Lifting Your Head?

This is The First of a Two-Part Series

As a recruiter, I work with healthcare executives contemplating their next career move––a process rooted in reflection and planning. As we approach the end of 2024, this theme of reflection becomes especially relevant as we evaluate our professional and personal experiences while charting a course for the coming year.

More often than not, I hear executives talk about their genuine desire to find a new opportunity, but don’t see the same level of energy placed in developing a specific career strategy to make that happen. Many of these people have not dedicated the time needed to do this, while others simply underestimate its importance. Instead, many come to me expecting the answer. The reality is that each of us, as individuals, has our own personal brand, life experiences, and personal interests that, combined, need to inform our professional path forward.

When spending time with executives discussing career strategy, I like to apply a brand-centric approach to help them structure their thinking––and ultimately define their career strategy. With that strategy in hand, it’s easier to determine how best to spend our time pursuing new job opportunities and, more importantly, knowing when to say “no” to ones that don’t fit our plan. Funny enough, most CEOs and other C-Suite executives I work with dedicate significant time each year to developing and writing business plans to achieve their work-related goals. So, why don’t we invest the same amount of time outlining our professional careers? 

Like anything else, a deliberate strategy and plan will improve the likelihood of a timely and successful outcome when we decide to lift our heads and make a career change. As executives, we use these strategies to improve the “enterprise value” of the businesses we run. Why not approach your professional brand with the same mindset as enterprise value? Knowing that over time, we have accumulated rich industry and functional experiences as leaders, these outcomes and the context of the results translate into your professional brand and should inform how you see yourself today and where you want to take your career in the future.

Like successful consumer brands such as Starbucks, Amazon, or Nike, these businesses know what they stand for in the market today and make important investments and decisions based on where they want to take that brand in the future. Sometimes, the external perception of these businesses is not aligned with where these businesses want to take their company. In other cases, the brand is helping them propel further in a direction that helps them achieve their long-term goals. Why not apply this same framework to your professional brand? 

So, ask yourself, am I fully leveraging the essence of my brand to pursue what I want in my career? Perhaps there are roles you have played in the past that have effectively defined how you are viewed in the market. In some cases, this could be a good thing. In other ways, it may be something you want to move away from by stretching into other industry sectors or new areas of responsibility. What’s critical is that you take time to evaluate how you view your professional brand and how others perceive you. In most scenarios, they are not the same. This means you, just like a Brand Manager of a giant consumer brand, need to carefully study what that means and make informed career decisions on where you will take your brand in the future.

In the next ChasmPOV, I will lay out a specific framework for evaluating your professional brand and developing a formal career brand strategy that will help you achieve your career goals in 2025 and beyond.

This article was writen by Matt Dumas, Founder and Managing Partner at Chasm Partners.