that tend to be used interchangeably-and shouldn't be. They are "vocation," "career," and "job." Vocation is the most profound of the three, and it has to do with your calling. It's what you're doing in life that makes a difference for you, that builds meaning for you, that you can look back on in your later years to see the impact you've made on the world. A calling is something you have to listen for. You don't hear it once and then immediately recognize it. You've got to attune yourself to the message.

Career is the term you hear most often today. A career is a line of work. You can say that your career is to be a lawyer or a securities analyst-but usually it's not the same as your calling. You can have different careers at different points in your life.

A job is the most specific and immediate of the three terms. It has to do with who's employing you at the moment and what your job description is for the next 6 months or so. These days, trying to describe what your job will be beyond 12 to 18 months from now is very dicey.

Waldroop: If you look at the derivations of the words "career" and "vocation," you immediately get a feel for the difference between them. Vocation comes from the Latin "vocare," which means "to call." It suggests that you are listening for something that calls out to you, something that comes to you and is particular to you. "Career" comes originally from the Latin word for cart and later from the Middle French word for race track. In other words, you go around and around really fast for a long time-but you never get anywhere.

You give advice on career decisions to students in their early twenties and executives in their late forties and fifties. Do these age groups face different kinds of choices?

Butler: You tend to make different decisions at different points in your life. In fact, you can almost chronicle the kind of choices you have to make by decade. For example, the decisions that you make in your twenties tend to be about creating opportunities. At that stage of life, the questions you ask are, "What can I choose to do that will make my world bigger?" and "What will give me more options?" In contrast, when you reach your thirties, the decisions are about establishing focus. That's when you first realize that you're not going to be able to do everything in your life-and that to do something well, you've got to narrow your interests. By your late twenties and early thirties, you're closing in on something. If you're doing things well, if you're becoming more deeply involved in your career, you're actually closing doors. That's a very hard task, and we see a lot of resistance to that shift.