This past week I asked a client to reframe their definition of success.
As we talked, it became clear that they hadn’t really stopped to define what success meant to them, or to question where some of their ideas about it had come from. It made me think about how often we carry a definition of success without really examining it.
Whose definition of success are you using?
A lot of our ideas about success are inherited. They come from family, work, culture and the people around us. They can be so familiar that we don’t necessarily recognise them as expectations; they simply become part of how we decide whether we are doing well.
In my family, working hard was a strong measure of success.
And I do work hard — sometimes too hard. But over the years I have realised that one of my own measures of success is actually loving what I do.
Those two things can happily coexist, but they came from different places. Working hard was something I absorbed; loving what I do is something I have consciously chosen.
Architecture has plenty of familiar measures of career success: studio size, project scale, awards, profile, promotion, team size and responsibility.
There is nothing wrong with any of them, although it is worth asking whether they are still yours.
Success has more than one dimension
Research into subjective career success has identified eight different dimensions: recognition, quality of work, meaningful work, influence, authenticity, personal life, growth and development, and satisfaction.
We can be succeeding by one measure while feeling unsuccessful by another.
You might have recognition, influence and seniority while also thinking:
I hardly design any more.
I don’t see my family enough.
I don’t feel as though I’m learning.
I’m producing work I don’t particularly care about.
What does enough look like?
For senior leaders in particular, career progression frequently assumes more: more projects, more people, more responsibility, more revenue, more influence.
If success always requires expansion, when are you ever successful?
My own definition has changed considerably over the years. Success is sometimes connected to one big end goal but increasingly it’s about how I experience my work and life along the way.
“Success can be something you practise, rather than something you reach.”
For me, success can look like:
Feeling creative and actually doing something with the idea.
Moving forward without needing every uncertainty resolved first.
Recognising and communicating what I need.
Maintenance is an underrated form of success too. Keeping a good team together, protecting design quality, retaining good clients, or preserving thinking time may be more valuable than growth for its own sake. Not every year needs to involve expansion, promotion or transformation.
And we don’t get to define success entirely on our own terms. Workplace structures, caring responsibilities, health, financial pressures, discrimination and access to opportunity all shape our choices.
Being intentional about success helps us notice what matters within the circumstances we actually have.
Looking for the evidence now
Some of the most important evidence of leadership success appears before the result does.
A difficult conversation today may not improve business performance until months later.
Delegating something instead of personally solving it may initially feel less successful.
Protecting thinking time may produce nothing visible that afternoon.
These things are harder to count than a deadline met or a project won, which makes them easier to overlook. Yet, they may be precisely the behaviours that create better leadership.
I don’t want all my measures of success to depend on something happening in the future.
Which brings me back to the question I started with:
What does success look like for you, now?