The Principled Professional

  You have probably spent a lot of your career asking yourself some version of the same question: What does my employer expect from me? Meet the deadline. Take on the project. Learn the new system. Pick up the work nobody else wants. Be more strategic. Be more visible. Develop your leadership skills. Adapt to AI. Do more with less. Take ownership. The list never really ends. And much of that is reasonable. You are being paid to contribute. Organizations have goals. Jobs evolve. Careers require effort. But somewhere along the way, an important question can disappear from the conversation: What has my employer done to earn another year of my finite career? That is a different question. It changes the posture. And it is one of the most important questions you can ask as you move through your career. The responsibility gap works both ways That has been the underlying theme of this series. Your job changes. Your responsibilities expand. Your accountability increases. Your title may or m...

  There is a strange thing that can happen when you become very good at your job. People trust you. They come to you when something is broken. They give you the difficult projects. They know you'll figure it out. Your manager doesn't have to worry about you. Your teammates know you'll deliver. Customers know you'll come through. And eventually, something happens that doesn't feel like a problem at all. You become indispensable. That's when you need to pay attention. Because being indispensable at your current level can sometimes become one of the biggest obstacles to advancing beyond it. Not because your organization is necessarily trying to hold you back. Not because your manager is secretly plotting against your career. And not because being good at your job is somehow a mistake. The problem is simpler. Organizations have a natural incentive to keep reliable people doing the work they're reliably good at. You solve problems. They give you more problems. Yo...

Some reports indicate that AI has only increased our capacity for doing more work and absorbing more operational load, instead of elevating us to higher skill levels and access to promotional opportunities. The more our capacity increases, the greater degree that we get "stuck" in our existing roles at work. Consider today's deep dive conversation in five minutes:

  Career Stewardship Brief The most useful career news today isn't another prediction about whether AI will “take your job.” It is the evidence accumulating underneath that headline: work is being reorganized, some entry points are shrinking, AI benefits are unevenly distributed, and the skills that make people valuable are changing at different speeds. For the career steward, that creates a more durable question: If I stay where I am, am I becoming more valuable—or simply becoming more accustomed to what I already know? 1. AI May Be Changing Careers Before It Changes Paychecks Source: Brookings — “Still waters, rapid currents: Early labor market transformation under generative AI” New Brookings research based on roughly 25,000 Danish workers across 11 AI-exposed occupations found no measurable effect of AI chatbots on earnings or hours through the end of 2024. But there was one notable movement beneath the surface: workers who adopted chatbots were more likely to switch occupati...

You can be responsible for the outcome without having the authority to control it. That sounds like leadership—until you realize the organization has handed you the liability without giving you the leverage.  You know that moment when someone says, “I need you to take ownership of this”? It sounds good. Ownership sounds like trust. It sounds like leadership. It sounds like someone has noticed that you are capable of handling something bigger. And sometimes it is. But there is another version of ownership that is much less flattering. You become responsible for getting something done, but you don't get the authority to make the decisions required to get it done. You are accountable for the timeline, but somebody else controls the resources. You are accountable for the outcome, but somebody else has veto power. You are expected to influence people you cannot direct. You are expected to solve problems created by decisions you did not make. And when things go sideways? Suddenly, your n...

  Sunday Edition There is something unsettling—and liberating—about the vineyard in today’s Gospel. Isaiah sings of a vineyard lovingly planted, tended, protected, and given every opportunity to bear good fruit. Jesus takes that image and places people inside it: tenants entrusted with something that does not ultimately belong to them. The tragedy comes when the tenants forget the difference between being entrusted with something and owning it . ( Catholic Diocese of Cleveland ) That distinction reaches much further than property. It touches the way we think about our work, our reputation, our income, our abilities, our time—and even the years we sometimes speak of as though they were possessions. We say, my career . My position. My team. My accomplishments. My time. And, of course, there is nothing wrong with those words. But there is a subtle danger when possession becomes identity. We begin to believe that the vineyard exists for us rather than that we have been given a place w...