How to Crush Your Career
After a foray into the world of layoffs because that’s seemingly all that’s been in the news lately, I want to come back to a more optimistic topic: how to do better in your career. This is, obviously, a big topic - one worthy of of multiple posts - but we gotta start somewhere, so we’ll start with some quick tips and principles. I’m going to assume, by the way, that you have the baseline skills to do well at your job. If you are in fact bad at your job, I’d suggest learning new skills and/or getting a new job, because no amount of “career guidance” is going to make you suddenly amazing at something you don’t have the skills for. But lots of people have the skillset to do well at their job…and yet some people get more opportunities than others. They get bigger raises, they get promoted faster. How can you join that group and accelerate your career growth?
Fortunately, that part is something you can teach yourself, and it isn’t actually all THAT complicated.
First, take a moment to think about people you’ve worked with throughout your career. Think about the people who you’ve enjoyed working with and think about those you haven’t. If we could survey everyone who reads this, I bet some common themes would stick out.
People you’ve enjoyed working with are likely very collaborative. They’re probably not egotistical, they’re focused on getting the work done rather than just on themselves. They’re probably good communicators. They’re probably good all-around humans: kind, empathetic, good listeners. People you haven’t enjoyed working with are likely the opposite.
If we assume you have the skillset to do well in your role, it’s time to focus on the other things - the soft skills. This isn’t just “be nice and you’ll get promoted,” this is about how to be a better colleague, a better teammate…because those things make you a better employee.
One way to separate colleagues into buckets is “people who make my job easier” and “people who make my job harder.” Managers have this, too - they have people on their team who are awesome and kickass and make their job easier, and they have people who struggle and need a ton of guidance and time and energy and make their job harder. On every team, the manager has a person who is their “right hand person,” the person they trust to get their shit done and who can step in to help elsewhere when it’s needed. Your goal is to be that person. You want to be the person who makes your manager’s job easier. Here are some ways to do it:
Check your ego at the door, because at work it isn’t about you. It’s about the work, about getting the job done. When something goes well, look around the room and share the credit. Very few things get done in a vacuum all by yourself, and if all you talk about is “me, me, me” you’re going to be insufferable. You need to be able to advocate for yourself - but make that advocacy about the work. Be able to articulate how the work went, what the project delivered and how that impacted the business. Don’t make it about you. Because it isn’t.
Be reliable and consistent. Just showing up every day is wildly underrated in terms of its impact on your success. Show up well everywhere - both in individual work and in collaborative settings. Do what you say you’re going to do. If a problem comes up, share it quickly and openly, and try your best to have a solution to the problem ready to go (“the project is moving more slowly than we planned, but I think if we do X and Y, we can get it back on track”).
Be a great communicator. Your manager should never be surprised by hearing about something related to your work from someone else. If someone’s going wrong, you need to be the one to tell them. Consistent communication is key: let your manager know what’s going on, and be proactive about it. Don’t wait for them to ask. You don’t want to constantly spam them every 10 minutes with updates, either - a good way to set expectations is asking them something like “I want to make sure you are well informed. How often would you like me to send you updates, and in what format?”
Do lots of favors for other people. Is there other work occurring where you could lend a hand and help it along? Is someone struggling and could use some guidance or assistance? Have you spotted a problem somewhere else that you think you have an idea how to fix? Managers want people who are proactive and who solve problems. Nothing creates good bonds and positions you for future success like having a lot of people throughout the organization thinking well of you as someone who jumped in and helped them out when they needed it.
Proactively ask how you can help. Figure out your manager’s stress points - what work are they worried about? Be the person who’s actively looking for problem to solve. Try asking your manager something like “is there anything I can take off your plate?” You might be surprised what opportunities come up from a simple question like that.
Never say no….but practice saying “yes, but.” When you get asked to take on additional work, presumably that work is important. If you want to be the reliable right-hand person, you want to be the person who helps when those things come up (if you keep getting asked and keep saying no, eventually you’ll stop getting asked). But you also don’t want to burn yourself out saying yes to everything and working 70 hour weeks. The solution is “yes, but.” If you’re fully tasked and get asked to take on something else, say something like “yes, but here is my current workload of X, Y, and Z - what would you like me to shift in order to take on this new project?” This lets you be the problem solver while still allowing you to protect your work/life balance.
Always be open to feedback. Critical feedback can be painful in the moment and it can trigger defensive reactions. Recognize that (almost) every time someone offers you critical feedback, it’s from a place of caring and support - they want you to be successful (if they didn’t care, they wouldn’t bother offering feedback). You may disagree with it, but in the moment it’s offered, just accept it - if you don’t know how to respond, just say something like “thanks for the feedback, let me take some time to think on it.” Make sure to come back to them in the future so they know you really heard it, even if you don’t agree with all of it. A useful exercise is simply pretending the feedback is accurate - even if you think it isn’t, just pretend that it is and think “if this is accurate, what would I change?” And then, just maybe, it might make sense to make that change anyway.
These are big topics and just this checklist isn’t going to magically make you wildly successful. But they’re good principles to build off of, and over time we’ll explore these ideas further and in more depth.