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Before You Quit Your Job, Try This: Create a New Role at Your Current Company (The Internal Move) · Happen To Your Career - Meaningful Work, Career Change, Career Design, & Job Search

• 0:00
  Scott Anthony Barlow: Laura was working in a company that she actually liked, but she got two years into the role, decided she was interested in moving, and she felt stuck.
• 0:08
  Laura Parker: My issue was I know about all the jobs that exist. I don't know what future jobs people might be thinking about creating, so I was struggling.
• 0:17
  Scott Anthony Barlow: So she did what most struggle to accomplish. She thought of a new role, proposed it, and even though it didn't exist yet, got it approved, and then moved into it. Four years later, she came back and did it again.
• 0:30
  Most people think they need a new company, a new organization, but that wasn't what Laura needed. She needed a new role inside the one that she already had, and the process that she used to get there is something most people never actually pursue.
• 0:44
  Introduction: This is Happen To Your Career. Most people let their career happen to them, falling into jobs by accident, staying longer than they should, and wondering if this is really all there is. But a few people decide to stop settling and do something different. This podcast is for you to take control, get intentional, and design your work to fit the life that you want to build. Real stories and real research so that you can stop waiting and start making it happen. I'm Scott Anthony Barlow.
• 1:09
  Scott Anthony Barlow: If you've decided to pursue an internal move at your current company, then you've probably hit up against some problems, 'cause here's what people do.
• 1:19
  Either they talk to their boss, maybe a few other people, and they don't really get anywhere, and they give up. Or maybe you've looked at jobs that are posted internally and didn't see anything that fits. But here's what happens. If you've drawn the conclusion that it's not going to be possible, then that conclusion is usually wrong.
• 1:40
  The posted roles, they're not the universe of available options. What your boss knows about, even if they're completely on your side, there's probably a whole other realm of possibilities. Is it always possible? No, not always, but most of the time there are many more ways than what you realize, and that is exactly what this episode is about, breaking down the hidden ways to be able to make an internal move without pursuing just the normal channels.
• 2:07
  We get to work with people all over the world that are changing jobs, changing careers, making different types of transitions, and one of the things that we've seen along the way is that many people think that they have to completely leave their organization to get what they want. Sometimes that's definitely true, but before you start jumping in and doing all the things that you think that you need to do, update your resume, searching the job boards, whatever else, those probably aren't gonna be productive in most cases anyways.
• 2:34
  Let's start imagining what it would be like to have exactly what you need out of work. Now, there's two questions that I think are worth answering first before assuming that that has to happen elsewhere, someplace else, some other organization.
• 2:50
  Question number one is, what do you not like about your current role? Is it the lack of flexibility? Is it not being able to have the right challenge? Is it who you're working with? Whatever it is, let's start identifying that, and then we can take it a step further and begin to identify what would create a phenomenal fit for you.
• 3:10
  And we have many other episodes, an entire back catalog of how to do exactly that, and if you want more help, you can obviously, yeah, email our team, and we'd be thrilled to pieces to help you out. That said, I'll drop one of the links to the episodes for how to define what creates a phenomenal fit for you.
• 3:27
  But there's another question here, too, and that question is, can this be solved by staying where you are, or are you better off getting what you need somewhere else, some other organization? And many people skip these questions entirely, or they're trying to look at it in a very different way.
• 3:44
  They're usually making assumptions about what they can get versus what they can't get from their existing organization. Even though they might be coming from smart, talented people, we find that many of us are making assumptions that aren't actually true, and then that leads to job searching before we've actually really acknowledged what the problem is and what we specifically need.
• 4:04
  So sometimes leaving really is the answer, but what if it's not? What if the thing that is no longer working is completely fixable from the inside, at least if you're willing to do the work to fix it. For Laura, who you got to meet briefly earlier, the company was a phenomenal fit overall. Organizationally, great. The problem she faced was a misalignment with what she actually was working on day to day.
• 4:29
  Laura Parker: My strengths and, I guess, my values aligned to really building relationships for the long term, bringing value to people, understanding what they value, and then figuring out how I can bring that to their table, and I just didn't have the opportunity to do that when I had to try and keep in touch with 150 different customers and try and sell to them. It was just very transactional.
