In part 2 of our career conversations, we need to consider what the peak of our career looks like. This is especially hard for your youngest or most ambitious employees. The youngest ones don’t know what all the options are, and the most ambitious ones see too many opportunities. Of course that doesn’t apply to everyone. Some people know exactly what they want, and those ones will take 2 minutes to get through this conversation.

For now let’s focus on the ones who don’t know what the peak of their career looks like. They’re not on a set path like “I’m going to be a doctor before I turn 30!” They either don’t know enough options, or they see too many options. Something I like to do to narrow the focus is to ask people on my team about aspects of a job or work environment they would want.

For me that includes things like:

• I want to be a decision maker
• I want to help people get better at what they do
• I want my team to respect me
• I want to work regularly with the same team of smart and passionate people
• I want to be seen as a supporter in their career development
• I want to work with people who assume positive intent in each other
• I want to work with people who assume positive intent from me

With these aspects your can do some more investigation to see what ideal jobs have similar aspects. For me, that works out to being the director of curation at the peak of my career. But it could just as well be any leadership position that builds psychological safety into a team of subject matter experts.

You can try this out yourself or with your team members in 1:1s. As you figure out the aspects of the ideal job, you can start to clarify where you or your team members want to be in the future.