Dan Morrell: Clay Christensen was a legendary professor and thinker and his “Jobs to Be Done” theory—this idea that customers buy products to solve problems—was one of his iconic intellectual contributions. In their new book, Job Moves: 9 Steps for Making Progress in Your Career, coauthors Michael Horn, Ethan Bernstein, and Bob Moesta—all former students, collaborators, or colleagues of Christensen’s—apply this theory to our careers: How should people hire their next job?

In this episode of Skydeck, I talked to Horn, cofounder and distinguished fellow at the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation and a lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and Bernstein, an associate professor in the Organizational Behavior unit here at HBS, about how people can make real progress in their careers when they switch jobs, the trade-offs required for success, and the hidden power of your random LinkedIn connections.

Ethan Bernstein and Michael Horn

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Dan Morrell: Michael, what is it about the moment we're in right now—tail of the Great Resignation, the rise of artificial intelligence—that makes this book and its lessons all the more urgent?

Michael Horn: I think the anxiety of individuals right now in the job market is off the charts in many respects. We know individuals stay in their jobs right now, they're not quitting because they're nervous about will I be able to find a good fit on the other side? We know two thirds of them according to Gallup and Pew surveys are saying that they're disengaged or have quietly quit on the job. So there's a lot of anxiety on that side. And then on the employer side, we know that open jobs are remaining open for far longer than they have historically, as they just struggle to find individuals with the right skillset, the right dispositions, the right, frankly, desires on their behalf to be the right team member for what they're trying to do. And so that anxiety, I think on both employer and employee—or would-be employee side—is really high right now. There's just a lot of friction in that job market.

Ethan Bernstein:
Meanwhile, the way in which organizations and managers have been taught to retain and develop their people is really still rooted in some respects, back in the nineties. McKinsey comes out with their “War for Talent” article, gives a recipe for how we manage and develop talent. We're still following that recipe even though we learned through the pandemic—and before the pandemic, but it really came out in the pandemic—that there were shifting preferences in the workplace, even shifting definitions of what it meant to be productive, what it meant to be collaborative, how we collaborate. All these pieces, all these tools gave us at the same time flexibility and a tremendous number of headaches. And those headaches add flames to the fire that Michael just described.

DM: I want to get into the research of the book because it's backed by a lot of research that both of you participated in. Your research found that career moves were primarily driven by four different quests. Ethan, can you walk through those quests briefly and then tell us why it's important for job seekers to know what quest they're on?

EB: I'm going to back us up for one second because we didn't start with four quests. We started with the validated protocols for interviews. We distilled all those interviews down to what we thought were a small number of pushes and pulls. So you'll remember from that first interview of Clay on Jobs to Be Done Theory, it's all about the pushes and pulls, the forces that drive people away from one thing and towards another, aligning sufficiently so that it overcomes the anxieties of the new solution and the habits of the present. And so we first had to understand those pushes and pulls, and I at least went into this—Michael might've been smarter than I—I went into this believing that it would not distill down to anything less than a hundred. That there was just so much variety out there in terms of why people decided to make progress in a certain way on their career in the next job that we wouldn't be able to get it to anything tangible, anything concrete. And it came down pretty easily actually to the 30—the 14 pushes and the 16 pulls—but that was still too many. So we went back to the data to understand, all right, do we see these pushes and pulls appear in patterns that define at least some meaningful subset of the population, which created our four pulls on the map, the quests.

MH: And I'll just say quickly, that's the work that Bob [Moesta] does on a daily basis is taking these pushes and pulls and clustering them to figure out where's the heat, if you will, of what he calls the job to be done. And he often doesn't name them, but we did. And the names are”get out”, “next step”, “regain control”, and “regain alignment”. So people who are looking to get out of their job, they don't like how it energizes them on a day-to-day basis, they feel micromanaged by their manager, they feel like the company's going nowhere fast. It's a dead end. It's just not meeting their expectations along a host of dimensions. And they also feel like what they're asked to do doesn't actually align with the capabilities that they have or want to be known for. So they're seeking to get out. On the flip side of that map that Ethan described, that two by two almost, if you think of the energy on one axis and the capabilities on the other or the how and the what of your work is the next step.

