6 Ways To Succeed In Your Current Job
When we think about career success or career development, it's usually in reaction to an event. Like someone getting a promotion, a big raise or bonus, or a new job. But these are all outcomes. What often gets lost is the work and actions that led to that outcome. Consequently, career development and these career success events can feel like a mystery. And the way most people talk about these topics doesn’t help explain them. How many times have you heard that someone got a promotion because they’re talented? Or because they are a hard worker? Or reliable? Or all of the above?
They might very well be all of the above. But that still doesn’t explain why they got that promotion or a raise. There are plenty of talented, hard-working, and reliable people that get overlooked for promotions, raises, and bonuses. So what’s the difference?
6 drivers of job success
There are many ways to succeed in your job. And your probability of success is also influenced by the industry you’re in, the company culture, and a host of other factors. But there are 6 factors that are universal. They also happen to be the most impactful things you can do to accelerate your career development and achieve success in your job.
1. Know how your success is measured
You should know your team’s targets as well as your own at any given time. Sounds simple enough, right? Yet, for most people, it isn’t. And the reason is that most people, including managers when they communicate with their teams, define targets as the things we need to do rather than the outcomes we need to create.
To illustrate the difference, let’s say you’re responsible for a new marketing campaign this quarter. You could define that target as “Launch the new campaign by June 1st”. In fact, this is how most people would think about it. There’s one problem though. To the company, the purpose of a marketing campaign is not to be launched. In this case, it might be to generate a 5% growth in new customers. So unless you’re the campaign project manager, whose only job is to manage the timeline, you should probably add the business outcome to your target. Because that’s ultimately how your success will be measured.
Being clear on not only what we need to do, but what outcomes we need to achieve is crucial for succeeding in our jobs. It allows us to plan our time better, make better decisions, develop the right skills, etc. In the end, promotions and raises aren’t given as rewards to people for ticking off things on a to-do list. They’re given to people who make the company a better and more profitable business.
2. Own the 1:1 meeting
A lot of people have a hard time establishing a good line of communication with their manager. Team and 1:1 meetings are frequently rescheduled or canceled. What’s left is usually spotty communication about problem-solving or other “issues of the day”. And that leads to reactive busywork. If this sounds familiar, it probably means your manager is overwhelmed and needs your help.
It’s good practice to take ownership of any 1:1 meetings you have with your manager. The same goes for other stakeholders who are higher up in the org chart than you are. To be clear, this isn’t about hierarchy or politics. It’s about being pragmatic. All meetings require a degree of preparation to be valuable. People higher up in the org chart tend to have more employees reporting to them. So while you have 1 weekly meeting with your manager, she might have 9 more such meetings in a week because she manages a team of 10 people. It’s easier, and more efficient, for you to be responsible for the quality of that meeting than the other way around.
The 1:1 meeting should be structured. A good approach is to create a shared document with a fixed agenda. You can adjust this to your situation and needs but as a minimum, it should contain:
An update on your progress, including the key measures of success (see #1 above)
A list of decisions (resources, budgets, etc) you need from your manager to achieve your targets
Time allocated for ad hoc problem solving with your manager
Doing this consistently over time has several benefits. Firstly, you’ll get better support in achieving your goals. Secondly, the communication between your 1:1 meetings will improve because of that common ground. Lastly, you taking this ownership will be seen as a leadership quality. It will buy you goodwill because you’re making your manager’s job easier.
3. Take responsibility for your own career development
A common mistake a lot of people make is expecting our employer or our manager to take the lead on our career development. And it’s no wonder. Most companies claim to prioritize their employees’ career development. They may have formal performance reviews and bonus evaluations. But sometimes, this masks the truth.
While some companies do invest a lot of money in employee development, the training on offer might not be relevant to what you need to progress your career to the next level.
Your manager might not have the time for, or be good at, developing individual employees. This is especially common with managers who lead teams of specialists, where the employees have very different backgrounds and needs from their own.
Many companies have employee development and evaluation processes that sound more mature and structured than they really are. In some cases, they are highly arbitrary and anecdote-driven. Other companies are reluctant to invest in employee development because employee tenure is getting shorter across the board. So the thinking goes “Why should I invest money to develop someone who’s going to leave in 2-3 years anyway?”.
