It’s a popular job interview question, and it’s also a question often used by life coaches and mentors. Entire essays are devoted on how best to answer this question. But maybe it’s the wrong one. Especially in a job interview, it’s absolutely a trick question. No one wants to hear a candidate say they want to use their next job as a quick stepping stone to another, even though these days, that may often be the truth. Trick questions have a way of generating manipulative answers, and so fewer and fewer managers are continuing to use them in interviews.
But even outside of the hiring process, perhaps it’s time to toss this question out like so much household clutter. It focuses on the wrong thing. If the pandemic has taught us anything, it’s that most of the major events that will happen to us throughout our lives are entirely beyond our control. The truth is, as human beings, we can’t predict with any certainty that we will be healthy in one year, let alone five, that a marriage won’t dissolve, or that a parent won’t need more care. You can set as many external goals as you like, and if that helps motivate you, that’s great. But we’ve all learned that even if you do everything right, there’s no guarantee you will achieve them.
Setting internal goals is a different story. We can’t change what will happen to us, but we can absolutely change how we respond to it, and we can build our skills to respond better. There was absolutely nothing any of us could do, practically speaking, to stop the pandemic eventually from reaching our shores. But we could learn how to do jobs from home that were once thought impossible to be done remotely. We learned how to host effective Zoom meetings, and we learned the importance of building better bonds with our coworkers. We learned how to get the same amount of work done with more distractions, and many of us learned how to do far more work in a shorter time period.
Certainly it wasn’t all roses, but the innovation that came out of this period will have an enormous impact on how we do business, and many industries outside the health care sphere are already discussing the phenomenal amount of progress that has taken place because we were forced to learn new skills and new solutions.
Now that we’re seeing a gradual end to the pandemic, it’s a great time to ask yourself what skills would you like to add in five years. It’s a fundamentally better question, and a promising job candidate should be able to answer it insightfully and honestly. It’s also a great question to continue to ask at every stage of your career, even if you’re already a CEO.
Kris Lindahl, who got his start in real estate during the housing crisis, has always been focused on adding skills, not achieving external goals. Founding Kris Lindahl Real Estate in 2018, and doing over $1 billion in sales in less than two years was simply a logical outcome of trying to solve the problems his clients were facing. He explains, “I am always offering my team of realtors new tools and new ways they can respond to challenging markets. It’s not about me saying that I want to expand my business into multiple states, and then trying to do that. It’s absolutely the other way around. I try to always focus on making my brokerage the best it can be in any market. The clients, the success…that’s just what’s followed.”
Setting career goals isn’t necessarily a bad thing. For some, it may be a helpful exercise to envision a different life. But for others, it may be putting the cart before the horse. What skills would make you more useful to your clients? What skills would make you more helpful to your boss? What skills would make you a better leader? Add a few, and you might be surprised at how much those external goals start to just happen automatically.