I want to GROW! (say the Swedes)

When Personal Growth is of Primary Professional Importance

It is a lazy Monday morning. I’m been baking scones and foaming milk while an old friend alternately falls into bouts of giggles over happenings from the weekend and concentrated silences over her textbooks. She is in my kitchen to study for a business school exam while I blog and follow up long-neglected emails. Beside her notebook is her cell phone, which she glances at every couple of minutes in tense anticipation. She is waiting for a call. Last week, she met me for lunch after an interview for a project manager position with a large cable company and today is the day for the verdict. She wants to the job. Why? “Because I want to grow,” she says, blue eyes glittering. The rest of five-person team she would be working with if she lands the position have all been working in management consulting for a little under a decade. “Imagine what I’ll learn just by working with them!” she says, literally drooling at the thought. To her, the most important thing an employer can offer is personal growth potential. How much will she learn? How much will she be encouraged to develop personally? How can her experience at one particular workplace serve as a springboard for her career as a whole?

The desire to see growth opportunities in a position is not unique for my ambitious friend. In fact, we have found that it is a common sentiment particularly among the Swedish Gen Yers we interviewed. When we ask Stina, 24, who was just promoted to Senior Consultant at a global management consulting firm in Stockholm, what she looks for in a job, she says: “A work place with high performing, young, fun colleagues. And a clear trajectory and learning path.” Similarly, Adam, 24, who works at a venture capitalist firm in Stockholm, says he quit his previous job at an ad agency because: “People were not that engaged. They worked from 9-5. At five o’clock they went home, and they didn’t really have a passion for their job.” When we ask him what he likes best about his job now, he answers: “I must say my colleagues. They are a very diverse group. They are fun, they are very engaged, they work hard.”

In other words, talented and driven co-workers who can inspire you and whom you can learn from is a draw. Apparently, so is continued education and training on the job. When we ask Ellen, 22, a medical student specializing in dentistry in Stockholm, what kind of benefits would make an employer attractive to her, she answers: “I would love to have education benefits, such as courses that would specialize me in different areas…I think it is important to me that they put money and effort into their employees and help for the people that work there…And of course how much you can advance in the position that you are hired. Do they have a plan for me? For how I will develop a career there?” Sara, 25, a first year associate at a prestigious Stockholm law firm, gives us a similar answer: “At this stage of my career, when I was looking around (for jobs), I was looking for education, the opportunity for training (on the job).”

Over and over again I am struck by how far ahead the Swedish interviewees seem to have thought when it comes to their careers, especially compared to their counterparts in France, Spain, Russia and the United States. They had answers to all we asked them: everything from how much parental leave they intended to take, and how they would split domestic responsibilities with their partner, to what they were looking for, specifically, in a job. Of course every interviewee, no matter nationality, mustered some sort of answer to each of our questions— often commenting confusedly that this was the first time they’d thought about these particular issues. What made the Swedish interviews stand out was that the answers seemed so pre-meditated, so thought-out.

Where does it come from, this culture of thinking ahead? Sweden is famously small and homogenous (as Elizabeth Gilbert writes in the international bestseller “Eat, Pray, Love,” if every city has one “word,” one imperative that defines it, Stockholm’s word is “conform”), and sometimes I am tempted to feel as though the Gen Yers inhabiting this Northern European tip have been brainwashed to believe certain basic principals. To streamline, or “conform,” their values, if you will. This may sound rather disturbing, and if you are someone who dislikes the idea of a society where people tend to be more similar than they are different, then Sweden may not be your cup of aquavit (my colleague Vetta commented with wonder, after three months in Sweden, that every Swedish kitchen she had been to had the same kind of basic groceries in the fridge, similar interior decorating styles, at least one Josef Frank fabric...). On the other hand, if you tend to agree with those shared values— such as the importance of lengthy gender-blind parental leaves, a basic standard of living for everyone, free basic as well as higher education, universal healthcare etc— then being all the same may not be all bad. It may simply be all good.

Now, I am sensing that there is a new “shared value” on the rise: the importance of personal growth in the professional world. After all, most of our Swedish Gen Yers referred to it specifically, without our prompting. Furthermore, I read an article in SvD (Swedish daily) yesterday (Sunday, August 10th, 2008) where the political opposition leader and head of the Social Democratic Party, Mona Sahlin, listed “adult education” and “developing professional competency” as the most important political issues this fall. In other words, we haven’t heard the last of it. Call it brainwashing or call it strong shared values, but today’s Swedish Gen Yers have “personal growth” clearly printed on their professional agenda.