The Elusive Secret of Career Growth

It’s easy to understand that sometimes in business, things can be a bit obscured and maybe you can even feel disconnected. I remembered the first time I set up a company division from scratch. I was all full of fire for what I knew the mission would be, and all I needed to do was plot out the budget, the revenue goals, etc. My two partners said, “Okay, and what do you want your salary to be?”

I froze. For whatever reason, I hadn’t thought about the fact the budget included my salary nor the payroll for the two other people I would soon hire. I was focused on the other expenses like some software, travel budget, etc. But I just didn’t connect the fact that I had to earn our salaries alongside everything else the division would be tasked with doing.

Career is a Unit of Measurement

When I hear people talk about their career, there are two ways they portray it: one, as a way to sum up the work a person has done over some span of time (usually decades), or two, as some mythical thing you plot and develop and plan for and build from all kinds of carefully considered experiences. This is about that second use of the word, and it’s some advice from my own personal experience (not specifically about Appfire).

When people ask me what they can do to advance their career, I start with one simple idea: do something useful.

My own “career” was just a series of attempts to be useful to the people who paid me and trusted me to bring some level of value to the organization. I was better at matching my skills to the job at hand sometimes, and other times, I wasn’t the right guy and I had to find a different role that fit me better. It sure wasn’t a “career” in the sense that you start here, move up to there, etc.

I honestly don’t think those kinds of linear paths exist all that often, except in very regimented systems, like maybe law, medicine, etc.

So How Does One Advance Their Career?

Be useful. I said it once. Worth saying again. Beyond that, it’s a matter of a few more details:

• Understand what the business/organization does - this sounds silly, but sometimes, people take a role, and they focus on the execution of that job, and they never once try to understand how what they do factors into the rest of the company. Every role is better served by learning more about the overall goals, strategies, intentions of the place where you work.
• Pay attention to the industry news - I work in a software company in the tech sector. It’s astounding to me how many people aren’t aware of the layoffs, of the macroeconomic headwinds facing companies in this space, and how that might impact less-prepared organizations. (We’re rather prepared.) You can’t just focus on your role. (Same as above.)
• Focus on the job and how to win - and by “win,” I mean how do you work with your colleagues to accomplish the work you do, how do you give the customer what they want while serving the business, and how do you improve the interactions you might have between your internal and external customers.
• There are always two games - game number one is the job and what you do to satisfy the people you serve: your customers (or internal customers). Game number two is how to work most effectively with the people in your organization. You have to be great at both. But you get paid to do the first one.
• Achieve - the easiest way to get a promotion is to clearly understand what your boss says is the most important work you can do in your role, and to do that consistently. But then, do more than that. Meet the expectations, and then exceed them. People see this on performance reviews, but they don’t really think about how to exceed.

Your mileage will vary, but those five perspectives are what I feel plenty of people lose track of on the way to imagining their advancement.

Your Boss Isn’t Your Career Coach

It’s not your supervisor’s job to think about your career intentions. It’s their job to work on the objectives of your organization, whatever those may be. They need your contributions to accomplish those goals, and they probably think often about ways to optimize your output so that it’s easier to achieve the goals you set out to accomplish.

What they don’t think about often is how to level up your skills and move you to some new role. You might express your interest in some future role, and your supervisor might keep that in mind while handing out tasks, if that’s doable, but that’s not their job nor their primary focus. Their job is to do what their boss needs.

The secret of career growth is to do cool stuff that benefits your business (in measurable ways) while getting along well with everyone. It’s to move on when something is too stale and you’ve been there too long, or if you no longer feel like you can deliver effective results. And finally, help others where you can. The more people know you to be a helpful and useful person, the more times you get offered a way to contribute to the success of cool projects and places.

That’s it. Those are the secrets. Any I missed?

Chris…