Navigating Your Career: Michael B. Horn on Job Progress

Aidan McCullen: i gave this book to so many people i. sent them on the website the guys are so generous with the website to give away resources where you can plan your career etc and i think everybody can relate to the book in some way that I’ve made moves my career it didn’t work out you feel like a failure.

And i love what you’re doing with this book to help people really consider what they’re gonna do next, i’m doing when they’re not in crisis mode do it actually when they have time and prepare for when the future inevitably comes specially in this job market maybe give us context to what this book, is about what you wrote

Michael B. Horn: Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, look, we observed over the course of 15 years, basically, that people were giving all sorts of advice to job seekers, and they just weren’t making progress in their career. They kept making the wrong move. We, my co authors, Ethan Bernstein, Bob Mesta, and myself, we’re just as guilty of it as anyone else you know, people would come all the time asking for career advice, and we’d give them advice, and then we’d see, like, it didn’t work out, or we felt sort of empty about it, and we realized that if we just actually understood what was the progress, That those individuals were trying to make in their career, which required us to actually dig a little bit with them, get them, you know, do an interview.

Why are you switching jobs? Why did you most recently switch jobs before that? And really understand what progress meant for them. Then we could give them much better advice and help them get unstuck, if you will, and make progress. And then the second flip of that was to help them realize that just as much as employers are hiring you.

You are also hiring your next job. Like you have agency and you get to make a choice. Is this a job I’m going to take in exchange for the various benefits that it provides? And those two things, like what is progress to you and you get to actually choose you, you get to hire your next job. I think together is a very powerful combination that we hope will help a lot of folks make more progress.

And by the way, we hope employers can use it. To better retain and engage the talent that they want to, stay in the company.

Aidan McCullen: i think what’s so interesting is Your origin story and your time that you spent with the late great Clayton Christensen, but also Bob Mesta, who is your coauthor. I had the great pleasure to host Bob when he was in Dublin before. And he hinted at this book. He didn’t say who his coauthor was.

And I don’t know, Ethan, I haven’t met him before, Bob really emphasized this idea of progress. And it really resonated with me because I thought back to the jobs I’ve had in the past, and it felt like. I was rotting. I felt like I was stagnating. I was losing my competitive edge. I could tell what time of year was by my activities. And this idea of not making progress anymore, that really, really resonated. I’d love you to share a bit more about that because I think when people hear this, they’ll really reach out and get the book

Michael B. Horn: think the fundamental insight of the jobs to be done theory, right. Is that we switch behaviour. When we’re in a struggling circumstance, looking to make progress. And what that means is you really have to understand what is your context, right? Because context helps us understand what’s valuable or not to you at a given point in time.

And then we have to help you contrast the various things you could go do next, because the contrast creates meaning in terms of what is, or isn’t a good role for you at this moment in time. And what we we’ve done in the research is. Study over a thousand individuals who had actually switched jobs to understand what are all the forces that are pushing and pulling them to make a switch in their lives so that we’ve created a free assessment, as you said, on jobmoves.

com so that people can diagnose themselves and understand what’s acting on you right now. And then from that, understand what’s the. Job to be done, or we call it the quest for progress. You’re on right now to help you understand what’s a good or bad switch for you. I’ll give you just a concrete example to try to bring it in sharper relief, which is so, you know, one of the quest for progress that some people are on is regain control.

So in this one, they like a lot of what they’re doing in their job. But they don’t like how their time and energy is being used. Maybe they’re micromanaged. Maybe they’re one of these people being called back to work full time in the office right now and they want to have some hybrid work or virtual work as part of their experience.

Any number of things, right? And so you think about that individual. The worst advice you could tell them is, Oh, just go for the promotion in the same way and like work harder. Get your nose to the grindstone. You know, it’s you, not them. You know, buckle up, buddy, right? What they really need is a shift where they get more control over how they do their work that could be at their current job, it could be a job switch, but it would be a mistake for them to actually get out of the line of work because they like what they’re doing.

And so that understanding is very different from, say, someone who is in the quest for progress of take the next step. Right, which we can help you diagnose because that individual, they’re at a career or personal milestone. It’s like the next logical step on the journey that advice, go for the promotion, climb the ladder, right?

It’s time to buckle up and make that next big thing and become a manager, whatever it is. That’s probably the right advice for that individual, but the wrong one for the other person and vice versa, right? If you told that person and take the next step, Oh man, keep doing the same work, but like find a place that’s really going to respect your boundaries and don’t go for the promotion, like all that stuff, it would land like, you know, it’d be the complete wrong advice.

And so that’s the point is that if we understand what progress is to you. We can then tailor the advice, help you understand what’s a good or bad choice for you at this current moment. And think about how you make progress. One last thing I’ll just quickly say, which is, I think a lot of people are always looking for the dream job, the perfect job, it doesn’t exist.

