Your Brilliant Career
Module 1: Perfect Destination – A Career Strategy

So where are you headed?

Before we embark on the journey we need to know the destination. We don’t just get in car and drive without knowing where we want to get to. So why do we begin a long career without a clear understanding of our goal.

What does an amazing career mean to you? Most people think a brilliant career is about getting to the top in your organisation and being the big cheese. Well not necessarily. A brilliant career is what you want not what you’re expected to want and say. A brilliant career is more than just the position. It’s about what you want to achieve, it’s about being respected, it’s about being able to look back and say “Yeah, I’m proud of that”.

A brilliant career is anything you want it to be.

Promotions

Career success is usually measured in terms of job title, salary and status and many times the age of the person. That’s the outsiders view when judging whether an individual is successful or not.

The questions I ask myself when reviewing the status of my career are:

• Am I progressing ?
• Am I being challenged every day ?
• Can I see opportunities for me that help me achieve my goal ?
• Am I being rewarded and recognised ?
• Am I making a difference in this organisation ?
• Am I learning and enriching my mind ?
• Do I feel respected ?
• Is this a great place to work with a great set of people ?

Hopefully you can see that this is a much deeper and more thorough career analysis than just asking yourself whether your job title and salary are at the right level – that doesn’t help you understand what to do or where to go and won’t make you happy.

A word on promotions

Most people think a promotion is to move to the next level in your organisation with an increase in salary. These occur every two to three years if you are lucky. This is a passive long term view. Think of promotions another way – a way that has helped me gain career progression every 18 months since I started work.

A promotion can actually be gaining more responsibility, gaining more profile in the organisation, being given interesting projects which will get you noticed or being asked to go on courses that develop new skills. All of these are promoting you and when you promote yourself in this way you will then get to the next level and get the job title, salary, company car and PA.

So think of a promotion as building blocks to your career goal – its these building blocks that you create, manage and make happen through your actions, your personality and your results. Throughout this course this is what you will learn and put into place.

Career goals

We need to have clear and exciting career goals. We need to have a pretty good idea of where we are headed and why. All organisations have a mission, vision and strategy. Why? So that they know what to do, what not to do and to help them know when they go off track and need to change. It also allows them to seize opportunities when they arise. There is no excuse for you not knowing what you expect your career will look like in 5 years.

To illustrate this let me describe two different people who I have worked with.

Richard, had a clear goal of where he wanted to be in five years right down to how much he would be earning, what his job title would be, what he would be doing and the kind of people he would be interacting with.

The other person, John, never thought more than a month ahead – he would always say I don’t know where my career is heading – I’ll just take each opportunity as it comes.

For three to four years both individuals progressed through the organisation at the same pace and both were highlighted as high potential employees. Then one year their career paths took very different routes.

Richard’s career just took off – he got the opportunity to work on a big project for some senior people and impressed them. Then a month later when some internal job opportunities came up he was promoted with a huge increase in salary, job title and status. He was also now being groomed for some big promotions in the next two to three years.

At the same time, John’s career took a different turn. Due to a reorganisation in his department he had to apply for a new job and didn’t get it. He was given a lower level job and told that this is probably as far as he would go in the organisation.

Both Richard and John were good at their jobs and intellectually there was little to differentiate them.

The reason Richard has done so well is that he had a career goal, he had visualised it , he wanted it and he was prepared.

He could articulate what his ambition was, why and what he needed to do to get there. There was a clear reason for promoting him. John on the other hand came across as not caring and a bit laissez-faire as he had no career plans and goals. If someone has no plan or goal for themselves how much will they care about the organisation, its people and its goal.

So have a career goal – at least a vision for five years ahead.

Make it happen

When you have career goal it is up to you to make it happen. John thought that if he turned up to work and did his job he would soon get promoted. Effectively he was waiting for an opportunity to come along and hoping he would get promoted. Richard came to work with a plan to achieve his career goal and he made sure he did things that got him closer and closer to the goal. He was proactive and was making it happen.

As a manager myself, these are the types of people I look for – the ones who are proactive about their careers, who want to make it happen and who go out and do it. The people who actively plan their careers and have a strategy will get on. This is why having a goal and then making sure that your actions and results each year move your forward to that goal is so important. This strategy actually helped me reach my first career goal three years ahead of plan.

Look again for a moment at this week’s “Thought of the Week”:

“Success is when opportunity meets preparation”

Preparation

To be prepared is so important. It’s about knowing where you are headed and what you want from your career. It’s also about making personal change so that you are ready. To get a promotion you generally have to be 75% able to do the next level job.

