DR. SARABETH BERK

Full Transcript



Douglas Ferguson:

And we're live. Today I'm here with Sarabeth. Welcome Sarabeth.



Dr. Sarabeth Berk:

Hi. This is great. Thanks for having me.



Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, for sure. For those of you that are regular watchers, Karen is away today. It'll just be me. She's making a move to New Zealand, which is really exciting. I wish her lots of luck getting there safely, and excited to connect with you all today.



Douglas Ferguson:

If you're tuned in and listening share your name and location in the comments. It'll be great to connect and see who's there. We'll have a few prompts as well during the day, so looking forward to seeing what you have to say.



Douglas Ferguson:

So today we have Dr. Sarabeth Berk. She is a researcher of professional identities and author of the book You Are More Than Your Job... More Than Your Title, sorry.



Dr. Sarabeth Berk:

You got it. You got.



Douglas Ferguson:

Yes. I'm really excited to have you today. I'm really curious, what is the... What do you mean by professional identity?



Dr. Sarabeth Berk:

Identity is huge. We have so many identities in our lives, from race, class, gender, hobbies, religion. Professional identity is one of those strands. What I realized from my own pain point was that I kept being put into a box of just one professional identity, and that was being a teacher for a long time, but yet in my heart and my soul I was like more than that. I'm this artist, this designer, this researcher. Like how do I showcase and use all these identities?



Dr. Sarabeth Berk:

So professional identity, I define it as anything you do for work, whether or not you get paid. It's the stuff you put on your resume, and I believe so many people feel stifled and confined to just calling themselves by one thing. So that's my definition of professional identity and that's what my research is, how are people more than just their job title?



Douglas Ferguson:

If someone is seeking to explore this notion about what are these other parts of their identity or what does that make up, what are some ways they can get started, or how might they start to unlock that?



Dr. Sarabeth Berk:

The journey I've been on is first understanding myself and then understanding how are others experiencing their professional identity. What it led me to arrive at is this, that there's three types of professionals in the workforce and we only think of two of them.



Dr. Sarabeth Berk:

The three types are singularity, multiplicity and hybridity. What I mean by that is some people in the workforce are experts. They are truly good at one thing, and one thing only. They have one identity, singularity.



Dr. Sarabeth Berk:

Then you've got a body of people that are maybe generalists in the gig economy, are freelancers, and they have multiple identities. They do many different things.



Dr. Sarabeth Berk:

But the third bucket and the one we haven't talked about in society, but it's emerging and growing rapidly, is people that are blending and combining and literally integrating identities together, and when they do that that's a hybrid.



Dr. Sarabeth Berk:

I realized I'm doing that. I didn't have language to describe that, so the steps to explain and understand this first was wow, permission that you can be a hybrid. It is the revelation that that term was allowable, and using that word when I introduced myself.



Dr. Sarabeth Berk:

But then I had to do a lot of self-reflection. That was really the first cornerstone of the work, to understand what are my professional identities and how do they integrate together. When I could articulate that and I came up with my own hybrid title, which I now call myself a creative disrupter, and that's how I introduce myself professional.



Dr. Sarabeth Berk:

When people say, "What do you do," I go, "Well, I'm a creative disrupter," and I'm able to use my artist, educator, designer identities to do innovation strategy, and suddenly everything comes together in this narrative.



Dr. Sarabeth Berk:

So those are some of the initial building blocks I talk about in my book, and I also have a workbook, because people are so excited about hybrids and they're like, "Where do I start? What are the steps?"



Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah. I recall when we were talking just before the show started this notion of the Venn diagram and intersection of these different attributes or these capabilities and interest in things that you have, that's truly your specificity. As a professional that's that unique thing about you. There it is in the book, the diagram.



Dr. Sarabeth Berk:

It's a great tool. People have never, ever been asked to put their identity in the Venn diagram and then realize that their truest professional value and their differentiator is who they are in that bullseye, in that intersection.



Dr. Sarabeth Berk:

When you can discover that and share that with employers or clients you stand out from the crowd. You're not just a researcher and a designer and a coder and a sales person anymore. You are this new title that could be the spiritual disrupter or whatever you want to call it, and then you get to explain what that means.



