On Being Great Everyday

How to Become the Best At Your Career

I’ve gathered this advice over the course of the past eleven years. This information is a mix of experience working with bosses, mentors, and coaches alongside hours of research from articles, eLearning content, and books.

When it comes to getting ahead at work, people will go to all kinds of lengths to find an edge up on the competition. Anyone who dreams of climbing the ranks of an organization and making it to the top of their field realizes there is a long journey ahead. Getting ahead can be difficult with so much advice out there. It’s hard to know what’s true and what will be the difference-maker and provide that impact.

From mentors to managers, and coaches to counselors. From articles to Google searches, and eLearning content, YouTube, and books, the information on this topic is endless.

What if all that information could be accessible today?

From my experience as a mentor, manager, and talent strategist, I have developed dozens of people and their careers.

As a mentor, it’s been my pride to watch my people grow. I’ve worked with these people to stretch them in ways they never saw or believed they could be. We’ve grown through challenges, stretch assignments, conversations, projects, and ideas. I’ve instilled the best practices that I’ve found that work and provide results.

Throughout this time, I’ve grown too. It’s developed me in ways I never believed possible. All the while, I’ve also had my own set of mentors and coaches leading me up, providing me insights, and furthering my growth in unimaginable ways.

I say this to show you my expertise on the topic. I believe I have the secrets that you want to know. These are the tips and tricks that I have used to gain three promotions in under 15 months! If I could go back to the start of my career, these are the things I would have taught myself.

I want to share my secrets with you. Let’s dive in!

Treat Each New Task Like Day 1:

If no one has told you this before,?Listen up!

“People do not care how much you know, until they know how much you care” — Theodore Roosevelt

Every Single Day Matters.

You cannot rely on your past victories to continue to carry you into your future career. You must consistently demonstrate your skills and abilities through actions, effort, and task completion.

Anything you completed yesterday?no longer matters.?No one cares how well you did on your last five assignments, especially when your next one doesn’t measure up in comparison.

At the end of the day, you’re only as good as how you last showed up. That previous victory is no longer today’s victory. It is no longer being measured, once it's been turned in. It’s all about this new task or assignment, and this time it should be better, quicker, and stronger.

Act like it’s day one all over again. Treat your previous victories as the things that got you in the door and to where you are right now. Have the intuition that you must continue to act and keep rising each time there’s a new assignment in the balance. All eyes are on you, and it’s your time to demonstrate just how much you care and all that you can do.

Leadership Pro-Tip:?Schedule a meeting at the end of your project to discuss the following lessons learned:

Lessons Learned —

• What are the obstacles you and your team overcame?
• What are the challenges you fought?
• What may still present itself as a problem today? How can it be overcome?
• Knowing what you know now, how would you have done things differently?
• If you could start over today, are there any changes to the process you would make?

Then celebrate your victories together as a team!

Bonus Tip:?If you want to get extra creative, consider creating certificates of accomplishment, appreciation, or achievement for the talents of your group. Make these shoutouts extra special by creating personalized awards or certificates. You can print off certificates from the internet or try making your own?(try Canva.com to make certificates! Super easy!)

Top Of Your Game:

It’s easy to get distracted, lazy, and complacent with your job. It can be?hard?to be great every single day.

Whenever possible, be the absolute best on your team at the core function of your job.

Do everything in your power to understand all the extra intricacies and complexities of your function. Learn how to solve highly escalated issues. Learn how to de-escalate highly irate customers.

High performers will always stand out among a crowd. People notice when you pay extra attention to detail. Do everything in your power to become a coach, mentor, and go-to on your team.

You will become the name on everyone’s mind.

The next time a project needs ownership or a team needs leadership; you will have demonstrated your abilities and readiness to stand up and take on your next job.

The Yes Man:

Whenever the opportunity presents itself and you are able to, say “yes.”

Always raise your hand when someone is asking for a volunteer and you have the ability to take on more.

Demonstrating this will set you far apart from your peers, and leadership will notice.

Eliminate tasks and activities you spend time on that cause distractions and hinder your ability to complete the complex tasks at hand. Doing so will significantly serve you as you move into leadership because you will have the flexibility to delegate.

Additionally, as a leader, you can take on more capacity.

Why?

Because you have a team. You can pull in additional resources for projects and provide easier, less complex tasks and portions of work to your team members.

Celebrate your team. Shower your people with praise.

