8 Critical factors for career success (part two )

In part one of this series, we looked at the first four critical factors for career success. In the final part of the series we will cover the next four aspects.

5. Increasing your influence and impact

One of the aspects we don’t talk about enough in women’s careers is learning how to build influence and increase your impact. Having influence in the workplace has “clear value,” says Dorie Clark, author of Entrepreneurial You, in the Harvard Business Review. “You get more done and you advance the projects you care about and are responsible for,” which means “you’re more likely to be noticed, get promoted, and receive raises.” 

Some of the ways we help women focus on building influence in our Women Rising journey include:

• Building executive presence. You may have been told as you progress up the ladder that you need to develop your ‘executive presence.’ It’s about inspiring confidence in other people, and having them believe that you are capable, committed and will deliver. We build it through using our strengths, building relationships, understanding power dynamics and building our inner confidence.
• Communicating with power. We build our influence through the way we communicate, and with the power inherent in our communication style and message. There are a lot of ways we diminish our message and our voice. Using words such as ‘just’ and ‘sorry’ to preface delivery of a message are one example. Become conscious of your language and how it either enhances or diminishes your communicating power.
• Building relationships. It’s all too easy in our busy working lives to focus on getting the job done at the expense of everything else. Relationships often get looked over while we focus on the to-do list. You don't have influence without positive, robust relationships, unless you are in a position of power (and even then it can be limited). Understand your stakeholders, spend time cultivating connections and invest in your relationships as much as you do as getting the job done.

Try this:

Think about where you would place yourself on an influence and impact scale. 0 is where you find yourself having little influence and impact, and 10 is that you have all you need to excel in your career and get the next role you really want. In the three areas outlined above, what is one thing you could focus on to increase both areas – influence and impact – so that you can have greater success and fulfilment at work? And think about what you actually need for the next step in your career, not just where you’re at now.

6. Creating intentional wellbeing

Wellbeing at its essence is our ability to feel good and to function effectively. And it’s what gives us the resources to navigate the highs and lows that everyone experiences in both our professional lives and our personal lives.

From a work perspective, people who thrive at work and have high levels of wellbeing have been found to be six times more engaged, more than 100% less likely to burn out, are almost 30% more productive, 45% more likely to be satisfied in their job, and 32% less likely to quit.

So if we know we want to create high levels of wellbeing, how exactly do we go about doing that? To begin with, it’s important to look at 4 different aspects of wellbeing - your physical, mental, emotional and spiritual wellbeing.

Physical wellbeing - there are 4 foundational components of physical wellbeing - sleep, nurture, move and restore. If you want to feel physically well, some helpful metrics to guide you are making sure you’re getting 7 to 9 hours of sleep per night, eating meals that fuel you, nourish you and leave you feeling well, exercising 5 times a week for 30 minutes and taking mini moments every day to restore your energy with things that relax you. 

Mental wellbeing - mindfulness and meditation are two of the greatest tools we have to manage our mental wellbeing. Mindfulness helps you to be mentally attuned to the situation. It’s about pausing and being present in the moment and being open and curious. We can practice mindfulness through our everyday activities, like eating, walking around the office, making a cup of tea, listening in a meeting. A great way to think about meditation is that we are in mental training. We are training our brains to focus. We are practicing by focusing our attention on something in particular. We can meditate sitting down, walking or doing things like drawing - anything that brings us into a focused state of concentration.

Emotional wellbeing - for positive emotional energy, one of the best indicators of our emotional state is the frequency of positive emotions versus negative emotions. There’s been significant discussion on the research here, but what we’re aiming to achieve for our goal of emotional thriving, is three positive emotions to one negative emotion. Think about these simple questions - how often are you having positive emotions in your day? How often are you having negative emotions in your day? And is that the right ratio for optimal thriving and flourishing?

Spiritual wellbeing - The core aspects of spiritual wellbeing and connection are aligning with your purpose, living your values, building positive relationships, serving other people and connecting to something greater than yourself. These are such important sources of fuel and energy in our lives, and yet our spiritual wellbeing is often one that gets left off altogether, particularly in a work context. How and when are you spending time and energy connecting to these aspects to fuel your spiritual wellbeing?