Douglas Ferguson:

It also reminds me of like personal branding types of kind of work, like people that are kind of pushing that as a vehicle or as a thing to do. But this seems a bit more down to Earth and technical, which is like... There's a lot of power in that, right?



Douglas Ferguson:

People often seek the tactics. They're like okay, that sounds great. I should be an influencer and have a personal brand, but what does that even mean for me? How do I translate it?



Dr. Sarabeth Berk:

Totally. This echos the area of personal branding, but how do you come up with your personal brand? I think work actually has three pieces to it and, again, we usually only talk about two. I call it the three-legged stool.



Dr. Sarabeth Berk:

You talk about your passion, what do you do? Your purpose, why do you do it? The thing we don't ask is identity, who are you? What do you call yourself when you're doing your passion and purpose? So you can't brand yourself until you understand, like reflect on where your identity is.



Dr. Sarabeth Berk:

Then I think the combination of those identities takes another level up. It's more than just saying I am a consultant and marketer and coder and developer. Who are you when those are combined? That's a whole new you.



Douglas Ferguson:

Uh-huh (affirmative). I love it. I think that's a great prompt for our listeners. If there are personal identities or professional identities that you have that you think really kind of define you, it would be great to see those in the comments.



Douglas Ferguson:

Sarabeth, I'm sure that you have much better prompts to extract some of these. What should folks be thinking about as they start to enter stuff in the comments?



Dr. Sarabeth Berk:

Yeah, I'd love to hear from people how you're more than your job title. So if you're a director of programming, what are you really? How would you label the identities that show up the most? Maybe you're an innovator or a journey mapper or a storyteller or a marketer. Those are nouns that kind of are the real definition of who you are.



Dr. Sarabeth Berk:

People usually 10 or 20 different identities that they've never really shared before, and that's great. It's really good to understand here's all the things you are. Then I say focus on the ones that are the primary professional identities. That means those are the ones that light you up, give you energy, you use on a daily basis, you couldn't live without. If you had to turn one of them off you'd be like I'm missing part of myself.



Dr. Sarabeth Berk:

So knowing all of your professional identities, and then narrow it down to the ones that are just your top most frequent, most enjoyable one. I'd love to see people's comments of... List those three or four identities for us.



Douglas Ferguson:

As you're kind of describing some of these things, it started to make me realize how helpful it could be to leadership, because you mentioned the gig economy and being able to find opportunities that maybe weren't readily apparent before, but if as a leader I knew more about my team's abilities because they are communicating them in a way that was more clear and apparent, I think then I could create more opportunity for them, or match opportunities to their capabilities more easily.



Dr. Sarabeth Berk:

Yes. This is workforce transformation and it's not going away. The hybrid job economy report came out last year and it said hybrid jobs are growing twice as fast as traditional jobs in the job market, and they're being paid 20 to 40% more.



Dr. Sarabeth Berk:

The reason is that hybrid roles typically can't be automated and outsourced because it requires so much human knowledge and experience, and they are very sophisticated and complex. You're combining hard and soft skills, technical and nontechnical abilities. You're just doing things that nobody else can do, so hybrid workers are very desirable and those jobs are just growing.



Dr. Sarabeth Berk:

So I think leaders need to think about okay, I need to hire experts, I need to hire generalists, and I need to hire hybrids, and they don't know how to do that. There's different interview questions and training and just routining processes to keep a hybrid engaged and feeling they're in their zone.



Dr. Sarabeth Berk:

This is what I want to start opening up and talking about, so more people feel they're being valued and hired because they're a hybrid, and not just hiding or fitting into a box that employers are like, "Oh, you're only good at this one thing." The hybrid is going to get tired and move on.



Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah. It also reminds me of how we talk about cross-functional teams being so critical and so important and diversity of thought mattering. So if you hire individuals that have diversity of thought based into how they approach work because they are hybrid, it kind of unlocks even more opportunity, right? Because we're kind of pushing this... We're making this notion of cross-functional teams more granular because the individuals are cross-functional.



Dr. Sarabeth Berk:

Yeah, the individuals are cross-functional. They sort of are the translators between modalities so that the teams have better communication, better strategy, and things connect. So there's a lot of reasons why a hybrid worker adds a new dimension that's critical for teams.



Dr. Sarabeth Berk:

I think they're already in companies and doing jobs, they just don't know that that's what they are, is a hybrid, and companies don't call them out that way.



