To paraphrase LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, launching a career is a little bit like leaping off a cliff, building an airplane on the way down, and taking flight before you reach the bottom.
But that construction is not without instructions. We’ve sorted through Quora and other bloggery to find the most unexpected ways to add “lift” to your “liftoff”–find them below.
1) Your boss is busy, so find the gaps she doesn’t see
Your boss spends a quarter of her time wading through email, so how can you expect her to know what the best things for you to do are?
“Managers are largely stretched thin managing their reports so they can’t always think of everything to be done that will benefit the firm,” PaperG cofounder Victor Wong explains. “People who can think of what to do and deliver are the ones who ultimately are more likely to get promoted to the top levels.”
2) No one will tell you what you need to do, Wong continues, noting that every company (and every industry) has a central asset that they’re constantly trying to accumulate, like:
deal flow in financial firms,
new clients in law firms,
product and partnership ideas in multinational corporations
The key for the progressive careerist, then, is to find out what’s most valuable to the organization as a whole and make sure to keep providing that. How do you find out? Asking your colleagues to lunch or coffee is a gracious way to share knowledge.
3) It’s not who you know, it’s what you know about who you know
As artist-entrepreneur Molly Crabapple will tell you, we need to have “consciousness of power” if we’re going to navigate its halls.
Medical Science Liaison Institute founder Jane Chin has sage advice on how to build that awareness: We should first learn the organization by title, then by influence–this will help you see the plays for power behind the decisions that get made.
It’s like Cosmo editor Joanna Coles told us: When you get into the office, become an anthropologist–study your colleagues.
4) Build your relationships out
“The network of people you know who leave your current company are oftentimes more valuable to you than those with your company,” advises James Schek of Netflix.
This hunch has been corroborated by organizational psychology: The people that you used to work with but fell out of contact with–called latent ties–can be some of your most unexpected assets.
5) Satisfy the metrics–and go past them
You will have implicit or explicit goals to be met. Machine learning engineer Michael O. Church urges us to transcend them.
“Prioritize long-term growth over short-term objectives delivered by managers,” he notes. “You have to keep bosses minimally happy in order to stay employed, but never lose sight of your real goals.”
And being able to express your career goals demands having a rich career vocabulary.
6) Get those expectations explicit
As we’ve noted before, we humans have a terrible time taking actions unless they are granular and specific: When we say actionable, we really mean abundantly clear. Entrepreneur-turned-VC Mark Suster explains that that invaluable explicitness doesn’t come automatically:
“Knowing the expectations of your senior employees (and peers) is invaluable to your success and asking people’s expectations is the clearest way to get them to think about it in the first place. The easiest way to beat expectations is for you and your boss to agree to them two-ways and check on progress periodically.”
This will lead to less ambiguity, more unstoppability.
7) Find a rocket ship, get on it
Everyone goes through an uncertain job search–Sheryl Sandberg included. As the Facebook COO told Harvard Business School of an interview with Google, certainty presents itself as a rocket ship:
So I sat down with Eric Schmidt, who had just become the CEO … and I said, this job meets none of my criteria … he looked at me and said, Don’t be an idiot. Excellent career advice. And then he said, Get on a rocket ship. When companies are growing quickly and they are having a lot of impact, careers take care of themselves. And when companies aren’t growing quickly or their missions don’t matter as much, that’s when stagnation and politics come in. If you’re offered a seat on a rocket ship, don’t ask what seat. Just get on.
So how do we find rocket ships? Paying attention helps.
via The Career-Advancing Secrets Of 3 People With Awesome Careers | Fast Company | Business + Innovation.
The Career-Advancing Secrets Of 3 People With Awesome Careers