• 4:49
  Scott Anthony Barlow: Okay, let's fast-forward here. Months of work that went into Laura getting the clarity about what she actually needed. She did a great job here, and she knew the answer at that point was not to leave the organization because so much of what the organization had was a clear fit.
• 5:06
  Instead, it was to go through the time, effort, and investment of energy to find or even create a role within that organization that matched her actual strengths and the other elements that she was looking for.
• 5:20
  Laura Parker: I love the win of a sale. I do love getting those signatures on the dotted line, but I wanna do it because we found a solution that really works for that customer and because we're gonna help that customer's business, and we're gonna help our stakeholders look good, feel good, do their job better. And for me, that just means I prefer to spend more time understanding what that looks like for as many people as I can.
• 5:40
  Scott Anthony Barlow: So if you still like your company, if you still trust your leadership, you value the relationships that you've built, the internal move might be worth pursuing before you try to make other moves. What I found is that most people will try some things. They'll talk to their boss. They will go ahead and have a couple conversations with other people around them, maybe even have a few conversations with other people in the other parts of the organization.
• 6:01
  Great. However, that alone usually is not gonna get the job done. So then they might go look on, you know, internal job boards and keep continuously monitoring that. Also might not yield anything that fits. So many people conclude that it's just not gonna be possible. Is that always the case? Mm, not usually.
• 6:19
  A lot of times that conclusion is wrong. The posted roles aren't the universe of available options. They're the jobs that already exist and are actively being back filled. The real universe of options is much larger than that, and it includes the roles that your organization and the people inside your organization are thinking about creating, the problems that need solving and you don't have an owner, and departments that are growing and haven't yet articulated what kind of help that they need.
• 6:45
  Now, you can't find those by browsing an internal job board, as it turns out. You find them by talking to other people, key people in the organization, usually decision-makers or the people close to the problems. Laura did exactly this. She'd already told leadership that she wanted to change, and by this point in time, we were working with her to help her navigate through this series of conversations, and they told her to figure out what she wanted, and she couldn't find that by just looking at what currently existed. That's the challenging part.
• 7:18
  Laura Parker: I started getting in touch with senior people, not so senior people, people in departments that I thought I might wanna work in. We're not very big in London here. There's only about 40 of us now, so I was contacting people in our San Francisco, Melbourne, New York offices, and they were people who had either shifted roles quite significantly, and I wanted to find out how they'd done that, or they were people, as I say, who were in departments that I thought maybe I'd be interested in working in.
• 7:44
  Scott Anthony Barlow: Okay, so here's what Laura was not doing here, to be really clear. She wasn't networking or building relationships around the organization to ask for a job. Instead, she was building relationships. She was using her actual genuine curiosity. She was investigating. She was exploring to understand what was possible.
• 8:03
  What did work in different departments actually look like? What problems were they actively working on, did they care about, and were trying to solve? How had people navigated internal moves before for the area she was interested in? And where might alignment be with what she had to offer and what she could contribute, and what parts of the organization actually needed that contribution?
• 8:26
  Okay, you've probably heard us refer to the idea of test drive conversations in the past, and this is just one way to create career experimentation so that you can get inputs in order to determine what you actually need and what might be a good fit, right? However, test drive conversations, not to be confused with informational interviews, tend to be very informal, often short conversations that are intentional, where you are connecting with somebody else, expressing genuine interest about what the work might look like, how they operate within it, and about their experience overall with it.
• 9:03
  Similar to an informational interview, you're going to get different types of information that's gonna be useful for you, and instead dialing up the exploratory and having much more of a two-way engagement here. These conversations do two things simultaneously. They, of course, give you that information that we mentioned, and they build a relationship with the person who's in or near the role that you might eventually want, or with the people that can help you or hire you get to that role, too.
• 9:30
  It's worth doing both. I wanna make a clear distinction because talking to people who are currently in a role will help you understand what the work looks like day to day. It will allow you to understand their experiences, but it's going to be through their lens. So you're gonna have to filter that information, and you're gonna still have to understand your strengths more than well enough to then use the information that you're getting and filter it through that lens of how somebody else got there and what they're sharing with you.
