How YOU can succeed in any career!

Do you feel you could progress faster in your career? Are you trying to find your marks since switching to a new industry or role?

A fellow member of our community shared this: I have just transitioned from my usual work to a new area and I am keen on professional experience.

In response to Harriet's question, which I thought would benefit you too, I have compiled below, some tips which I have tested and refined in over a decade.

These very tips allowed me to rise to C-suite level in just 10 years of career and I am CERTAIN they can do the same for you, if you are DETERMINED enough to integrate the principles I am bout to share with you below, and apply them with FAITH and PERSISTENCE.

Pay attention, to grasp the meaning of the 3 steps to succeeding in any career!

First step: Own Your Career Development & Performance

Always remember this: If you don’t work on improving your performance, it won’t suddenly surge afterlife situations get in, such as becoming a parent, or dealing with difficult personal situations that may affect your work.

Here is how you own your career growth:

1. Make your skills audit: Does your organization have a competency matrix or career ladder that describes the skills and competencies required for each level of seniority in the organization? What skills are required of me in my current role? How about the next level? Use that next level as your target.

Once you know the skills required of you in your role, make this short assessment, taking detailed notes in your favorite notebook.

Across the skills and mastery level required, what are you amazing at? How can you keep shining in your areas of strength so they become how you define your personal brand? The biggest mistake people make is to omit what they are good at and overly focus on what they are not good at.

Then, which skills do you need to improve to meet the competency skills required of the next level? Which activities will you seek at work on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis to hone these skills.

2. Craft your Personal and Professional Development Plan, if you don’t have one yet: The notes from your skills audit from your professional goals. Simple and cool, right?

But what about your personal goals? I want you to project yourself into the future 10-20 years from now, who do you want to be? And to be that person, what kind of skills will you need?

For example, I wanted to become President of my country, Benin. When you have a personal purpose as clear as this, it's easy to identify the skills you will need, e.g., public speaking skills, persuasion skills, interacting with a particular type of stakeholders, etc.

You will notice some of your personal and professional development goals intersect, and that's beautiful, because you get double motivation to do you work and grow professionally, which will lead to more self-fulfillment and earning more money.

Second Step: Involve Colleagues in helping you around your goals.

1. Share your personal development goals with your manager in a structured 1:1 conversation. Emphasize to your manager so they may direct to you, the right opportunities and work assignments that will help you on your goals. And the more you get exposure to do those things, the faster you'll get promoted.

2. Share your goals with your peers and invite them to help watch how you gain mastery in those areas and to offer constructive feedback that may help you improve. The best feedback I've ever received were from peer colleagues on a project or sometimes those who were more junior to me but have been around long enough to tell me what mistakes I should avoid.

3. When promotion decisions are to be made, your manager is not the only person in the room. A strong no from a colleague who hardly sees your capabilities can rob you of the opportunity to get promoted.

Conversely, if you have a difficult manager who is not interested in seeing you promoted, colleagues above who have seen your capabilities will do the fight for you naturally.

The bottom line is this: don’t just hide behind your manager in all you do. Spot the best leaders you feel attracted to in the organization or who you occasionally work with, and keep a continuous meaningful relationship with them. Don't overdo it, please. Needs to feel natural :).

The easiest way to approach people like this is to identify something they do very well and which might be a skill you wanted to improve on from your personal and professional development plan. Ask them that you'd love to learn from them or you'd appreciate if they can watch how you do on that particular skill and help you improve.

People are proud to say they helped you improve on a particular skill. Start from there, and they will naturally grow into allies (I call them Personal Board of Advisors) who will speak up for you in rooms where you are not.

Third step: Manage Upward effectively

Know your manager's working and communication style in and out, to guarantee the best work interaction possible. You can do this through a few ways:

1. Ask your peers who have worked with your manager. Whether they had a positive experience and not so positive one (that is where you learn mistakes not to make) - but do not hold any judgments about the person based on this. Negative pre-conceptions will tend to give you a negative experience too. Instead, embrace these learnings as they are. Be specific on the kind of questions you ask, so you don't fall into gossip. For example. How do they like to do X? What do they hate? Etc.

2. Ask your manager directly during your first 1:1 conversation about your work - or use the next coming 1:1 opportunity to do so.

3. Suggest periodic check-ins to track progress on the work, but also separate sessions to get their feedback on how you are doing with regards to professional development goals. Frequent feedback is the secret. You’d rather know that your approach to presenting your department's work sucked from the first team meeting and correct it quickly, instead of sucking at your presentation in 3 team meetings before someone tells you were sucking the whole time…

4. Keep your commitments and be reliable. If you say you will share some work on Thursday or by 6pm, do it by 6pm. It’s all about planning your work and never underestimating the time tasks might take you. If close to a deadline you anticipate the slightest risk that your work will not be ready in time, communicate the risk as early as possible. Your manager will see you as reliable. Ask them if they prefer you send the draft unfinished work their visibility or to share when completed. Sometimes we stress over a deliverable meanwhile the person reviewing will not have time to look until tomorrow.

5. Manage expectations and push back when needed. First impression is what people keep of the entire relationship. As much as you want to please your manger, learn to say no when needed, otherwise it will be hard to say no later. Know your limits and don’t over-promise. You'll be painted as unreliable if you don’t deliver on your promises. You don’t have to yes all the time, otherwise you'll very quickly feel burnout and people will step on you.

My friend, if you follow my advice above, you will build a personal brand so outstanding that your company will have no choice than to keep promoting you.

My Bonus for you: Keep learning and practicing technical skills important for your role. When you stop learning new things, you stop growing and as a result, your manager cannot promote you.