Be restlessly patient & take control of your career journey

Introduction

In today's fast-moving and highly connected environment, it's easy to feel left behind, over-passed, or simply not growing fast enough. Scrolling through our LinkedIn or news feeds can often make us feel this way, especially as successes are amplified, and often exaggerated through the different social media platforms. It's important however to keep yourself grounded & be reminded that the professional career progression pace varies, and is unique for each person; seldom is it a linear progress too. It's also not a competition with others, rather, you only need to be competing with your own self over time. So, it amounts to ensuring that yourself tomorrow is ahead of yourself today. You need to maintain focus and have a plan - you're in for the long haul. Shield all the outside distractions or thoughts that could hold you back, and don't feel pressured to have to make huge leaps"now". Don't sit around waiting for your lucky breakthrough or the 1 million dollar idea. It's OK if it takes you longer, or shorter, than others to grow in your professional career, remember, it is not a competition, so only focus on yourself and how to make progress, day over day. It's equally important to maintain your success, as well as groom yourself for more - just seek to take control and be "restlessly" patient.

What it means to be restlessly patient?

We may confuse the concept of patience in career development, with doing nothing or slacking, but that's far from true. Being restlessly patient in this context means that you are approaching your career development with a mindset of a farmer, where you know it's an investment you need to actively work for, which will pay off, albeit not immediately; you will nurture the soil, plant the seeds, monitor the growth, give enough water, sunshine & fertilizers sometimes, and afterwards, you will cultivate or reap the benefits sooner or later, AND the cycle goes on indefinitely. You wont rush a plant or tree into growing, would you? If you try to, it may collapse or wither (equivalent to breakdown or burnout in humans). So, you'd patiently put in the effort (restlessly) and work for the results. Lets map this to the professional world. What does it means to take control of your career plan and be restlessly patient about it?

In this case you would:

• Know when you are ready and when you aren't. Note that being ready doesn't have to mean meeting 100% of the requirement for the next career step or move or being extremely confident about it, it's rather a more subjective caliber by which you "feel" that this is a step you can: take, and excel with it further - and it's OK to feel cautiously excited, or even terrified, initially.
• Recognize the positives in the opportunities you have: there is seldomly a concept of complete waste or regret in work assignments you take on, it all adds up to your experience and your personality, no matter how challenging, tedious, hard or easy it may seem. You interact with new people and increase your network, you influence other people positively, you learn new or hone existing skills (technical or non-technical), you gain visibility, you are exposed to different personalities and schools of thought...
• Rarely would you doubt yourself, and accordingly you would be very confident and conscious of your worth (keeping imposter syndrome at bay). And, no one can get to you, by putting you down, undermining or doubting you - you've earned your seat at the table, fair and square. Having said that, it's important to be self-aware and continuously assess? your areas of strength as well as those you need to do better at, and to do this, you could request feedback from your 360 degrees circle, as well as pursue people who can help you fill any gaps you may have.
• Seek challenges & seize growth opportunities still if they come your way: be open for stretch assignments, putting yourself out there and getting out of your comfort zone, just do it in a calculated manner, without stressing yourself out. On this, I'm always reminded with former CEO of IBM Ginni Rometty's quote: "Growth and comfort do not co-exist".?
• Be hungry for learning, continuously. Recognize the areas you need to enhance in your own skills and capabilities, and seek to train yourself in them, take the right, just-enough, amount of time for them to soak in, then immediately start applying them (best way to make them stick!). With this regards, ardently seek to work with people who have strengths where you have gaps, besides complementing your work, you would learn a great deal from them.
• Look way ahead, not only for your next career move, but 2-3 steps ahead on what you intend to do and start with small incremental steps towards that long-term goal from now. As it's never too late to start, it's also never too early to start, especially for aspects you need time to hone or build with quality (such as building a professional network or switching to a new specialty domain).
• Lead with humility and be empathetic; when you've been patient yourself, you would understand and respect other people's journeys and struggles in their own journeys, you'd be more encouraging and supportive, especially as you pay it forward yourself to others.

What doesn't it mean to be patient?

Being patient towards your career development doesn't however mean:

• That you should accept any situation as the status quo, and not attempt to change course for the better. You need to know when it's necessary to pivot (especially if you've been coasting for a while), and when to hang on and adapt.
• That you have to say "Yes" to every opportunity that comes your way, on the contrary, it's equally critical to learn when to say "No" & take a stand, especially if it's for something that would deviate you from your own charted course of career development & aspirations.?
• That you give in to others, or being co-dependent on them to define your own course, it's your career after all, and no one would, or should, care about it more than you do.
• That you do not seeking help from others throughout your journey. You still need to have mentors, coaches, sponsors in your career, they will open up new doors for you, which comes in many forms and shapes: new opportunities, new ways of thinking or approaching topics, guidance and experience building, networking & building connections...

How to put it into action?

Now that you've identified what it means (& doesn't mean) to be patient in our career planning, lets next explore how you can put it into action as we deliberately take control of our long term career development plans.?

Basically, one would need to put pen-to-paper; categorizing and defining our goals and actions, keeping record of them, revisiting/updating them regularly & often, and re-assess or take-stock over longer periods of time. It's important to follow a methodological approach, and there are several out there, you would just need to find one that works best of you. In this article I'll describe a model I've devised over the years, one which has been tried and tested for my own career development planning, as well as with my protegees and direct teams I manage and lead. The feedback and results are extremely positive thus far and it created a ripple; as people exposed to it are passing it on within their own circles. It's relatively simple too.?

