“Things were not supposed to unfold like this,” you say to yourself. “How did I get to this point?” You were taught that if you got a good education and worked hard, you would reach your important goals. You followed the roadmap but you ended up nowhere close to that Promised Land.
For the past few years, you have spent more time in the office hoping to demonstrate your loyalty to the company. You did favours to people with the expectation that your good deeds would be rewarded down the line. Unfortunately, so many years later, you find yourself stuck and suffocating. You’re not making the kind of progress you’d hoped to make. Your career seems to be in the wilderness.
What went wrong? Opportunities keep going to other people who don’t seem to be putting in as much effort. The dream projects consistently go to the people who are no better qualified than you or who appear to value them less.
“What am I missing?” you’ve been asking yourself. “Why do I get passed over for important opportunities so often?”
The answer is simple. You have believed a lie. As lies go, there are many layers that we cling to. I’ll stick to just one for this article. First, understand that your actions are the practical expression of your beliefs. In a contest between what you desire and what you believe, guess which would win most of the time? What you believe typically trumps what you desire. You can’t consistently act out of alignment with your beliefs and feel good about yourself.
“How can that be?” you ask. This is the sequence of how we are wired. We call it the Belief – Action Spiral. The flow is dynamic, meaning it also works in the opposite direction.
Beliefs ⇒ Mindset ⇒ Thoughts ⇒ Feelings ⇒ Actions ⇒ Results
Your beliefs shape your mindset. Your mindset determines the dominant thoughts in your head. Those thoughts influence your emotions and how you feel. It should be obvious now that how you feel has a major impact on the actions you take or don’t take. It’s fascinating how we sometimes take actions that seem so incongruent with what we say we want. Trust me, there is a good reason for that. We each are two “people” who don’t always see eye to eye but that is a topic for another post.
If you find yourself struggling to achieve a goal that is important to you, it is worth going back to interrogate the beliefs you hold in relation to the matter at hand. Why? Because your results come from your actions and your actions are the practical expression of your beliefs. You act consistently in alignment with your beliefs.
A belief is an unconscious program of how you assume the world works. That assumption is often based on what you’ve heard over and over or how you made sense of what you saw happening around you. Here is the point that so often gets lost. You may have heard people quoting from the Bible that the truth shall set you free. What that means is, if you are not free, chances are it is the lies you cling to that are holding you hostage. Simply put, you are stuck because you have believed a lie!
If your belief is based on a lie, you’re really going to struggle to achieve related goals. Let’s dump the technicalities and make things a bit practical. A belief is the promise of a reward if you take stated actions. For example, Pulane eats a balanced meal and exercises regularly. She believes that these actions will lead to the reward of good health. Her belief is the causal link between the actions and the reward. She takes the above actions with the expectation of getting the reward stated by the promise statement (the belief).
“I’ll let my work speak for itself.”
What do you believe will help you get ahead in your career? If you’re like most people, you believe that hard work will help you get ahead. But what do you mean by “hard work”? Have you ever sat down and broken that into a definitive list of what you ought to be doing? Do you define “hard work” as spending more time in the office? Is it delivering on your assignments on time and on budget? What does it mean?
Here’s the truth. Performing to the standard expected of your technical skills is not good enough. Just about anybody can do that. The question is: what is that optional extra that only you can contribute in your own way? Something that is uniquely you. One of the common lies is how you are supposed to be like everybody else, to be “normal”? We learned this early as children that those who are different get picked on. The boy with the big head is called names like Humpty Dumpty. The girl with pimples is called spotty.
All these teach us that being different is bad. You get isolated and nobody wants to be ostracized at that stage when their identity is forming. As a result, we all do everything possible to be as normal as possible. The urge to belong to a tribe is not just a good thing, it is a matter of survival. It is safer to belong and that means being like everyone else. Your individuality is never allowed to shine through. You learn that your uniqueness is what gets you on the playing field sacrificial altar.
Let’s look at the situation from a different angle. Why do you go see the same doctor all the time? You see her because of that something extra that makes you feel good about interacting with her. It’s her uniqueness over and above her technical skills as a clinician. What do those who interact with you at work get that is over and above the technical skills you bring?
The belief that “I’ll let my work speak for itself” won’t get you very far. Consumers don’t buy a product because it is the best compared with the alternatives. They buy it because they think it is the best compared with the alternatives. Perception matters. You are responsible for how people see you. Okay, not fully but to a large extent. The point is that if you do not polish your tribe’s perception of you, they will make up their own and it will probably not be very good.
That does not necessarily mean hiding the dark spots. It means highlighting the good ones. We love athletes at the top of their game not because they have no flaws but due to how bright their special talents comes through.
Be clear what is unique about you and talk to it consistently. Obviously, you need to back it up with results. Do and talk. Actions alone won’t get you very far. There is a reason consumer goods companies like Proctor and Gamble, Unilever and BMW have huge advertising budgets. They know that it is not enough that their products can deliver exceptional utility. They want you to know just how good they are. They desire to own a small space in your head. It’s about influencing you to see them in the right light.
