How to find a smoother ride with your career.

In my career, I’ve ridden through multiple tech bubbles and financial bubbles, rising startups, collapsing corporate cultures, bumpy buyouts and messy mergers.  What many do not know is I’ve also pivoted my career four times on my professional journey.  What allowed me to ride through these ups, downs, twists, and turns and change directions in my career? I built my career like a bicycle wheel.

Why a Bicycle Wheel?

Bicycles have been a key part of my life for many years.  In my school years, I became interested in long-distance cycling.  Logging 30-50 miles a week was not unusual.  I even rode 100 miles in the horribly humid Florida summer.  While these rides challenged me, they also opened up possibilities for new places to explore.

As I moved into my first career, I realized that thinking of my capabilities as bicycle wheels would allow me to navigate a changing job market and open up multiple career paths.  Also, the design of bicycle wheels helped me ride around the hazards on my career path.

But what is so special about a bicycle wheel?

What is Resilient About a Bicycle Wheel?

Did you know you can lose a spoke or two on a bicycle wheel and it will keep rolling? How the spokes work together are the key.  When you look at the wheel, some spokes act like columns holding up the hub of the wheel.  At the same time, you have several spokes that hold up the hub from the top of the wheel — like a suspension bridge.  All the spokes work together to support the person and allow forward movement.

The front wheel of a bicycle with a black spoke coming down to connect the hub.
One of the many bicycle wheels in my garage.

How to Think of Your Career as a Bicycle Wheel

Now consider your career as that bicycle wheel.  The hub is what supports you steadily going through your work day.  The rim represents your contact with your daily work.  It cushions the bumps that occur and absorbs them.  You might call the rim “execution.”

The spokes represent your skills, attitudes and behaviors.  As you roll through your work day, some skills hold the weight of your current job. In the early part of my career, many of these supporting skills included the math and language skills I learned in high school and college. Can you think of examples in your career?

A simple drawing of a bicycle wheel with a rim, hub and spokes labeled listening, taking feedback, speaking clearly above the hub and organizing, analyzing, writing, and mathematics below the hub.
My early career wheel with only a few spokes shown.

Other skills, behaviors, and attitudes hold up your career, like the spokes near the top of a wheel.  What might these be in your career?  For me, the socialization skills I learned early in life helped support my early interactions with my first teams. These included listening for meaning and intent, speaking clearly to be understood, taking and giving feedback, and adapting to others' styles. Then I learned other skills to align my work with my manager and my team — negotiation and influence.

These career spokes not only hold the wheel together.  They support each other.  So the terms “hard skills” and “soft skills” never made sense to me.  They were all different spokes in my career wheel that supported each other.  They needed to work together.  Relying on just hard skills (or spokes) meant you probably had a hard ride.  You need other skills to smooth out the ride through your career.

A broken wagon wheel is half-buried in a field. Behind in the distance is a small town with several wooden building. There are two power poles indicating some people may still live there.
A hard wheel gives a hard ride. (source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Broken_Wheel.jpg CC-SA 3.0)

Building or Losing a Skill is Like What?

Remember how I said you could lose one or two spokes in your wheel and you can still keep moving?  It’s the same way with skills, behaviors, and attitudes.  Let’s say you’ve been let go from your job and have been out of work for several months.  You might feel some of your “spokes are loose.”  I’m speaking from experience.  I’ve been down that lonely road too.

When you do find a new position, some of your spokes may feel loose since you've not rode those skills for a while. But your skills, behaviors and attitudes work together. If one skill is loose, the stronger skills still support you – similar to the crossing of spokes to support each other. You adjust the loose spokes and get back on your career ride.

Zoomed in view of the earlier bicycle wheel showing how spokes cross each other to reinforce each other.
The crossing of spokes helps support other spokes.

Let’s consider another scenario.  What if you want to change careers?  Do you build a new wheel of skills?  Maybe.  Building a new wheel of skills can be challenging and time-consuming.  What if you slowly replace some skills you may not need in the new career and keep the ones still useful?  Your swapping out old spokes for new spokes. That allows you to practice ride your new career sooner.

So what spokes make up your career wheel now?  What skills tend to be the ones you rely on?   And do you just have one wheel?  We’ll explore these questions later.