Typical career arcs

Last year I shared a blog post on my 2024 new year's resolutions which included the following exploration of typical career arcs, based on what my mentors at the time had been helping me with around my leadership development.

I've found that I've shared this advice quite a few times since then, so I'm resharing it here as a stand alone article.

Just to note - we’re all individuals and there is no right or wrong career path. That said we could summarise a “typical” career arc into 5 modes:

At the start of our career, we spend most of our time learning how to do things. As we get more experience we start to do more things, we are better at what we do and can start to do it independently.

Initially this doing is still part of that learning mode, but as we get more confident and experienced we are able to deliver work independently.

As we get more senior and more experienced, we start to manage the doing of work. We take more ownership of our own work and eventually will start to manage the work of others.

I’m currently learning how to be in the next stage of my career around leading. Specifically I’m finding leadership is less about managing tasks, telling people what to do and how to do it. I’m finding that leadership is more about inspiring others around the idea or the outcome that you’re trying to achieve, and then empowering managers to own a plan of how to deliver tasks that align with the delivery of that overall outcome.

The 5th mode of the career is around counselling others. I think the objective at this point is to have built up enough knowledge and wisdom that your counsel, your views and opinions, have value to others around you. In this final mode of the career it seems to be less about getting stuff done. I think it’s more about being a sage advisor sharing experience and thoughts.

A key point here is that these modes are not rigid but overlap entirely. Everyone should be learning. Most people, regardless of how wise they are, still have to get things done. Some of the best learning moments I’ve had have come from the counsel of junior colleagues through their observations and questions.

It seems useful to me to reflect on the balancing of how much of each mode we hold at different times in our career.

My current focus is on trying to be such a good leader that I am able to empower those leaders around me, creating a virtuous feedback loop. The leader matrix!

If you found this useful or interesting, the best compliment you could give me would be to share it with someone else!

Asset Management is more than managing assets

TL;DR

Thinking about asset management as just maintenance of assets misses potential value. Just as all senior leaders should have a basic understanding of the legal, financial, and commercial aspects of their business, any senior leader of a physical asset owning business should have at least a basic understanding of asset management.

What is asset management?

Asset Management, is about having a structured, methodological approach to the ownership of physical assets. The overall methodology is what we call the asset management system. A document that sets out the asset management system is known as the asset management system framework.

Science is the application of logic to life. Engineering is the practical application of science to solving problems in society. Asset Management is an engineering discipline, focused on the application of logic to the ownership of physical assets. 

A scientist might ask “what are the different solutions that exist for this problem?”. An engineer might ask “how can I solve this problem?”. An asset manager would ask “which problems do I need to solve and by when?”.

Managing assets is about the day to day work to maintain functional outputs. Asset management is not just about managing physical assets. This is certainly one part of asset management, generally delivered by engineers and maintainers. But there are other parts as well.

We’re all asset managers

Asset management should include the whole of a business which owns physical assets. Beyond the engineers maintaining assets, Finance teams should be asking “what are the costs and returns of our physical assets?”. Commercial teams should be asking “how do our physical assets generate or cost us value?”. Legal teams should be asking “what are the risks (both threats and opportunities) associated with our physical assets?”

It’s often, especially in large businesses, valuable to have a specialist asset management function. But it is vital for that function to work across the full breadth of the business. While it is the responsibility of the asset managers to speak in a way which can be understood by the rest of the business, it’s also the responsibility of the rest of the business to work with the asset management function to deliver the overall business objectives.

Asset management is about deploying an approach that maximises the value of the physical assets while minimising the whole life cost.

Maximise asset value...

Value generally refers to the good things we get from the assets. We typically try to define functional outputs of asset groups and systems, aligned to the delivery of a businesses overall strategic objectives. 

...Minimise asset cost

Costs are generally things we want to minimise or avoid. Costs can be monetary as in day to day operational expenditure, like maintaining assets. Costs can also be longer term capital expenditure like building new, or replacing existing, assets. 

Costs can be negative risks, environmental damages, injury to staff or the public, loss of future revenue or regulatory fines or penalties. 

Whole life costs are simply these costs extended over the entire life of the assets - all the way from design, delivery, utilisation, replacement and eventually demolition or decommissioning. Worrying about the cost of today is valuable. It is more valuable to worry about the future cost, and especially what this might mean for future shareholder returns.

Why all this is important 

An asset management system is only as good as the people using it. A well structured asset management system framework, with active participation from across a business can add tremendous value.

All professionals can benefit from a well structured asset management approach. It is easier to run the accounts when you have a clear list of assets. It is easier to procure insurance if you know what risks you have.

Fundamentally, adoption of asset management techniques across a whole business will make it easier to deliver the organisations strategic objectives. Specifically those related to the production or output required from the physical infrastructure. 

Ensuring that commercial and customer facing teams are engaged in the asset management system will ensure alignment of output to customer requirements. And giving the customer what they want is good! 

Last (but by no means least) senior executives following a structured asset management approach are more likely to exploit opportunities and mitigate threats.

September 2019 Update

This post was originally published on the 4th July 2019.

Since then I’ve had a fantastic discussion with David McKeown, one of the leading thinkers in Asset Management and Board Member of The Institute of Asset Management. David alerted me to an ISO Technical Committee article that he, Terrence O'Hanlon, and Thomas Smith published on this subject, back in May 2017.

The full article is well worth a read and is freely available on the ISO website: Managing Assets in the context of Asset Management.