6 Tough And Brutal Truths About Your Professional Career Growth

Professional career growth is one of the things that most people in the workforce keep always in their minds.

However, there are a lot of misconceptions and wrong ideas about what "career growth" means. Especially, I’ve seen that a lot employees put their expectations in the wrong place, resulting in job disappointment, disengagement and frustration.

I wanted to straighten out the ideas about career growth. And I'm doing so by acknowledging some brutal, tough and sometimes inconvenient truths about it.

The ultimate message that you will get from each of these 6 truths is this: you are the owner of your career.

Whether you are in a rigid and slow organization with no professional growth opportunities, or in the most innovative, agile and fast one, you are the one responsible for making things happen. There will always be great and bad places to work, and excellent and terrible bosses. They can certainly make a difference and facilitate your professional growth. But, you have the biggest role to play. So, let's look at how the wrong and right expectations can have a negative or positive impact.

Check out these six truths and reflect if and how they’ve affected your career and what changes you need to make.

1. Your Boss

I believe that the most, most, most important role of a leader is to support and challenge people throughout their careers so they can grow and deliver the best results. But let’s be honest. Most bosses don’t do that. They just, well… boss people.

I’ve always expected that to be different, but expectations don’t change the way bosses behave with their people. So, the ultimate truth is that your boss really owes you sh... They can promise whatever and forget about their word. Not all bosses are like that. Some of them are true and genuine leaders. But a lot aren’t. Thus, you’re the one responsible to seek exciting professional challenges and gain support to advance in your career. Don’t wait for your boss to lead the way on this. Own your career!

2. Keep Your Expectations About Other In Check

Life gets real when you realize that the gap between what you expect and what happens is very, very wide.

You have to keep your expectations about others, bosses and coworkers, in check. Two things will happen if you do that: 1) you’ll get less disappointed when reality doesn’t come out as you expected and 2) you’ll be more responsible for your career.

Your career growth depends mostly on you. I’ll give you a few ideas in this post. However, what’s really important is that you fully understand and acknowledge that you're the one who needs to make things happen. And don’t get me wrong about expectations. They are good, inspiring and motivating. I’ve just seen so many people frustrated with their careers because they’ve expected more than the action they’ve taken that I don't want you following that path.

3. Feedback Truth No. 1

I see a lot of people sitting around waiting (or not) for feedback to come to them. Most people dread having feedback conversations with bosses or peers. But there are two fundamental truths about feedback.

1. Feedback won’t come to you. You have to go for it. Why? Dah!!! Because it’s a powerful way for you to discover blind spots that you’re either unaware of or unwilling to see. Feedback helps you see what's visible to others about you, but invisible to yourself. And that, brothers and sisters, is a fascinating way to grow.
2. The second truth is that nobody owes you sh... (yeah, yeah, I also said that about your boss). If you expect somebody to come to you and say “hey buddy, here’s some feedback about blah or blah”, well, you might be waiting for too long. Most corporate cultures aren’t conducive to genuine informal feedback conversations. And, people dread giving feedback even more than they dread receiving it. They’re scared of your reaction. So, you have to seek feedback and be open to receive it.

My point is, get up of your desk, talk to people, have nice and genuine feedback conversations. It’ll be incredibly productive for you. And perhaps you’ll be building a culture of corporate informal, on the spot and honest feedback.

Your career depends mostly on you, but it’s also slowly built on feedback received from others.

4. Feedback Truth No. 2

For too long I was very annoyed and closed minded to the feedback given to me. This was especially true at the beginning of my career.

During my feedback conversations I would normally have two stories running at the same time. The “external” story by which I’d tell the other person “oh thank you, that’s really valuable and interesting. I’ll take action on that”. And the “internal” and totally opposite story that was running in my mind went something like “f... this. I’m not like this person says. I don’t need to hear this crap. This person is full of sh...”

Well, the truth is that at the end of the day, I was the one full of crap.

Feedback is an extremely powerful tool to grow. And whether we agree with what we’re told or not, it’s better just to meditate about it and give the feedback a chance to make us grow.

Sometimes negative feedback can be exaggerated. But, most times, it carries a lot of truth in it. So, if you happen to have my same two stories running simultaneously as you receive feedback, reframe the internal one. Give yourself the opportunity to fully listen to the person providing feedback and value the information you’re getting. Don’t discard it or hide behind negative thoughts. Instead, meditate about it and break the feedback down in digestible pieces. Be open-minded, find what’s valuable and how it can help you grow and advanced in your career.

5. The truth about career growth

Alas, so many employees expect to be offered career growth opportunities as a result of their work. Well, well. Isn’t it natural to expect rewards and opportunities as a result of great performance? Yes. But, no.

A lot of organizations aren’t designed or flexible enough to provide ongoing career growth opportunities. Some of them are pretty rigid (old school) and won’t change. But even those that are agile and flexible can’t change, promote or mobilize people as fast as their people produce results. It’s sad. But, truth.

So, the problem is that anybody would get very disappointed and disengaged too quickly if there are no formal opportunities for career progression as a result of their work. What to do?

Again, take full ownership and responsibility for your career growth.

One way to do it is by informally creating your own growth opportunities. How? Find projects you can participate in, collaborate with other teams or simply propose new interesting ideas that can eventually become a formal project. Whatever you do, remain very, very active. All you learn while participating in your own informal professional initiatives will be extremely valuable for you and your career.

The informal opportunities you create have two very positive outcomes:

• The most important is that they help you stay professional relevant, challenged and in learning mode. I see so many people who have lost their entire professional strengths and skills because they waited too long for a formal opportunity to come to them instead of creating it themselves. In short, they are like the former runner who signs up for a marathon without training. They are rusty and will suffer.
• The second outcome is that, very often, those informal opportunities could become either formal projects or personal entrepreneurial adventures (the creation of twitter, Instagram, Whatsapp and Slack are great examples of this).

The ultimate message and truth here is STOP waiting for the opportunities to come to you. GO AND CREATE THEM!

6. Patience

The final truth is that we need to be more patient about our career growth than we are right now.

You want to know someone extremely impatient? ME! I want things to happen quickly. I get professional dissatisfied, bored and disengaged pretty quickly. And that happens because I feel I reach professional plateaus too quickly and hate to linger too much in them. I want new challenges to learn more and keep my life excitement's levels high.  

Sadly, but truly, formal career progression opportunities will never be able to catch up with the pace I and many others live our lives (especially the technically savvy generations, Millennials and Zs). So, we have to be patient.

But, hey, read this carefully: patience doesn’t mean inaction. Patience is not waiting around to see if something happens. On the [total] contrary, it means remaining active, taking action, creating opportunities, learning and growing, even if informally, while we keep pushing for the formal opportunities to materialize (in the form of promotions, mobility, other roles, a new job, etc.).

The ultimate message

No explanation needed. Just the poem “Invictus” by William Ernest Henley, which pretty much summarizes my most important point: You Are The Captain Of Your Career.

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