You also have to be 100% mentally prepared and have the right attitude. This is where most people let themselves down – they haven’t got the right mindset and attitude. Mindset and attitude can be seen by the way you work, by how you act and conduct yourself. In later modules we’ll explore your attitude. But to be prepared is to have a clear idea of your goal – what it looks like, what it feels like, how will you know when you’ve go there?

It means understanding what drives and motivates you – Money, power, influence.

Opportunity

How many times have you said “Isn’t he lucky” and then received the reply “You make your own luck”. A bit annoying but true.

You make your own luck by being prepared and when this happens opportunities don’t pass you by. They hit you right in your face! When you’re prepared its as if your engine has been reenergised and you start moving faster than you’ve ever done before. In your actions for the week at the end of the module you’ll get prepared and that’s a big achievement – that’s 50% of the way to your perfect destination.

You should be constantly looking for opportunities for career progression, to increase your profile, to learn new skills and to develop yourself. This is your responsibility and its up to you to create opportunities. If you wait until the next round of promotions or for when your boss moves on you’ll probably be waiting a long time.

Rudy Giuliani, the former Mayor of New York who successfully managed the City during and after the 9/11 atrocity says that one of the keys to his success is to “prepare relentlessly”. He prepared and over prepared for everything and so was in control when things didn’t go quite to plan. If your job takes up 8-9 hours a day for maybe 40 years maybe you spend some time preparing and understanding where you want to get to and what it means for you.

Let’s define success for you

Success. It may mean a salary of £100,000 per year, it may mean being recognised by the important people in the organisation, it may mean being in charge of a big team or simply it may mean getting to the top. What does career success look like for you in the medium and long term?

Many people don’t articulate what career success and a brilliant career means for them. Many people I speak to limit themselves and their thinking and in so doing put the brakes on before they’ve even got going. They say “ I could never do that….” Or “he’s much better than me” . Do you think Richard Branson, Margaret Thatcher or Mother Theresa thought like that. They all had amazing careers in their own fields. They also eliminated their limiting beliefs and just went for it.

By defining what success means to you and then understanding how you need to change to achieve it you are 50% of the way to your goal and an amazing career. Well done.

Actions of the Week

So lets take the first actions on this exciting journey. By the end of the course you will have a clear concise idea of what a brilliant career is for you and what you will do to get there. You’ll also be well on the way to your brilliant career.

1. Your Career Drivers

What do you want to get out of work and your career? Why do you do it? What are the most important factors for you in a great career?

Take a clean sheet of A4 paper and title it ‘My career drivers’. Down the left side write this list of career drivers – things that drive you in your job – going down the page:

• money
• status
• influence
• power
• security
• a sense of belonging
• mental challenge
• feeling of worthiness
• place to meet people
• something to do
• personal growth

Rank each one with a score out of 10 based on how important each one is to you in terms of you career goals and what drives you in your job.

Next to each score write down why. The top two are your career drivers – what motivates you and what you need from a great career.

2. What do you want to achieve in your career?

If there was nothing to stop you and no obstacles in the way, what is it that when you looking back on your life that you want to say about your career to explain to others how brilliant it was?

To do this, close your eyes and imagine you are 70 years old, sitting in a rocking chair talking about your life and your career. Write down what you want to achieve. Visualise it in your mind. How much do you want to earn? What position do you want to get to? How will people treat you? What will your career look like? Be very specific.

You’ll know it’s the right thing when it gives you butterflies in your stomach.

3. Your best moment

On a piece of paper answer these questions

• What have you really been proud in your career to date?
• Why was this?
• How did you feel?
• Did that experience satisfy your career drivers and what you want to achieve in your career?
• If not go back and review your career drivers and ask yourself if that really is what motivates you?

4. Career Mission Statement

So what is you career mission statement? Based on questions 1-3 write down in only 30-40 words what a brilliant career means to you. Include all aspects of questions 1-3 but keep it brief – this is your mission statement which we will refine throughout the course.

5. Bit of spice

To spice it up a bit lets just think about what will happen and what you’ll feel like if you don’t achieve your career mission. How much will it bother you. What will be the consequences to you and your life if you don’t get there?

Write down 5 things that would happen or how you would feel like if you didn’t achieve your vision.

Congratulations. You should be really excited about what you’ve achieved and where you’re headed. Just by doing this first module and taking the actions above you are well on the way.

In the next module we’ll get some attitude.