Try this:

·  Reflect on your physical, mental, emotional and spiritual wellbeing and choose which of these aspects needs a little more love at the moment. Do you need to create a nurturing evening routine to make sure you get enough sleep? Would you benefit from starting a daily meditation practice? Do you need to write a list of activities that bring you joy so you can increase your frequency of positive emotions? Do you have ideas for how you connect with more meaning and purpose in your work and life? Whatever you do, release any pressure you may be feeling to make improvements in all of these areas. Start where you are. Pick one thing. Small actions for your wellbeing can make a big difference.

7. Building grit and cultivating grace

Professor Angela Duckworth from the University of Pennsylvania has found that the most successful people in any field have a ferocious determination that plays out in two ways: they’re unusually resilient and hardworking, and they know in a very deep way what they want. It’s their combination of perseverance and passion that makes them high achievers.  In a word, they have grit.

People with grit work consistently toward challenges and maintain their interest and effort over years despite failures, setbacks, and plateaus in their progress. And while most of us take disappointment or boredom as signals that it’s time to change our approach or cut our losses, people with grit read these as signs to stick with it and truly show up. 

So how do you build more grit in your career? Grit means using your passion, interests and purpose to guide and prioritise your efforts. Pf. Duckworth suggests one way to understand this is to envision a goal hierarchy. Your top-level goals are shaped by your sense of purpose, the compass that guides you on the long and winding road to where you ultimately want to be. Next would come your mid-level goals (of which there could be several layers) that explain how this top-level goal will be achieved. Finally at the bottom would be your low-level goals that detail what you’re doing to make the mid-level and top-level goals possible. These are your most concrete and specific goals, the tasks you have on short-term to-do lists.

The research has found that being gritty is much easier when we pare down our long lists of mid-level and low-level work goals according to how they serve just one top-level goal.  She also notes that giving up on lower-level goals is not only forgivable, but sometimes absolutely necessary.

Alongside building grit in your career, it’s equally important to cultivate grace. The way we look at grace is really about sitting in the knowledge that everything will be what it's meant to be and that no matter where you are on your career journey, you are enough and it is enough, right where you are right in this moment.

Try this:

·  As you think about building more grit in your career, take out a notebook and brainstorm your own goals hierarchy. What is your top-level goal? Why is it that you do what you do? What are your mid-level goals - in other words, what are the different milestones and projects that will help you achieve your top-level goal? And finally, brainstorm all of the low-level goals - the day-to-day actions and tasks that will help you achieve your mid-level and top-level goals.

8. Leading change

We are all leaders and we all have the capacity to impact positive change on a small or large scale. While we tend to think that organisational change happens from the top, or in certain teams or certain initiatives, the truth is that change actually occurs when one individual, and then another, and then another chooses to start showing up and acting differently. And you are a leader, no matter what your role, level, size of team or even if you’re an individual contributor. We all have the capacity for leadership. And leading self and leading others effectively are two of the most critical success factors for your own success, and that of the organisation you work in.

So how do we lead change so that our organisations, governments and any other system we work in operate better for all who work in them, and also for the next generations that are coming through?

We start with learning to show up authentically as individuals and as leaders, and encouraging the same in others. The days of putting on your cloak and mask when you show up for work each day, so that you can be ‘accepted’ in the cookie cutter workplace, need to be over. Slowly, they are changing and we each have a role to play in accelerating that change. Checking our biases, being inclusive, valuing everyone’s voice, opinion and style, and bringing a mix of our feminine and masculine traits to the table (and making sure everyone has a seat at that table) and core factors that will enable you to show up with more ease and authenticity, and all those around you to do the same. Who we are is how we lead. Your ability to show up with authenticity, and lead with it, will have a profound impact on your career and leadership journey. And it's a great place to start. 

Try this:

·  If you are ready to learn the critical components of effectively leading others (no matter what your role) and you want the strategies and tools to effectively lead your self and change in your workplace, we highly recommend that you join the Women Rising program which kicks off on October 19. We are running an accelerator round of the program over 8 weeks at a very special never to be repeated price, so that we can work with women who want to truly transform key aspects of their career, life and leadership journey. It’s open and applicable to everyone no matter your age, career stage, industry or role. Come and connect with like-minded women, get expert teaching and coaching from our Founder Megan Dalla-Camina, and have something to look forward to and focus on that is positive, uplifting and will set you up for success in 2021 (which is going to be such a better year)! Details can be found here.