There is no perfect job on every dimension. Every job has some suck in it. Like you and I were just convection before we started recall you know, started our call. We have both chosen our career paths and we like, I think most of it, but like there are elements that drain our energy and suck. It’s just the reality of work.

Not everything is going to be perfect, but if you hold in your mind that I have to get perfection, one of two things happens. Either one, you just sit there paralyzed in your existing job because you can never find perfection, or two, you make the switch and you’re constantly disappointed because of all the bad stuff, as opposed to understanding, did I make progress?

And so the big admonition in the book is think progress, not perfection.

Aidan McCullen: Absolutely beautiful. I was thinking how perfect you are as a guest for this. Show because it’s about the neuroscience of learning and the future of work and your origin, this idea of your first book that you co authored with Clayton Christensen, disrupting class was literally about the future of education and i think it’s so interesting that you’ve evolved and you’ve kind of gone, I’ve worked heavily on that the future of education but it’s the same in work and the reason i’m saying that is because the workplace has become more than ever, a learning place because of the rate of change i think that’s a really important aspect and i’m gonna try it back then because i love the title the book job moves you’re moving job but also your deep understanding of jobs to be done theory, i’m also bob’s deep understanding he was the guy who did the research so maybe you’ll

Michael B. Horn: Yeah. He’s the milkshake guy, right? Yeah.

Aidan McCullen: I’m the snickers guy as you told me before his other one but I’d love you to share the theory for those who haven’t heard it before because it’s it’s really good to understand because this is almost the, foundation upon which you wrote the book

Michael B. Horn: Yeah, absolutely. And I, I started to allude to it in the, in the previous answer, but essentially a job to be done is the progress you’re seeking in a struggling circumstance. And the basic notion is that people do not hire products and services for their own sake, right? I don’t buy a quarter inch drill just because I’m obsessed with quarter inch drills for the most part.

I buy it because I’m in a circumstance where I need to make a quarter inch hole. And frankly, That’s not even a good enough explanation even there. I want to understand why do you want to make the hole and what’s the context? So if I’m pulling ethernet cable through the back of my closet over there, no one needs to look at it, doesn’t need to be clean, doesn’t need to be perfect.

I can punch a hole with my fist and pull the Ethernet cable through the drywall and it’s fine. If I’m hanging a picture in a, you know, a painting in a art gallery, precision, perfection, cleanliness, much more important. So it helps me understand which tool is the right one for me, given the progress I’m trying to make.

You gave the Snickers bar examples. Bob’s big insight was that Snickers bar and Milky Way are not actually competing against each other. Milky Way is hired after an emotional moment to sort of give you an out breath and an exhale after a difficult, you know, thing in your life. Snickers are hired as a meal replacement.

You’re not you when you’re hungry became the slogan out of that, right? And so understanding context and what progress looks like for you helps you understand how to design products or services that get the job done for the individual. And we basically in this book take the same thing around individuals and their careers, which is that you get to hire your next job, you can treat your career like product development, you can prototype to make more progress and understand what is good or bad, given your context, all of those lessons.

From the product development world that’s led to Bob Moesta being the innovator behind over 3, 500 products and services from missile defense systems to consumer packaged goods and food. You know, it’s the same insight that you can apply to your career and I love that you connected it to learning.

I just want to say one quick thing there and then go back to the questions on your mind. But the You know, I, I’m in the world where I see a lot of corporate learning and training efforts, right? And people are like, Oh, just throw learning at it. That’ll engage them. Well, it actually depends because if you’re trying to make progress to, you know, become a manager from an individual contributor, you’re Training that helps you do that is absolutely going to engage you more.

But if you apply that same learning to someone who is trying to just deepen their technical skills, cause they want to be a better individual contributor, complete mismatch, and it’s going to basically send the signal to that employee, I don’t really care about your goals, I don’t really care about what progress is for you, and it’s going to drive that individual away.

And so you have to understand this as the individual, as the employer, and that’s where jobs to be done comes in, which is it’s about the causality of what causes you to make the switch or hire that product or hire that job in your life. 

Aidan McCullen: It’s so important and you know such an important aspect of our life we spend so much time in work it’s how many of us feel we have purpose. Beyond the home yes we spent we have actually no education on how to actually navigators it’s a very lonely role. We don’t hear back from recruiters. We feel like failures. There’s so much emotional turmoil for people but some of the tips you give, I’d love to share some of the tips like for example, when people look at job features, they are literally looking at the perks, looking at these bullet points. I am 100% that most of these are written by ChatGPT and somebody just blurbs into ChatGPT. It’s almost like. A robot recipe maker; throw in a load of ingredients and hopefully it will come out with something that is half palatable as the same for these job specs and when most of us look at these will look at the specs and we don’t put ourselves inside that role to go how will i feel, how will the experience feel to me and i love what you say you say don’t think perks think experience

Michael B. Horn: Absolutely. I love the way you just set that up, which is people tend to look at the job title. I’m not going to take anything less than, you know, C level, whatever, for, for the next job. Or they look at the money that they’re going to get or the vacation time or the health benefits and all those things.