Remember, when you have help, even if it’s 1% them and 99% you — always give credit for the contributions of others. When you share your success, the team will be more likely to contribute again.

Continuously Seek Improvements:

Inward:

Become a wealth of knowledge. Seek higher learning at every opportunity.

Anytime someone offers you a course, a cohort, an article, or a book, pick it up, read it, watch it, and take action.

Surround yourself with articles and consistently educate yourself with YouTube or eLearning course clips. Read the books people recommend to you. Digest this information and consume it, so it sticks. Take detailed notes and refer back to them.

Work towards a constant evolution and reinvention of yourself. Work on your skills, talents, abilities, and your knowledge.

Demonstrate that you can and will constantly invest time into yourself to grow yourself. This will entice the business to invest back into you and your growth when they see that you will hold up your end of the deal.

Outward:

Take that knowledge, skills, abilities, and talents you’ve developed and act upon them and with them. Use them to your advantage and put them into practice. Test out and create ideas while developing new solutions to problems.

Challenge the process and question the status quo.

You will be known as a problem solver, an idea creator, and an innovator. Constantly questioning how things get done — not because they’re wrong — but because they aren’t the best they could be. You will raise the bar of your organization. You are working on improvements, and you will be the influencer of this change.

Leadership Pro-Tip:?Become a technology & application expert.

• Learn the basic commands and functionality in multiple platforms and applications. Learning applications will take you miles ahead in your career, and you will begin to notice a pattern of how apps operate and the functionalities they provide.
• When learning an application, become obsessed with clicking each command, tab, button, and ribbon option.
• Try every option and play with the settings — This is how I’ve learned every application I currently use today.

Learn the most about the application and you’ll be known as a “Wizard”.

I’ve been called one on over 20 occassions at work - and all I’ve done is scrub an app top to bottom and clicked all the buttons.

Pro Tip: A Google Search in a pinch will tell you what you need to do, but if you want to be able to explain it in a simplified way, learn how to do it yourself.

Business Acumen:

There is no shortcut to knowledge. When it comes to learning about your organization, you must dig in deep and dive headfirst into knowing the key insights and the whys behind the way things get done. These can be the difference makers in essential conversations with higher leadership.

Learn the terminology both inside your organization as a whole, how the terminology pertains to the industry, and specific terminology used in your own functional area.

Know the terms and abbreviations for each of these words. Recognize that these abbreviations may mean one thing on the sales floor and have an entirely different meaning in marketing. Pay extremely close attention to whom you are working with, and this will provide you with contextual clues for which abbreviations they are referring to.

Whenever possible, spell out the words and do not abbreviate your own text or documentation.?

This keeps everyone on the same page and helps others from having to guess what you’re referring to.

Demonstrate understanding and comprehension of the language, terminology, and your knowledge surrounding it. Try this by providing examples, repeating in your own words the request, and asking insightful and thought-provoking questions.

Example:

The abbreviation “CD” has many uses. Here are three different ways it’s defined:

• In the mortgage industry, CD means Closing Disclosure — Defined as a document you will receive at the closing or signing table at the end of your mortgage transaction.
• In learning and development, CD means Course Design — Defined as a document that layouts the course sections, activities, and pre-lesson planning before adding all specific details and scripting in a Facilitator Guide.
• In audio and the recording industry, CD means compact disc — an object used to store music or other digital information.

All three of these are standard abbreviations for CD. All three of these mean something entirely different depending on whom you’re working with. Know that this exists across many industries and it's essential to know what someone you're talking is talking about.

Network With Everyone & Always Be Open:

Networking and building a community of individuals you know at work and within your industry will pay you huge dividends in the future.

Having people recognize you and your brand is essential for building a network.

Create a personal brand that markets yourself as reliable, hardworking, trustworthy and kind to others.

Always be gracious, warm, and friendly in every interaction with the people you work with. You never know which person you’re working with today will become your boss tomorrow. Conversely, you may end up being their boss one day.

Better to have developed a great relationship from the start, than need to re-build a damaged or fractured one.

Stay in touch with your colleagues as frequently as possible. Always offer them additional assistance at the end of your call, anytime you have any available bandwidth.

Leadership Pro-Tip:?Never complain, bad-mouth, or talk down about someone else’s work, abilities, contributions, or knowledge.

• If you feel like you?NEED?to complain to someone,?ALWAYS?pick someone outside your organization who is a trusted friend and has no relationship with the individuals or people you need to vent about.
• Keep your personal and professional opinions separate.