• 9:57
  Even when you do that, though, those same people rarely are going to have the authority to create a role for you. The people who can do that are usually up a level or two or five, and the ones who decide what the department needs, what gets funded, and what problems don't yet have an owner are going to often be those people, too.
• 10:16
  The people with authority to help or hire. Now, a strategic approach here means that you're talking to both groups. Now, this is where you're gonna start to surface the invisible options, and if you think about what's happening here is you're taking a consultative approach to finding problems that need to be solved within the organization that are really, truly valuable, and you're trying to match those problems to how you can best contribute.
• 10:41
  So it's a very, very, very different way of looking at it. This is the type of work, by the way, that an organization might go and pay for, like pay a consultant to come in. But if you're doing it for free, the meal ticket here is that you're getting to often have the beginnings to build your own role. Not easy to do.
• 11:01
  This is an advanced-level maneuver, and this is something we have helped quite a few people with. But it makes it very, very possible to get to other work that most people in the world are never going to be able to achieve. Pretty cool, right? And if we want to think about this a different way, really what you're doing is you're going and collecting the problems while simultaneously trying to uncover what creates that great fit for you, and then therefore you're engineering the situation in which you become the solution to that problem.
• 11:31
  I've personally done this many times over with organizations that I've worked with back before I was running this company. It's something that we've helped hundreds of people do. Not easy, but worth it 'cause it leads to a result that most people will never get. But let's talk about how this actually happens.
• 11:45
  Once you've identified an opportunity, if you've done a great job meeting with the people that have a vested interest in that, the people who are in, you know, similar roles or the people who have ownership over that area or the people who have the authority to make the decisions, and you're bringing them along for the ride, then you already have a leg up here.
• 12:04
  But once you're at this stage, this is where many people will either get way too informal or overly formal. They either have a casual conversation and hope that it turns into something, or they write a 15-slide deck proposal that nobody really has time to look at and/or read. An effective way to make an internal move has three components here.
• 12:27
  First, we have to help the people who have a vested interest understand what is the business case, not the personal one. What is the real impact that this needs to make? Your leadership doesn't need to know what would make you happier. A lot of people go after the business case, and that's a good thing to do.
• 12:44
  However, it's not really just about the business case. It's about relating the business case to that particular set of individuals and the things that they care about the most. Is this the biggest problem that they're trying to solve, or is this some tiny little thing that really doesn't justify resources to be able to solve it, and it's just a fire that needs to burn in one way or another even though we know it's an opportunity for improvement?
• 13:06
  That is a big distinguishing factor. So when you're building out the business case, we have to connect it back not just to how it would make the organization more effective, but what problems does it solve for the real people that are in those roles or around it on a daily basis. And a better way to think about this was, why can't we not do this?
• 13:27
  Now, here's what this looked like for Laura, and just a little bit of context. Her company had around 80 of its largest customers, and only four people responsible for delivering the product to all of them.
• 13:38
  Laura Parker: All four of them as kind of treating that role a little bit differently. They're delivering different things in different ways to the customers.
• 13:44
  Scott Anthony Barlow: Okay, this is not a small thing at a fast-growing company. This inconsistent service to the highest value accounts is a pretty big cost, and it's something that all of them cared about. So Laura didn't just ask her manager to help her find her a new job. She proposed a role built around fixing this exact problem.
• 14:05
  Laura Parker: We're trying to bring some standardization to then allow people to flex where they need to, but where we're kind of starting from a bit more of a standard approach
• 14:14
  Scott Anthony Barlow: Laura's internal move succeeded partially because she'd done the diagnostic work. She wasn't asking for a favor. She was proposing a solution to a problem, of course, that the company had, but more importantly, it was a problem that the people that she was asking really cared about fixing. They thought it was a big deal to fix it.
• 14:34
  Laura Parker: That allowed me to design... Essentially, I've designed a job for myself here.
• 14:39
  Scott Anthony Barlow: Okay, the second thing that has to be in place here in order to make an internal move. The 'why you' specifically. You have to help people connect the dots. Like, how are you going to be able to deliver this, and more so, how is it going to be a net benefit to the organization?