So these are the people that I would say are closest to the progression that we've always thought of people making—that career ladder. They've hit a career milestone, they're ready to build on their capabilities, build on the way that the job makes use of their energy and take that next step in their career. Often that looks like climbing the career ladder—not always, but often. The third quest we found is regain control. And these are people who actually like what they get to do, but they feel like how they're being asked to work just doesn't add up anymore, just does not energize them. These are the work-life balance people, but also the people who are like, “I'm much more productive when I'm not being micromanaged” or “I'm much more productive in a hybrid work situation” or things like that. How their energy and time is being used, they want to reset. And then the regain alignment folks are those who say, I actually really like how my job engages me, but the what I'm being asked to do, it's just not adding up. It's just not aligning with the skillset that I bring or that I would like to be known for in this job. I feel disrespected fundamentally that I'm being asked to do things that don't align with the capabilities that I bring to the table.

We didn't answer your second half of your question why people need to …

DM: Yes, why it's important …

EB: We are friends. Even after publishing a book, the three of us together, we're still friends.

MH: We're even better friends…

EB: Which we understand is not necessarily commonly the case.

MH: … commonly the case in these things.

EB: If you think about those four quests—and you have to understand much more deeply each of them in order to perhaps truly understand the nuance of this statement—but if you think about those four quests, good advice for one of them is not good advice for the other three. So we discovered—and we've been giving career advice for a long time—that maybe three quarters of the time we were giving bad advice because we didn't know that the person who was coming to us was in one of those four quests. And so we weren't tailoring the advice for that person. It's been interesting for us, for example, to engage with people MBAs to engage with HBS MBAs over the course of their time here in my case, and then at reunions as people make their way through each of these quests over time. And the advice really does have to change because the quest changes and how you think about advising a take the next stepper, which the rest of the world is very well designed to equip, is very different than engaging somebody who's trying to regain alignment because they're worried their skills won't be relevant in 10 years given how AI is taking over the world or someone who's just trying to regain control because they've just become empty nesters and they don't feel like they're motivated anymore to do the job. Because there's just not enough job for them to do.

DM: One of the things I really connected with was this idea of proactively prototyping that job, this entrepreneurial approach. Can you talk a little bit about the theory behind that approach and what it looks like in practice to do that?

MH: I'll start with just a quick note in the theory and then maybe you can jump into the practice for a moment, which is that I view jobs to be done fundamentally as the entry point into design thinking. So understanding the job to be done is helpful, but it's not sufficient to actually help you make progress because what you build then is a design process. And that's where prototyping comes in.

EB: And to some extent, you've got the wrong two co-authors here to describe this because I credit Bob [Moesta] with really having taught me that in new product design, you never ask somebody what's the product? You ask people: design five prototypes. It's very difficult to create the perfect new product. It's much easier to create five different prototypes and then figure out which parts of each make the most sense for the job to be done of the consumer that might purchase the product. And then quite frankly, the difference between those allows you to make progress. Contrast creates meaning. I suffer from the same consequences that he does with his new product developers, with the people I try to advise. Back in 2016, I was asked to create a course here called Developing Yourself as a Leader.

And my goal was solely to try and help the people who enrolled in that course make progress in their careers. And naturally the first question you ask is: So what do you want to do? And it's a very difficult question to answer. Yet if you ask them what are five things you could imagine doing? And by the way, try to make those at least a little bit different from each other, ideally more different than not. It's a much easier question to answer. And then that starts the conversation that ultimately charts the path to progress. And if you know the energy drains and drivers and you know what capabilities they want their job to make use of, now all of a sudden you can start to prioritize the pieces of those prototypes into a role. Rather than choosing one from the world right away, you can actually start to define it and then go searching for what you know you want.

DM: So you do all this work, you develop this prototype. What happens when it meets the reality of the market. Does this job exist?

MH: Yeah, so one of the biggest things that I think we make a contribution here is first when you're doing these prototypes, we teach you how to do informational interviews in a very concrete way. Because most people, at least if you were like me, my parents said one day like, Michael, you're going to eventually need to find a job. Here's a couple friends of ours. Go do an informational interview with them. I showed up and I had no idea what to ask them. So I ended up sort of, how did you get here? All these questions. What we say is with the work you've done understanding what drives your energy and the capabilities you have and want to develop, how does what the person does in their day-to-day job align or not in a day-to-day, week-to-week basis with those things and really flesh out this sort of abstract prototype in your head into something concrete that you can actually envision, “How would this be for me to actually be in this role?” So the first part of that is actually as you're having those informational interviews, you're gaining real intelligence about what's actually out there in the market, but you're not yet looking for a job. You're basically trying to figure out—through this contrast of these different prototypes—which one of these do I think would I most want to do? So we're trying to converge here in the prototypes and then we get to take it to the supply side of the market, if you will, the actual jobs that exist. And we get to start to look at job descriptions. We get to start to use this informational interviewing protocol to actually meet real people, which is how 70-plus percent of people actually get jobs, is through your network—not through these online postings where we blitz out a thousand and a half resumes hoping that something lands.