Douglas Ferguson:

We're getting this awesome question from one of our listeners. How does a hybrid resource find work?



Dr. Sarabeth Berk:

What I've learned in my own job trajectory is until I called myself and owned my hybridity I wasn't actually finding and landing roles that represented my hybridity. The last few jobs I've had, I was very clear in the interviewing process and looking at the job descriptions, does this allow me to showcase my multiple identities? As I did that, then the roles actually embraced and encouraged my multiple talents and identities to show up. So hybrid roles will come forward as you know more about yourself and how your identities work.



Dr. Sarabeth Berk:

You can also start Google searching hybrid roles. I'm seeing the word hybrid in job descriptions and in job titles. I told you there was a hybrid sales representative role I just saw yesterday, so it's starting to enter more.



Dr. Sarabeth Berk:

But I think the self-reflection, being explicit in communicating this is part of what matters to you and why you should be hired in the first place, and then looking for jobs that fit that. We're just at this cusp of this being a major part of the workforce.



Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah. I wanted to come back to the team thing, because there was another element that really excited me, which was the... There's a workshop we really love to run which is based off of the Clifton StrengthsFinder. The real power is that everyone on the team is getting to see what other members of the team, what their highlights are and what I assume maybe pitfalls are.



Douglas Ferguson:

I can imagine if a team went through this together and started to understand how each person, what their hybrid elements might be, then you get to this understanding of the team and how you can help each other in ways that maybe weren't anticipated before.



Dr. Sarabeth Berk:

Absolutely. I play with this idea a lot, that skills and identities are not always the same. So I might be really good at event planning, but I don't call myself an event specialist. That's not an identity I see myself as being.



Dr. Sarabeth Berk:

I think unpacking as a team, what are the different identities people see you as, but then how do you see yourself and how do you want to be seen? That changes it, because if I start projecting I'm this artist and computer researcher and designer and that's how I want to walk in the world, then my teammates will see me that way. Most people don't realize I'm an artist, and that's important to me. I have to be creative in my work.



Dr. Sarabeth Berk:

So this is really about confidence and self-awareness and communication about who you are and how you want to be in your work.



Douglas Ferguson:

I also would assume that any time there's a discrepancy between what you're trying to project and what people are perceiving that's also not healthy, so getting a microscope on that and understanding that that's there, how to potentially address it?



Dr. Sarabeth Berk:

Totally. Yeah. Identity work is big. I think typically we focus on like Myers-Briggs StrengthsFinder test, there's so many assessments. That's good for team dynamics and who are you. It's another layer of this, and I think it puts it up to the next level. Yeah.



Douglas Ferguson:

I imagine they can get into the aspirational as well, because you're looking at like where you want to go. So being able to assess that difference can be transformative, because you won't be able to get there unless you can see it.



Dr. Sarabeth Berk:

I work with so many people on career transition and they're saying, "I'm trying to reach for this new identity." I'm like, "Great. Let's bring that into your intersections and talk about that as part of your hybridity." This just makes people's minds blow up. They're like, "I didn't know I could do this. No one gave me information on how to look at my hybridity." So this is the tool I think is a gift helping people just see themselves in a new way.



Douglas Ferguson:

Absolutely. Well, Sarabeth, it's been amazing chatting with you today. I love this work you're doing. I think it's much needed, clearly the trends you're talking about, like the fastest growing sector of the job market and kind of just growing in the not too distant future.



Douglas Ferguson:

Tell us a little bit more about where we can find you, and if people want to work with you or want to learn more where can they go?



Dr. Sarabeth Berk:

Yeah. I have a website, morethanmytitle.com. My book, just released in April, so you can read all about hybrid professionals and who they are. There's also a workbook, which has a lot of the tools on how to do these activities to find your own hybridity. On my website there's online courses that will walk you through.



Dr. Sarabeth Berk:

I love hearing from people, so people can email me at sarabeth@morethanmytitle.com, and I'm happy to answer questions directly.



Douglas Ferguson:

Excellent. It was really again fantastic to have you on the show. I'm Douglas Ferguson, co-author of Start Within with Karen Holst. We're here every Friday if you want to join us as a guest or just want to tune in it would be great to see you. Until then enjoy your day.