How to manage natural tensions throughout leaps in your career
Our latest article in our Leaps and Bounds series are insights from our recent chat with Gatonga Theuri at Diageo. He shared insights on managing different tensions in a career – when to push through a challenge versus pivot, balancing activities that drain or spark energy, and how we think about being ourselves at work.
In a recent WERKIN interview with Gatonga Theuri, Data Analytics and E2E Commercial Transition Lead at Diageo, we discussed his leaps from and to different work roles and geographies and how he managed those alongside his parallel journey as a gay Kenyan man navigating homophobia in Africa and racism in Europe. Throughout his career, Gatonga had to navigate several tensions and make choices based on them. These choices are universal to career journeys, and provide an opportunity to reflect on our individual choices and decisions around taking a leap -
When to push through challenges versus move on
How to counterbalance energy-draining activities with energy-giving ones
When to bring (or not bring) different parts of our identity to work
When to push through challenges versus move on
Gatonga described early in his career how he shifted from a finance and accounting path to a role in change management. He knew that if he didn’t find a subject interesting, it would be at a cost of his own joy and ability to do his work, especially when he already carried the daily burden of being in the closet. Later in his career, when faced with challenges at work, he committed himself to pushing through those challenges and proving his capability, which ultimately opened up more job opportunities in the future. Both of these decisions – to change and to ‘stick it out’ were intentional choices based on his own value system and self-awareness of what he would enjoy and what he wanted in his career at the time. What we can learn from his journey is the importance of having some type of framework – be it values, goals, priorities and continuously evaluating our current and future opportunities against them.
How to counterbalance energy-draining activities with energy-giving ones
At one point in Gatonga’s career, his work involved headcount reduction, which he found energy-draining. This prompted him to find ways to increase his energy at work, which he did through involvement in diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives and in employee resource groups. He saw this as a way of giving back and helping others on their career journeys, and his work and support of DEI has only expanded since then. It’s unlikely that every part of our work is energy-giving; Gatonga’s choices highlight is that we can create opportunities in our workplaces or outside of them that do give us energy – be it mentoring, involvement in an employee resource group, or other ‘extracurriculars’. Thinking creatively about how to manage our energy sets us up for longer-term career success, staves off burnout, and could even create future opportunities. In Gatonga’s case, succeeding in that role set him up for making a transition a host of new roles from which he could pick the one he was most excited about.
When to bring (or not bring) parts of our identity to work
When he was traveling all over the African continent, from Kenya to Ethiopia, Uganda, Nigeria, and Cameroon, Gatonga had to be very careful to stay closeted about his sexuality. The degree of homophobia varied from social stigma to the death penalty, and Gatonga had to bear the burden of hiding this part of his identity from his coworkers and people outside the LGBTQ+ community. When he moved to Europe, almost overnight, the part of his identity that stood out was his race, not his sexuality. He found community at work by creating an employee resource group for underrepresented races and ethnicities, and through his professional success has been able to serve as a role model and mentor for both LGBTQ+ community and racial and ethnic minorities. Gatonga’s experiences highlight how in different contexts, different parts of our have different salience. We need to first manage our own mental health and ability to create belonging and community for ourselves, and then can serve as a role model and support others in their same journey.
Balancing all these tensions – of changing roles, sources and drains on energy, and different parts of our identity can guide leaps and create long-term career success and opportunity. That isn’t to say managing these tensions are easy or not without difficulty, as was highlighted by Gatonga in our conversation. However, being thoughtful about frameworks for career decisions, sources of energy, and how we communicate who we are at work can help create a more positive work environment for ourselves and others.
Photo by Denys Nevozhai on Unsplash