Those are features in the absence of understanding the context and what you actually want them for and what you want them to do in your life. And so, If you think about real estate listings, for example, they’re the same ways you look at a house listing. It’s like granite countertops, natural light, you know, this many bedrooms, all this stuff, right?

And they all sound nice, but to help you make a choice about what’s right for you, you need to think about how am I actually going to use this house? Like what are the experiences I need? So, as you know, in my case, I got twin girls. They’re now 10 years old. They’re older than when we first met. And, but I still need a quiet place.

Cause one of them’s sick right now where I can lock myself up and do recordings like this. And so that’s, you know, that that’s a critical experience of how I will live in a home, which then defines which features are valuable or not the same is true in the jobs, right? Which is like, all those things sound nice, but you know, I was talking to an someone who wanted to start a company recently in the B2B space.

And he was like, I want to be a founder. I’m going to do this, blah, blah, blah. And I was like, so do you like sales? Cause every CEO I know that starts a company in B2B, the first two to three years is just going to be you selling. No one else going to do it for you. He’s like, I hate sales. All right. The title, the feature ain’t the thing you got to think about.

You got to actually think about what the day to day and week to week is like, and how does it line up with what gives you energy and what progress looks like for you. Get your head out of the, I must be the CEO of a new startup because that’s going to mislead you. It’s going to lead you to. failure or misery or both.

Right. And so that’s basically the shift where we’re describing there.

Aidan McCullen: A great analogy the idea of you’re literally, In many jobs buying off the plans and you don’t even know the territory you don’t even know the neighborhood 

you know i think about that like when i look back on. Buying or renting you really should be driving through that neighborhood at night time you should be experiencing should be interviewing the neighbors understanding around it but very few of us do that will move on because there’s some great knowledge in this book and I’m cherry picking little pieces of it here because there’s no way we’ll do it justice preparing you know you’re coming to the end you know you’ve got these triggers that i’m no longer making progress, one of the things you talk about is then you need to start cataloging your capabilities. What can you do and maybe then what could you add to them. In order to make you more relevant for a different role. I think this alone, if people get that from this episode, it will be absolute gold. I

Michael B. Horn: And the big idea, right. Is that we say, think about the assets that you bring to a job, like a balance sheet. So your assets are things that you can do or possess that confer future economic value. And on the other side of the ledger, you have liabilities, which are the investments in time and money you need to make to develop or maintain, keep those, you know, assets skills.

And in essence, what we say is think through what are your 8 to 12, you know, top assets, those capabilities, skills, Degrees, credentials, experiences, whatever they are, right. That really make you tick. And what’s the useful life of each of those. And this gets to your point that a lot of these skills are degrading faster than ever, particularly in a technical front.

And if you can start to estimate the useful life of those and then ask yourself, okay, what sorts of investments and time and money would I need to make to keep those up to snuff and. Are those the investments that I really want to make or do I want to be developing other skills and therefore have to do other investments in terms of time and money to develop those capabilities?

So you’re thinking about present, Future, and what are the liabilities I will have to incur to get from here to there to that desired state, right? And this is a way of us like forcing you to think about trade offs. You think of the person, you know, who says, Oh, I’m going to learn three foreign languages this year.

Oh, okay. How much time you get to put into that, right? Like, let’s be real about that. Is that a trade off you’re going to make relative to keeping your ability to you know, Code up to speed, whatever it is. Right. And so we want people to be very clear about what are your capabilities? What are the desired future ones?

What are the critical ones you want to have in your next role? And what are the investments you will have to make to keep those up to snuff or to develop new ones? And hopefully that gives people a clear eyed view of really how they can contribute. In the workplace, I think of this chapter is sort of the sober minded reality check on folks to really say, what can I actually do for someone out there?

And how am I going to learn so that I can stay on the cutting edge or get there? And whatever is most important to me right now, I want to say one of the quick thing. These are different. From aptitudes or strengths or personality traits or things like that. I think all of those things are important clues, if you will, to things that you might be good at, but they are the antithesis of growth mindset, right?

Because it’s just a label on you, you know, and, You are an individual capable of developing new skills and capabilities. And while strengths finders, for example, I think is super valuable to helping you figure out which ones do I want to lean into and which ones do I want to avoid, you still have to make those investments and time and money to, to develop those.