• 14:56
  Now, people who are making an internal move definitely have a significant advantage over external candidates that most people underutilize. You're a known quantity. Your leadership already knows that you can do hard things. They know your values, your work ethic, your relationships, your institutional knowledge.
• 15:14
  Now, a lot of people will get really into the narrative here, and maybe overly so, because it is important that they understand, you know, your track record and how that relates to what you're gonna be able to do in the future, for sure. But usually, that's a small portion of this.
• 15:31
  Here's the value I've already demonstrated to the organization, here's how it maps to what the new role requires, and that's enough. Unfortunately, that's where most people stop and where your change will often fall apart. Knowing your own value isn't enough, and communicating it in that narrative is not enough.
• 15:48
  Because you're not the one taking the risk here. It's often other people who are taking the risk, at least that's how it's perceived. There's a psychological reason internal moves can be harder to make than what it seems like they should be. That reason is loss aversion. Here's a way to think about that.
• 16:06
  If you're performing really well in a role, then it actually is a loss for your leader and for other people to pull you out of that role and put somebody who's an unknown quantity into that same role, even if you're moving to something that's gonna make a gain for the organization overall. Now, I think that there's a lot of great leaders out there that recognize this, and they're willing to put your well-being and the company's well-being ahead of that potential loss.
• 16:36
  However, there's also many people that don't recognize that this is what is happening to real time, and there is an extra barrier there that they might not realize, you might not realize, and ultimately you have to work around. So I just wanna be cautious about that, and make sure that you're thinking about that as well.
• 16:40
  However, there's also many people that don't recognize that this is what is happening to real time, and there is an extra barrier there that they might not realize, you might not realize, and ultimately you have to work around. So I just wanna be cautious about that, and make sure that you're thinking about that as well.
• 16:55
  Another thing to consider here,
• 16:56
  A lot of people imagine an internal move, maybe they do an interview, maybe they have a conversation or two, but what we see in reality is that this is usually a series of conversations spread over time rather than a one-and-done pitch. Internal moves are work that is going to not take place over time, but take place over a variety of interactions.
• 17:19
  They're much closer to a partnership, matching what you need with what the organization needs, and I'd like for you to think about it that way. This is refined conversation by conversation. Now, we shared Misty's story semi-recently on the podcast, and she has a great example of what happens when this isn't entirely well-handled.
• 17:37
  She raised her hand for a second role at her organization, and the plan was to make an internal move. This was part of her experimentation, though, and this role was a higher-profile one that was tied to a revenue-generating project, and for a while it looked like it was going to work. Then, the second role just stacked on top of the first with no plan for handing anything off.
• 17:57
  Misty Leon: It started to become clear to me that I was still going to be doing the original full-time job on top of the new role, which was definitely a full-time job in and of itself, and I started having a lot of conversations, and it just was getting very, very clear that it was not a high priority to anyone other than me to solve a situation where I was filling two jobs at the same time
• 18:25
  Scott Anthony Barlow: Part of what then made this challenging was there wasn't necessarily a transition plan in place that everybody was agreed upon, and there wasn't necessarily a planned backfill.
• 18:35
  And fortunately, in Misty's case, this actually worked out really well 'cause it led her to something that is even better. But we wanted to share her little bit of story because that's what can happen if we don't think all the way through this.
• 18:48
  Misty Leon: As the date started approaching and I was having all these internal conversations, and it was becoming really clear to me that I was going to be working two full-time jobs for the foreseeable future.
• 19:01
  Scott Anthony Barlow: Okay, so this is usually the point in the process where outside perspective helps the most.
• 19:05
  Building a transition plan that accounts for loss aversion while you're standing inside the situation is challenging to see your own blind spots. It's very difficult to do alone. It's also the kind of thing that our team can help you work through directly, pressure testing both the business case and helping you connect it back to what you specifically need as you're trying to build not just a career for yourself that fits, but also a life for yourself that has work that you actually want to do within it.
• 19:32
  The real key here is we want this to happen before this reaches your leader's desk. It's much better if it's proactive. It also moves much faster. Okay, let's go back to that third element here that needs to be a part of this process. This has to be specific and timeable. Vague questions tend to get vague responses.