EB: Dan, this question gets at what for me and I believe for us was a fundamental principle of the book. I don't believe that any career book should be about the dream job. It should be about trade-offs. And so we've written a book about trade-offs.  The reason you have five prototypes that are different is so that you can start to think about which trade-offs you are and are not willing to make, not so you can take five different prototypes and take all the best pieces of all of them and create a dream job that doesn't exist. So the process is built in to do that. That's why the informational interviews make sure that it actually exists. And that's why the next steps after that involve using those priorities to figure out what's next. This is about progress, not perfection, and the progress comes from taking that next step, not in the terms of, take the next step, the quest, but in terms of what progress that individuals decided he or she wants to make in the next step.

MH: I really learned this from Ethan, by the way. I remember we were in Detroit with Bob [Moesta], workshopping a bunch of the research and how it would translate into the book, and Ethan made this big statement of “This is not going to be about your dream job.” And I sort of looked at him because I think about building passions and fulfilling human potential in my education background. I was like, what do you mean by that? And over the course of the writing of the book, I really understood that dream jobs, perfect jobs, in all dimensions, they do not exist for anybody anywhere. Every job has pieces of it that we don't love, that we don't like, that we sort of trudge through. And the key is recognizing which ones are those going to be? Which ones am I glad to take on because I get all these other benefits that represent progress for me.

EB: And we moan about that—that the dream job doesn't exist, but yet that's actually the best feature of human beings. We always aspire for more. And somehow, unfortunately, in the current milieu, organizations and managers have felt overwhelmed by the fact that they have to deliver the dream job and people are seen as continuing to ask for more and more. Neither of those are bad things, but people feel so burdened by it that we've lost track of the idea that we're all just trying to make progress so that we're better off tomorrow than we were today. And if we can give them a process for doing that and that process is social so they can interact rather than believe they know what the other person wants without actually hearing them articulate it, then that turns from a negative to a positive.

DM: I want to go back, Michael, you were touching on the sort of market research phase of this process. And one of the things that really stuck out to me—there's a few things—but this whole idea of relying on what you call ‘weak ties’ out there. And it's not your family and friends, maybe it's a random LinkedIn connection. And to many people that kind of networking can be really awkward. And even, as you note in the book, can make people feel dirty. But you essentially say, get over it. Why should we get over it?

MH: Oh boy, do we say get over it. Yes. So the research is extremely clear and we'll start there and then we'll talk about how it feels as an individual, perhaps. But your strong ties are things that are incredibly important for emotional and day-to-day support, and people who love you and can call you on your BS and all the rest, right? That's important. Caring adults in your lives. But your weak ties are how you discover opportunities because your strong ties are like your echo chamber. You all sort of know the same sets of things. You're not making discoveries that are unexpected or lead to an opportunity you never otherwise would've imagined. And so the researchers in social capital call it the strength of weak ties, and they mean that to be paradoxical sounding and get your attention up, because the strength of weak ties—that friend of a friend, that connection on LinkedIn that you don't really know, those sorts of things—that's where opportunity is found. But what I think is really hard for individuals is, yeah, you feel awkward reaching out to them and saying like, “Hey, this is what I'm looking for. Have you seen anything like it?” And I think one of my hopes for the book is not only that we're saying get over it, but because we're giving people a process where they bring something very concrete to the table and the conversation that they're going to have is really spelled out in concrete ways, hopefully we're lowering those anxiety barriers and more people will have more conversations. And frankly, even when you're in your job, you'll just make it a habit of once every couple months, either have a conversation with someone who’s seeking and starting to learn or you yourself stay in the practice so that we can really build this muscle and it becomes less dirty feeling or awkward.

EB: It's beautifully said. As a first-time book author, I have occasionally reflected on why I chose to write a book. Of course it was for two awesome co-authors, but part of the real value of a book is that it gives the world a common language so that they can have a conversation they couldn't have otherwise. So it doesn’t feel dirty. Because progress isn't dirty; progress is positive. If you have 30 pushes and pulls, if you have prototyping language, if you have enough of a process that's intended to be social that forces you to go out and talk to weak ties about these things—and you can sort of blame us for that, by all means. And then if we equip you with the ability to tell your story using some of the best means of telling a story—we draw on Pixar's story spine approach to offer that narrative—people feel equipped for 20 years.