• The base career aspects you would continuously assess and plan actions against are:

1. Domain of expertise (technical eminence): this is the domain you would be recognized for, as a leader.
2. Mentors & sponsors: the people you need in your circle to provide you with the necessary level of support, guidance, coaching, connections, opportunities..
3. Programs & training: which you need to advance in your career, they could be long term programs (internal in your organization, or external), as well as short term activities and courses.
4. Networking & visibility: how well is your profile and work visible; locally within your organization, globally within your organization or externally within the wider technical community. As well as the strength of your network, with people you can significantly impact or could be your advocates or references when required.
5. Social eminence: how active are you in professional Social Media and external circles, your level of engagement, the quality of your point-of-views, and feedback you provide. How are you recognized and perceived in professional social domains; aiming to be well know in your domain of expertise, among other professional interests and areas.
6. IP, IC, publications: The Intellectual Property and Intellectual Capital and publications you take part in: patents, technical publications, white papers, etc..?
7. Certifications & credentials: Professional Certifications and badges across the various technical and non-technical domains (ex: leadership, soft skills).
8. Opportunities to excel: Are the activities you are engaged in, on day to day basis, providing you the opportunity to excel further in the career direction you have defined for yourself. This is important to always keep in mind, because often we could be too consumed with our day-to-day that we are blinded from recognizing if it is actually helping us grow, or not.
9. Awards & recognition: received over time in our journey. Besides being personally fulfilling to be recognized, it's also an undeniable assertion of your value and impact.
10. Give-back (including diversity & inclusion): A major part of growing in our careers is to widen our circle of influence, we gain skills and build expertise, which we need to pay forward and give back to others in our paths. This includes, but is not limited to, aspects that promote diversity, inclusion, mental and physical health to our colleagues.

• As a first step, you would assess yourself against all those aspects, and with a simple color coding (Blue, Orange, Green - or use your favorite colors!), prioritize the aspects that are most important and critical to tackle to the lesser, this will allow you to set the direction and priority for your actions next.

-Blue: Lagging in it, needs most attention, high priority & value.-Orange: Lagging a bit in it, could benefit from attention, not the top priority. -Green: Doing well in it, just need to maintain it.

• In the simplest format you can use a spread sheet with a few columns (for instance, columns for: Career aspect, Action, Status, Start Date, End Date, Notes/Comments) to track your action plans. Others have used a more visual mode, such as tools for visual boards, to track action plans, so whichever is most convenient to you.
• Add actions, which can be at the granularity you feel most comfortable with, sometimes it is good to have finer grained actions, and close them faster over time, other times it could be easier to keep one bigger goal open, even if for a while, until it finishes. Tip: Add actions even if you wont start on them immediately, it's always good to keep everything on the table to not lose sight of it.
• Visit your action plan at least twice a month, if not more often, that way you wont lose track or drift within the day-to-day spiral.
• Keep this as a rolling log of all the actions and outcomes over time, it will come in handy as you can easily filter by the aspect, the status &/or the year at any point. Note that actions may touch on multiple aspects, you may choose to have two columns for each action, one as a primary career aspect and another as secondary. Although, I recommend to always align to the most relevant/core aspect, or the one that matches your highest priority aspect.
• If at any point you find yourself held back in any of the aspects, you can temporarily double-down on others to help you on the longer term. For instance, if you are in a dead end job, unable to advance on the "Opportunities to Excel" aspect, and you feel stuck (mentors, coaches, sponsors cant or wont help you), then you may double your investments: in outside networking, join advisory boards, write, volunteer... these efforts will help feed your soul until you get unlocked OR you unlock yourself through them.
• Revise the assessment you made against the different aspects over larger periods of time to re-adjust your priorities for actions accordingly. Important to realize that this is a continuum, you will never stop!
• Among the obvious benefits of organizing your long term career plan, additionally, this model is a great conversation structuring forum as you have career conversations with your managers, coaches, mentors and/or sponsors. It allows you to conveniently receive feedback and incorporate it directly within your plan as part of the discussions. It also makes the yearly/quarterly evaluation cycles quite easy, as you simply filter by the start/end dates to determine what you've done over the given period.
• As a final thought, while in this section we're focusing on career-related aspects, it's important to note that you could also consider other areas of your personal life when doing your career planning, you can be doing pretty well in your careers but miserable in your personal life which you should strive to avoid. After all, the choice is your own, individually. Among the aspects you could consider if you expand beyond the professional career aspects above, would be: -Freedom, -Work-life balance, -Time-off, -Stress, -Health, -Family considerations, -Moving the "is this making a difference in the world" needle

Conclusion/Summary

In conclusion, we've explored together why restless patience in career development is necessary, and why it's become a challenging virtue to possess in our current times. We've also explored what it means being restlessly patient in our career development, and what it doesn't. You were then introduced to how to take control of your own career development journey, putting it all in action; based on real experiences and with real examples of applying a select framework for long & short term career planning, underpinned by restless patience. So, take control and always remember:

"Don’t let others define you. Define yourself." -- Ginni Rometty, former CEO of IBM.

About the author

Salma El-Sherbini is an Executive IT Architect at IBM Egypt. She has a long standing history in managing large technical teams (100+ members), whether in her primary role as a Lead Solution Architect or as a people manager for technical delivery practitioners. Salma is well known for having relentless drive and passion towards:

• Technical leadership: being an IBM Certified Thought Leader Architect & The Open Group Certified Distinguished Architect. She is a Hybrid Cloud & Digital Transformation/Platforms Solution Architect; experienced in Cloud, Cognitive & Mobile enablement solutions. Salma is also a member of the IBM Academy of Technology.
• Give-back and helping others thrive, with emphasis on diversity & inclusion: She is well known for being a catalyst for high performing teams. Salma lead and participated in numerous initiatives in support of the technical community within IBM.

Salma received top awards in recognition of her efforts, one of which was the Best of IBM award, for outstanding contribution, which is one of IBM’s highest honors, given to only the top-performing ~0.3% employees annually.