• 19:50
  Specific asks tend to create clarity and confidence. That's what it signals, and it also signals that you've done the thinking, you've done the work. You're not asking someone else to do the hard work for you. What you're telling them is that you want the responsibility to fulfill this position, whatever that is.
• 20:07
  Laura Parker: Look at what you can control and start working on those pieces. A lot of it you can't control, but there are bits you can, and that's where you need to focus your efforts.
• 20:16
  Scott Anthony Barlow: Now, what you can control is the quality of the plan that you've built, the business case, making sure that you have specificity in your ask, the strength of how well this fits, making sure this is truly a win-win, and doing that work for the people involved up front and not expecting them to do it for you.
• 20:37
  That's a big deal. I personally do not believe that organizations own this full responsibility for our individual careers. I think that we need to take the ownership of that, and when we do, that's when magic happens, when we're willing to put all of these variables together in a way that people can say yes to it.
• 20:56
  But that leads us to one of the most important questions in this entire episode, and one many people don't ask very clearly of themselves, and that's is the internal move the right answer for your situation, or is it a delay for the inevitable? Because an internal move can be either a waste of time delaying the inevitable, or it can be the right move for you.
• 21:18
  Here's a couple of things to consider to try to figure out which one it is for your particular case. Number one, do you genuinely like the organization, where you're enamored with it? You think this is a phenomenal organization, and the people within it are the people that you really, truly want to spend time around.
• 21:36
  Number two, is the problem that you're trying to solve here is it specific? Is it solvable? And have the people in the organization demonstrated that they can adapt? If those are true, then I would consider it to be time well spent trying to move forward with an internal move. But here's a couple things to consider about whether or not it might be a delay.
• 22:00
  For example, if the values misalignment runs deeper than your role and your particular set of circumstances, if that is pervasive throughout the organization, or you've already tried a version of this, like you've had many conversations with, you know, leadership and other people before and been told that something would change, and none of these changes ever came, but you were the one who was trying to drive these forward.
• 22:25
  Or probably the most common one is you have identified what is a phenomenal fit for you. You've been running experiments to try and figure out already if your organization could be a current fit, and none of them are pointing back to this organization. That can be a clear sign that we're just delaying the inevitable.
• 22:42
  In Laura's case, she liked the company. She had a specific and solvable problem, and the organization really truly had the flexibility and resources to be able to work with her, and it worked, not once, but twice. And many people, when they hear that, they might automatically think that, wow, she did something wrong the first time around to have to do it twice, but it was exactly the opposite.
• 23:02
  As humans, we tend to grow our expectations; our needs tend to change, especially as we go through different seasons of life. What we wanted when we were 20 is not the same thing we want when we are 40 or 50 or in our 70s. Turns out, right? So in Laura's case, she'd actually outgrown that first role that she built, and she needed to do that internal work again to create a more refined picture of what she wanted.
• 23:28
  Now, the really cool thing is since she had already gone through a version of that, it becomes much more about refinement than doing all of the same redundant work. Pretty cool, right? This is, by the way, how people continue to evolve lives for themselves and work that actually fits for themselves overall.
• 23:46
  It requires a very deep understanding, which is significant work up front. But once you have that, it is a continual refinement and maintenance process over the rest of your life, and the end result is you get to do things that nobody in the world gets to do. This is what an intentional career change looks like. It's not one big leap. It's a series of deliberate moves. Each one builds on the last.
• 24:08
  If you're trying to figure out how to build a life that really truly fits you and how work fits within that, then we can help you find your ideal career, whether it's inside your organization or somewhere else externally.
• 24:19
  And I'd say that it usually starts with helping you to build what we call an ideal career profile. And from there, we'd help you figure out whether that's an internal move or a full organizational change. Either way, the end result is getting to work that is an extraordinary fit for you and allows you to build the life that you actually want.
• 24:38
  Here's what I would suggest to do if you want help and support doing that. Just send me an email, scott@happentoyourcareer.com. Put 'Conversation' in the subject line, and I'll connect you with the right member of my team. They'll reach out, they'll understand your career goals, and we'll figure out the very best way that we can support you to get where you want to go. Until next time, I'm Scott Anthony Barlow. This is Happen To Your Career. See you on the next episode. Adios. I'm out.