Bonus Pro-Tip:?Find an advocate — someone who will always champion you when you’re not in the room.

• Find a mentor, coach, or leader in a position at least 1 Level (preferably 2 Levels) above you.
• Work with them by providing work that demonstrates how much you care about what you do.

They will likely, in turn, become a cheerleader for you and help you grow and reach new heights on your journey towards the next chapter of your career.

Accept Feedback Gracious & Take Action On It Immediately:

There are two main ways we take feedback — graciously accepting it immediately and acting upon it directly or dismissing it and ignoring it altogether.

No one wants to hear that they haven’t measured up to a specific behavior, challenge, requirement, or task. No one wants to give this feedback either. Always remember that the person providing this feedback is giving you a gift. Know that they are working with you and taking a chance on you.

They are offering you the opportunity to get better and demonstrate you can truly do the things expected of you.

Most often, if someone is criticizing the way you work, it’s because it affects them somehow.

Example:

When a lack of communication is an issue, here’s how you can ensure you over-communicate.

• Schedule more frequent conversations and check-ins
• Email a daily follow-up on meeting notes, assignments created from meetings, and task completion/success.

Taking these steps will consistently demonstrate that you’ve heard them.

Ask All The Questions:

It’s perfectly okay to have questions at work. It’s even more common when dealing with complex and unique challenges. With workplaces constantly changing and evolving and technology always speeding up, sometimes some challenges have not yet been faced in an organization and thus require you to ask questions.

All work is comprised of following a set of questions in a logical order and answering each of these questions with a solution.

Often a team may create a standard operating procedure (SOP) guide that lays out the framework of a role and the expected route for decision-making. SOPs are often a common practice for most entry-level associate positions. However, as you continue to climb into the ranks of leadership, management, or seniority, the complexities of the role or decision-making required may need additional assistance.

Don’t be afraid to ask questions. Often times you are not alone in having this thought or query.

Sometimes the questions can create complexity and cause intricate redesigns of the way the organization runs. Other times, it’s a simple explanation that solves the problem.

Asking questions leads us to become better organized, have higher functioning, and run on faster cylinders. Always be sure to communicate this solution back to the team to share this newly obtained information.

Under Promise, Over Deliver:

Always,?always,?always?give yourself more time to work on something than you think you will need.

Always add in a bit of cushion as you schedule your work, your day, and your plan of attack.

Things can change at a drop of a dime. Revisions might come that change the direction, the size, and the shape of what you can and cannot complete before your deadline. In the eleventh hour of the project, the plan might fall through entirely, and you might need to begin all over again.

If you can still push forward through the setbacks and honor your word and your commitments, you will be remembered for it.

My most significant piece of advice is always to tell the other person you will provide them with the follow-up, task, or completed project at minimum, one additional business day longer than you expect it to take.

Example:

You have a report to finish and are fully confident your assignment will be completed around 2 PM today.

Tell the person whom this report is for that they can expect it from you tomorrow by the end of the business day. This provides you with an additional 8-hour worth of time for those last-minute changes that inevitably will come up or for other distractions and divergences to your time and energy.

Always Take Ownership:

Own up to it if you don’t hit a specific deadline or don’t complete something as expected.

If you’ve made a mistake, it is your job to own it.

Ownership in the aspects of setbacks will show that you understand that things won’t always go your way if you’re willing to keep working and modify the plan to provide the best possible solution to move forward.

Ownership is also vital when you’re in charge of a project. Even if you didn’t personally do the thing wrong or personally miss the deadline, you still take ownership over the missed project deadline.

Never ever throw someone else under the bus on why a deadline was not hit.

Don’t Come With Problems, Come With Solutions:

Anytime you have a problem, start ideating on solutions.

Have several possible ways to attack this problem stored in your back pocket.

Whether the solution is just an idea or fully fleshed out, it shows you are looking at the bigger picture. It also offers a willingness to look for answers before bringing additional problems to the table.

Leadership Pro-Tip:?Consider scheduling a brainstorming session when no easy solutions seem present.

• Work with your project team to come up with several ways forward.

Final Thoughts:

These are the tips, tricks, and secrets I’ve used over the past 11 years that have propelled me forward in my career faster than even I ever imagined.

Now it’s your turn!

Let’s start a discussion in the comments. Share your favorite advice from this list. Comment any suggestions, tips, or tricks that I may have missed.