And so that, that’s the big idea there behind that is, is you have agency in it, but the more transparent to yourself, you can make it the better decisions you can make.

Aidan McCullen: felt it was also really useful for a company. So if you’re a leader of a company going through a new strategy, you can actually use this to go, what capabilities are we lacking? What, where does HR or L& D need to step up and hire new skills into the company, but also retrain people within our company as well.

So it’s useful from that perspective as well. Which leads me to this one and our final one for today is of the things the book may make you do is say, actually, I have a pretty good, where I am is pretty good. Maybe I just need to be making more progress. Maybe I need to negotiate more stretch goals for myself.

Maybe I need to have job mobility with inside the company as well. And I think that’s an important thing because I do a bit of corporate coaching, a bit of executive coaching. And so many times like you with that, I want a C suite role. Some, some of the people I’ve coached is like, I want to be CEO. And I go.

well just observe the CEO for a little while look how tough that role is look how little of a life that person may have, or how what sacrifices they have to make how little time maybe they miss their kids their twin softball game or something because of that role and think yourself do you really want it and maybe you’ll share this because, this is a realization I’m sure of those thousands of people you interviewed some of them had that themselves.

Michael B. Horn: Yeah, I love the way you asked the question. I’ll tell you a data point first, which is that 53%, I think of the folks that we coached actually stayed in their current job. So that’s not in the book, but a lot of people reframed it and realized, wow. Once I saw the possibilities of what I could do and what it actually looks like, like I prototyped and figured out to your point, I observed what the day to day life is actually like.

They were able to reframe their current job or go to their manager and make some slight shifts in the balance of things that they were doing. And all of a sudden they were like, no, this is where I want to be. And it gets back to that second thing, which is there are going to be trade offs in any job you make.

Right? So the trade off for the person who says, Oh, wow, don’t want to miss my twin softball game. I’m going to, you know. State, but, but therefore I don’t get to be CEO. That’s a trade off you’re making, right? And you have to figure out which of the priorities in your life are most important right now, because it doesn’t mean not ever, you might do that later down the line, but.

But it’s right now, what is the most important things to you? And what are you going to trade off on things that yes, in an ideal world, you’d have it all, but you’re willing to trade off so that you get the things that are most important to you. I’ll tell you one quick story. Which is this one person we coached.

 He had a job offer. It was something like 400, 000 a year versus to be a chief of staff, to an entrepreneur, considerably less money, like, you know, half as much. And he took the Job with half as much money where he’d be a chief of staff instead of, you know, some better sounding role at a more established company.

And we’re like, why are you doing that, buddy? He’s like, well, I want to start my own company and I want to learn from the CEO and I’ve shadowed him and his past chiefs of staff. And I know these are the four things I’m going to learn. And so therefore I’m willing to take less money so I can learn those things to set myself up to go launch something myself one day.

And we said, okay, that’s awesome. You’ve done the right work, but one more thing. When you take that job, don’t complain about that half as much salary, because you intentionally chose that so you can get these other benefits. And he was like, Roger that this is not settling. It’s a trade off I have chosen to make so that I get the progress I care about most.

Aidan McCullen: Brilliant. I’m that man is so important i think for people to realize sometimes it’s like once in the bigger house or once in a better car and, we rarely take time to have gratitude for all the things we have because of somebody else looking at your house or your car.

Michael B. Horn: Exactly. And it’s always so much comparison is the death of happiness, right? 

Aidan McCullen: Man, it’s always I think, you know, one of the happiest things that happened me was i used to care I’m sure like most people, stop caring and i think with stop caring it’s just such a weight off your back i would rather people not know what i do and have no trophies to show, will be happy and be able to be present as well so much more important and the book does that such an important book, Michael for people who want to reach out find out more about the book by the book where’s the best place.

Michael B. Horn: Yeah. Check out jobmoves.com. You can click order. And then there’s a bunch of places where you can pick your bookstore of choice to get it. And obviously Amazon and all those places have it as well. And then, you know, reach out over social media or my sub stack, Michael B Horn, get in touch. Love to hear from you and hear how the book is impacting your life.

Aidan McCullen: Brilliant. And for our audience, we’ve many companies all over the world. Michael does webinars, keynotes. He’s available as well. Brilliant speaker, as you can hear, but also on that website, just to say there’s downloadable aspects, sheets, cheat sheets, there’s also the intro of the book is available there.

It’s not yet released on Kindle in Europe. Michael, I don’t know if you know that, but not on Amazon.

Michael B. Horn: I did not know that, but we’ll, I will follow up with our UK publisher right 

Aidan McCullen: So, so you put, you can get that, you can get the hard copy and then you can, you can download the PDF to get you started anyway. So Michael B Horn, author of Job Moves. Thank you for joining us.

Michael B. Horn: Hey, thank you. Appreciate it.