A Pampers diapers slogan says, “One night, one dry baby.” As a parent with a young baby, it is very inconvenient, for both the baby and the parent, to have to wake up in the middle of the night and change a diaper because it is wet. Good as Pampers is they wanted to drive the point home that they provided the best when it came to dryness. They didn’t just say, “Our product will speak for itself.” They wanted you to know its most important message. What is that message which you want your colleagues and managers to know about you?
Your boss.
You are hired primarily for your technical skills but how you interact with others during the course of executing those skills can make you more desirable to deal with or less so. People are emotional beings. We make decisions with emotions and justify them with logic. For the record, emotions are the immediate, instinctual responses you feel, like a sudden burst of joy or frustration. A feeling is the ongoing experience of those emotions, shaped by your thoughts and memories.
You need to have a plan to manage your boss. Some bosses are micro-managers while others are easy going. Figure out what yours is like and tailor your work in a manner that aligns with that. At the end of the day, your promotion rests heavily on what he thinks about you. Give him what will make him comfortable. Having endless battles with him is a bad strategy, even if you are right. You will win the skirmishes but lose the war. You will remain stuck. In short, make the life of your boss as simple and smooth as possible. Deliver reports and feedback well before time. Let him feel that you are one of the people he can rely on.
Your job is to make your boss look good among his peers. Never drop a big issue you didn’t discuss with him beforehand, in front of his peers. This makes it look like he doesn’t have his house in order. It can be embarrassing. You don’t want to be the constant cause of his embarrassment. Never make yourself look good at the expense of your boss, except when it comes to core values that are about your identity. There are more productive ways to handle that.
The key to all these is an open relationship with him. Part of that is to find out what his interests are. Find out what his favourite teams are. Raise the subject and let him talk and talk about what he liked about the game. Sprinkle a few questions while he shares complaints about how the referee was not fair. You may not like the sport he cares about but that is besides the point.
This is part of your bigger strategy to win the war. It will require effort but it is well worth it. It will deepen the emotional bond between you. You will become more than just a pair of hands to him. People fight for those they have a deeper emotional connection with. Why do you think some employees are seen as favourites? They understand the game and make every effort to play it well.
The management team.
Everyone expected the next promotion to go to Sello. He was devastated when it went to someone who didn’t even expect it. When he started digging to find out why, this is what he found. His boss had informed his manager that he wanted to move to another department. That was factually correct but contextually inaccurate. He wanted to get those other skills but much later, as part of working towards pursuing his entrepreneurial dreams.
From that point onwards, Sello made a decision that he was going to share his career aspirations himself. He would meet his boss’ manager at least twice a year. There were three main reasons. First, he would have the opportunity to tell him exactly what his career aspirations were. He would no longer hear from the grapevine. Second, he could hear directly from the big boss what areas he needed to improve on. Managers promote those they think will fit in with the team. It is your duty to convince them that you are such a person. You can leave that to ravages of chance or have a meticulous plan to sell yourself as a valuable team player.
The third reason was to directly seek guidance from the big man. Given his elevated position, he would have access to the information the direct boss didn’t have. As you would know, the right information is valuable currency.
The human desire to fit in with peers is a very strong impulse. That also applies to your bosses up the chain. If the rest of the management team sees you as a lousy candidate for promotion, there is only so much that your boss will fight for you. Make it easier for yourself by networking with your managers’ peers. From time to time, formally and informally, seek their opinion on the projects you’re working on. Where possible, do them some favours. This will build the same bond I referred to earlier. Remember, people are emotional beings. If you connect with them emotionally, they will go out of their way to help you.
Here’s something you might find totally illogical. If you want someone to fight tooth and nail for you, ask them to do you a favour. Yes, you read that right. Get them to do you a favour. You would think your doing them a favour would be the better option but science says the opposite is more effective. Naturally, that won’t happen out of the blue. It takes us back to your commitment to building those emotional connections.
Conclusion.
You get results based on the actions you take. Be aware, though, that your actions are the practical expression of your beliefs. From time to time, take stock of what your beliefs are in relation to the goals that are very important to you. If those beliefs are based on a lie, you will struggle to achieve those goals.
One of those misguided beliefs is that your promotions and career progression are primarily based on how well you execute on your technical skills. That’s good enough only for you to keep your job, not excel in it. Top performers are passed over for promotions all the time. Work on the emotional connection side of the equation.
Your boss, his peers and your peers are emotional beings. Just like you, they make decisions with emotions and justify them with logic. Put more effort in smoothing your professional relationships. Make an effort to find out what they care about and engage them on the topics from time to time. Naturally, they’ll want to do most of the talking. Let them. They will feel good about it. Is that too much to ask as a price to pay for rocketing up the career ladder?
Obviously, people are complex beings. Different things will work for different people. The main point here is to make sure your strategy is not unidirectional. Hard work alone won’t get you very far. People quickly see it as normal, even if you’re better than everyone else. With the emotional connection though, things are a bit different.
If interacting with you leaves them feeling good about themselves, or merely being more comfortable that things are under control, they would want to work with you more often. They will stick their necks out in support of you. The reason they do it is not because they are altruistic and care so much about your career. They don’t. There are many other people who can fill that position. They do it to further their own agenda. They would rather spend more of their time working with a pleasant person than one who is not. Afterall, we must spend most of our time in the workplace. Who wants to spend so much time with a person who sucks up their energy?