My field, which I love dearly, has been saying how wonderful it is that people can now chart their own paths. We don't live in a world anymore where you'd enter an organization and the organization would dictate your path for you and with you. Instead, you get to choose, there's the freedom and autonomy that comes with that, all the motivational pieces. And when I say that some of you out there are probably thinking, well, that's like PTSD. Actually all I feel is the anxiety of not knowing how to do that. We haven't trained people how to develop themselves as leaders as well as we could even at the Harvard Business School. And part of that is that we haven't had the common language to allow people out there who are well-meaning to do that well. And I think that's what Michael's suggesting that makes the weak tie conversation much less dirty and much more progress-focused.

DM: I want to go to my favorite two sentences in the book, and they might seem totally strange to you, but something in chapter seven: “Movement feels good. But sometimes it masquerades as progress.” And maybe I just felt that personally, but it was my favorite line. You wrote it applying to this idea that even after prototyping, don't rush to apply to those jobs, right? But it also feels like it can apply to the larger thrust of the book, which is the benefit of reflection and analysis and strategy. And my question here is, is there something particular about career frustrations that can make us overly impulsive?

EB: I love the fact that Michael is pointing to me. If you were sitting in the studio, you'd be able to see that because I think those are your words, Michael, not mine.

MH: Probably. Go ahead.

EB: My initial response is it speaks directly to those quests. So it masquerades for progress when we're in a “get out” quest. Progress is literally getting out and whoever receives us is lucky to get us, and then they'll try to hold onto us as long as possible. If you are in one of the other quests, then it's really masquerading for progress because we think we're getting where we need to go. We are actually, we're seeking a pull and we accidentally end up elsewhere. The reality of course, is that if we are in a world in which, every four-ish years, the average employee moves, we make progress by moving and we have to stop thinking of the world otherwise. We think of moves as an indication that somehow we made a mistake, the organization made a mistake, the person made a mistake. It's part of the progress that we make. And in order to do that, we need to be deliberate about it. That's easy to say and hard to do, but it's a lot easier to do if you have nine steps to take you there. And so much of this is trying to make sure that progress actually is not accidental, but deliberate. And so it's not masquerading for progress, but it's real.

MH: How many times have you been at a party or dinner with some folks and you hear the person come in and say, well, I started to update my resume today, and I guess tomorrow I'm going to start applying to everything that's been popping up on LinkedIn because God, that was the final straw with my manager and I cannot take it anymore and I'm just going to start applying. And that I think masquerades as progress. It feels like, okay, I'm moving. I'm doing something. I'm doing something I'm supposed to be, I'm finally prioritizing myself. I'm not going to take it a minute longer. And, if you just follow that course, you’re going to wind up just where you started in another role where you didn't really understand what progress actually looked like for you, and you'll come to regret it. And we know an astonishing number of the almost a hundred million people who resigned and took new jobs during the Great Resignation felt that way, that they landed in a place that they almost instantly regretted. In Ethan's classes and at reunions, he asks the question: How fast have any of you regretted a job move? And you'll have to tell the statistic, but one of the options is within one month, and it's like almost a third of individuals have or something like that, Ethan, is that …

EB: And they always answer fastest, it just pops up …

MH: Because they know it, right? And so we've been there and the big push I think is that's not actually progress. It's just moving wheels or changing chairs on the Titanic, right? We're actually looking to help you make real progress in your life. Yes, there's going to be a little bit of reflection on the front end, but the movement you make is going to be so much more positive, such a better return on your time that I think ultimately it's actually not going to feel like much more time. It's going to just feel like time better spent that you were doing anyway.

EB: Because we can moan about the fact that people move every four years, on average. But from a different perspective, you only get to move every four years, on average. So you better make them worthwhile.

DM: You're going to come into my office in two years. You know how Notre Dame has to “play like a champion sign over the door” …

MH: I was say, where they touch the ..

DM: Mine's going to say, “don't let movement masquerade as progress” ...

MH: I love it. Love it.

This episode of Skydeck was edited by Jocelyn Gonzalez from PRX Productions. Skydeck is produced by the External Relations Department at Harvard Business School. It is available on iTunes or wherever you get your favorite podcast. For more information or to find archived episodes, visit alumni.hbs.edu/skydeck.

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