The solution is to own our career development and work with our employers to help us where possible. This means that we should all know the career path we want to have and what it takes to succeed at it. If we know which skills we need, we can ask our employers to pay for specific up-skilling, courses, etc.
The same goes for short-term job success. If you’re looking for a promotion or a bonus, you should work with your manager to figure out what it will take to get there. Even if the answer isn’t immediately apparent, most managers are willing to work with their employees to find it.
4. Contribute beyond your scope
We tend to get preoccupied with the job we’re doing and the never-ending list of tasks. This is after all our first and most important responsibility as an employee. And some job success events are tied to doing our jobs well. Bonuses and raises are typically retroactive rewards for good job performance.
However, promotions are different. You still need to do your job well to get promoted, but that’s only one part of it. In addition to that, you also need to demonstrate a potential for growth. A promotion is a bet that an employer takes that you will be able to perform at a job that’s bigger and more complex than the one you have currently. So if you want a promotion, your job is to give your employer a reason to make that bet.
This can be tricky. How do you show that you can do a job that you’ve never had before? Like getting promoted to a team lead position without having managed teams. This is where contributing beyond your job scope can be very helpful.
Most companies have projects or initiatives that fall outside their employees’ job scopes. These kinds of cross-functional projects can be great opportunities for career progression. So can any unforeseen problems that a different department runs into.
By getting yourself involved and helping out, you’re doing two things. You’re acquiring new experiences that you might not get in your current job. And you’re showing your employer that you have leadership qualities.
5. Make yourself visible
The single most impactful thing anyone can do to accelerate their career development is to become more visible and start building their personal brand. We all have a tendency to assume that people think about us and what we’re up to more than they actually do. Most people are preoccupied with their own issues, problems, and task lists. Unfortunately, this also applies to your manager and other stakeholders who hold the keys to your career success.
This means that it’s not enough to work hard and get stuff done. The third part of the equation is to make sure people know about it, and convincing them that you are an employee worth investing in.
It starts with building relationships with your key stakeholders in your company. Obviously, your manager is the most important one. Beyond that, you should have recurring meetings and conversations with others who can have an impact on your career progress. It can be some of your peers, your manager’s peers, or even your manager’s manager. In those conversations, you should make sure they know about what you’re working on, what you have achieved, as well as show interest and curiosity about their work and how you can help them.
Once these lines of communication are in place, you should think about how to become more visible towards the rest of your company and what’s the essence of the personal brand you want to build. Do you want your colleagues to think of you as an expert? A person who gets stuff done? A great collaborator? Something else?
Once you have it figured out, the next step is to find opportunities to get that message across and tailor your communication accordingly. This can be presenting something in the company’s all-hands meeting, sharing interesting research and articles in the company’s Slack channel, or any number of other activities. The key thing to keep in mind when building a personal brand is that it’s not about making the biggest possible splash every chance you get. Or hogging the attention. Rather, it’s about consistency over time.
6. Manage your time
This is probably the most trivial-sounding factor on this list. Yet, it’s the most challenging one to get right. And the reason why most people never get around to doing factors 1-5. Because there is always more work to do. By the time we tick off one thing on our task list, two more have appeared.
Busywork is the bane of successful careers. And it’s an unfortunate affliction that even most high performers suffer from. The only way to succeed in our jobs is to spend less time doing stuff that doesn’t matter and more time doing things that create real business outcomes. It really is that simple. Solving this challenge starts with three things.
The first is #1 on this list - knowing how your success is measured. As long as you know that, you can evaluate your tasks and decide if they contribute to your success or detract from it.
The second thing is productivity techniques. The reason why so many of us spend so much time on busywork is that we get overwhelmed with tasks. We get reactive and after a while, we lose track of what matters. So we just try to do it all. The purpose of using productivity techniques is to go from being reactive to becoming proactive. So you should use techniques to break up your day and introduce time for planning, reflection, repetitive work, and work that requires deep thinking.
The third thing is communication. Hopefully, if you’ve done #1 and #2, you should be in a position to evaluate which of your tasks have a high value. But there are still expectations to be managed. Negotiating priorities with your manager and stakeholders can be challenging, but practice makes perfect. And a big part of that is learning how to say no in a way that doesn’t come across as obstructive or selfish.
Tiles Collab is a career development community. We help high performers identify the right career paths, create career plans and achieve their goals by focusing on strategies and tactics that work in real life. Visit our homepage for more information about our approach and services.