Are You a Lifer?

There are two distinctly different career paths to those in the professions – the lifer model and the migratory model, although most of us are a little of this and a little of that.

Lifers tend to arrive in the profession and decades later retire from the same place they started, although usually higher in the pecking order. The migratory types, on the other hand, seem to have itchy feet, and after a few years in one spot, get the urge to move on, usually to something markedly different. Some do it well, some do it poorly.

First, it’s important to revisit the working definition of “professional”. In my writing, speaking, and counseling, I like to define a professional as anyone who receives compensation for exercising their unique Giftings. That would therefore include everyone from the golf pro to the mad scientist, and everyone in between, including lawyers, engineers, and master chefs. Credentialed or not, if you are compensated principally because you are using your unique Giftings, you are a professional.

Spending your entire professional career as a lifer has much to recommend it. Many a young lawyer articles with the firm from which they retire, returning from the Bar Ads to become a junior, being mentored and molded to become an associate, earning their way into partnership, and typically becoming one of the silver-haired senior partners before they exit into retirement. In fact, in many professions, some retire to the cemetery– it’s not unknown for old lawyers to die at their desks, which is how they wanted it. (That was my plan, too, until my epiphany at Lake Bras d’Or. But that’s for another Briefing!)

The migrators, on the other hand, will for various reasons spend a time in one position, then move on into another opportunity, and typically do this four or five or a dozen times during their professional careers. Some move around because they just aren’t team players and each time find themselves not fitting in as they had hoped, others move around very deliberately, using each phase as a time of learning and cultivating new abilities, knowledge, and experience, all of which is purposefully calculated to ratchet themselves to a new level of capability and reputation.

Typically in each sojourn their professional network is widened and deepened. You know the sojourn was a good one if the team members you left behind remain among your best friends.

These latter migrators tend to be strong and valued members of each team with whom they sojourn, all the while growing and seasoning and acquiring new skills and knowledge. And then, when it’s right for them it’s time to move on to the next challenge, the next platform. While it’s almost always beneficial to the professional in question, it’s generally also beneficial to the team with whom they played for a season or two, provided the team was wise and foresightful enough to ensure that they were maximizing their own learning and adaptation, soaking up their maximum benefit from the sojourner. Done with class and intelligence, the parting of the ways can be organic and deeply beneficial for the parting sojourner and for the remaining team.

There’s much to be said for each model. Some of us spend an entire career in one or the other, some in a hybrid. An occasional mid-career change can work wonders for the professional and the teams, provided it’s done well and for the right reasons. Smart professional teams are aware of this and welcome the right newcomer on the right terms and for the right reasons, and similarly will work with a team member who needs to move on for all the right reasons.

Professionals who are acutely aware of their own Giftings and the need to cultivate them, and teams who are well managed and are clear about harmonizing all the Giftings of their players, together can benefit from sojourns. Professionals who stumble from one unplanned adventure of the heart to the next, and teams who are little more than condominiums, will churn through relationships like some kind of perpetual speed dating, with similar results.

It’s mostly about understanding the dynamics of Giftings.

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