When a “stretch opportunity” at work feels like too big of a stretch...
When I was in college, I worked on a number of political campaigns.
That led to me getting my first real job out of college: Working on a US Senate campaign.
After the candidate was elected to the US Senate, I ended up with a job on his campaign staff.
The job I took was well within my scope of ability...at first. Then another staff member resigned, and I was asked to take on their job in addition to my current role.
I was young. And ambitious. I'd been thrown into a lot of situations during the campaign where I just had to figure things out--from dealing with media calls to fixing the computer network--and I'd usually been successful. How much harder could this be?
I took over their job overseeing the campaign finance activities...and realized that there were some serious issues. And I quickly found myself in over my head.
I was a political science major, not a CPA. I had no idea how to do most of the things I needed to do to manage the daily activities of my role, much less do the forensic work needed to solve the issues I'd discovered.
I spent months fumbling through things, desperately using whatever resources I could (this was pre-everything being on the Internet) to try and understand it all. I puzzled through some of it, but a lot was beyond my technical capacity. I was told daily that if I didn't figure everything out it could potentially harm the new Senator's career, which consumed me with anxiety.
We made things right, but I was so burned out that I quit without having another job. I'd been there two years and it felt like 10.
Stretch opportunities can be hugely beneficial for your career. They provide opportunities to learn and grow very quickly while building your toolkit of skills and experience that can be applied to future opportunities.
They may can present themselves in any number of ways:
New projects in your current role
Temporary developmental opportunities on another team
Cross-functional projects within the organization
A new lateral role in a different business area.
However, without the right amount of support, coaching, and just-in-time learning, a stretch opportunity can be a fast track to failure.
Not until years later did I come up with the following set of questions to ask before I accept a stretch opportunity:
How do I see this benefiting me in my learning? Is it something I think will be valuable personally/professionally?
How does this align with career goals?
“What does good look like?” What are the strategic goals that this role needs to achieve? Are they realistic?
How can I add strategic value to the company by taking on this stretch role?
What access to coaching do I have? (“What got me here isn’t getting me there”—coaching can unlock your capability and potentlal, empowering your success.)
What resources and support will I have in taking on this stretch role? (Peers, mentors, leaders to help ramp up and ensure I have the appropriate understanding of the project, the domain knowledge, the players on the team, ensure I don't step on any land mines, etc?)
What access will I have to training and tools necessary to take on this stretch role? Just expecting someone to 'figure it out' isn't always the right answer when 'figuring it out' involves quickly learning new technology or business methodology that is totally outside of our current knowledge base.
Once I started asking myself (and others) the questions above, I've been more (not always 100%, but more!) successful in the stretch opportunities & projects I've taken on.
What's your best--or worst--story about a stretch opportunity you took on? What'd you learn from it?
