Managing risk in your career

Many Cana­di­ans are not risk tak­ers. We are a nation of home buy­ers (homes are per­ceived as safe and secure by many) and we grav­i­tate towards sta­ble jobs, ide­al­ly with full ben­e­fits and pensions.

In the book Start-up of You, LinkedIn co-founder and author Reid Hoff­man argues that overt­ly pur­su­ing safe­ty and secu­ri­ty in your career can leave you “…exposed to a huge blow-up in the future.”

Think of gov­ern­ment work­ers. They typ­i­cal­ly don’t take huge risks along the way in their careers. For their loy­al­ty, they receive incre­men­tal pay increas­es, good ben­e­fits, and a gen­er­ous pen­sion. For many peo­ple, this is utopia.

Com­pare these gov­ern­ment work­ers to real-estate agents, who need to hus­tle to find their work. Occa­sion­al­ly, they sell an expen­sive home and col­lect a lucra­tive com­mis­sion. The next month, how­ev­er, they may not sell any­thing. Their incomes are great some times, fol­lowed by lean periods.

Hoff­man writes: “He [the gov­ern­ment work­er] always eats well…until the day comes that gov­ern­ment pen­sions explode or aus­ter­i­ty mea­sures wipe out his depart­ment. Now he’s screwed. He will starve because, unlike the real estate agent, he has no idea how to deal with the downs…” A cen­tral theme of Hoff­man’s chap­ter on risk is that work­ers should take cal­cu­lat­ed risks in their careers to make them­selves more resilient when some­thing unex­pect­ed happens.

Peo­ple don’t just per­ceive gov­ern­ment to be low risk. In the late 1990s, Nor­tel could do no wrong—it was seen as a great place to work and its CEO was her­ald­ed as a cap­i­tal­ist hero. At the time, employ­ees were envied. A few short years lat­er, after the dot-com bub­ble burst, Nor­tel laid off 60,000 employ­ees. In 2009, the com­pa­ny filed for bank­rupt­cy and now its pen­sion is in tat­ters. Long-term employ­ees must have been stunned.

Taking intelligent risks

If you lived on an African savan­nah in cen­turies past, avoid­ing risk—like com­ing face to face with a lion—made per­fect sense. Today, in the devel­oped world, most of us don’t need to wor­ry about get­ting eat­en alive. Hoff­man writes: “Over­es­ti­mat­ing risks and avoid­ing loss­es is a fine strat­e­gy for sur­viv­ing dan­ger­ous envi­ron­ments, but not for thriv­ing in a mod­ern career. When risks aren’t life-threat­en­ing, you have to over­come your brain’s dis­po­si­tion to avoid sur­viv­able risks.”

Hoff­man does not advo­cate tak­ing stu­pid risks. He argues that tak­ing risks makes sense when there’s a promise of a reward.

Here are some exam­ples of tak­ing risks in your career:

Oth­er than con­tract­ing, I some­times take a cal­cu­lat­ed risk by pre­sent­ing a top­ic at an upcom­ing tech­ni­cal writ­ing con­fer­ence. How is that a risk? Because I don’t always know every­thing about the sub­ject. In some cas­es, I’ve just scratched the sur­face of a top­ic and I need to research the con­tent, cre­ate and prac­tice the pre­sen­ta­tion, and deliv­er it to a crowd of peers in a rel­a­tive­ly short time. This forces me to learn a lot about a sub­ject quick­ly and there is always a pos­si­bil­i­ty of fail­ure. Of course, there are ben­e­fits too. I learn new skills and I present my new knowl­edge to a crowd, which increas­es my vis­i­bil­i­ty. I also can use that research to present at oth­er events and writes arti­cles for mag­a­zines, such as the Soci­ety for Tech­ni­cal Com­mu­ni­ca­tion’s Inter­com magazine.

In the short term, avoid­ing risk seems like a good path for­ward. But over the long-haul, Hoff­man writes “low volatil­i­ty leads to increased vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty because it ren­ders the sys­tem [and your career] less resilient to unthink­able exter­nal shocks…If you don’t find risk, risk will find you.”

Do you agree? If so, how do you take risks at your work?