Your career is yours. Own it!

I have had a good career so far.

During this time, I evolved to a recognized people leader that keeps learning and evolving constantly, and that gave me the chance to lead and mentor a lot of people. As part of the trade, I had the opportunity to support my team and others to develop their career plan.

As I received some positive feedback about it, I decided to share it with my network. It is not the best, it is not perfect, but it has worked for me so far and can give you more inputs to help yours.

Own it!

It is very important to know that your career is YOURS. Nobody else’s!

So own it! Plan it and, after that track it, work hard on it, do your homework, be disciplined to follow through with it!

Of course there are important influencers and stakeholders that can impact it all - your boss, you company, your family, your own moment - but at the end, if do it right and you own it, you will end up in one of the options you planned to be.

If you don’t own it, you will probably end up where you company, your family, your boss or your moment accidentally took you. And if you are not a lucky one, you can end up in a job that makes you miserable. I’ll tell you why below.

Write your "happiness list"

I believe if you have a job that makes you happy, you have a huge chance to find your whole life positively impacted by it. All the hard stuff that happen will hit you softer because of it.

According to the magazine Revise Sociology, we spend 35% (35%!!!) of or waking hours working considering a 50 year working life.

Deeply understand what makes you happy, what fulfills you. It can be a purpose, a thing, a dream, an action, a company, a place... whatever you choose.

To give you a few of mine examples:

1 - to keep increasing the amount, complexity and diversity of people I lead. This is a purpose: help to build a better world through people.

2 - to have a big, hairy, bold challenge - I love the thrill of solving a problem, of turning around a result, of learning more on those situations.

3 - to work with people better than me - they will challenge me to improve continuously!

And so on! List them all!

Choose your destination

Considering your “happiness” list, look as far as you can see in your life.

Then look inside your organization and in the market. Ask yourself: where would I like to be? Not WHAT but WHERE, because it is a destination and it can have implications on the company you want to work for, the geography you want to be and, of course, in your life.

Also, don’t worry if you are too young and now you only see a few steps ahead. It also works!

Be as SPECIFIC as you can: I want to be in a Business Unit President for N company in X, Y, Z countries’ position.

To pinpoint your destination you will have to understand yourself, your organization and the markets that you are interested in.

I found it to be a very interesting exercise and it opened my mind.

Understand your development areas

From where you are now to where you want to be, you will need to learn things, to strengthen what you are good at and to work on what you are not - your opportunities.

The same way you got to find and understand what makes you happy, you should deeply understand your development areas: to develop others, manage budget, integrated communications, deal with agencies, manage P&L... things like that.

List them all and build a development plan based on a 70/20/10 model:

70% on the job - short term assignments, different positions (we will talk about that in your destination map below), etc.

20% on mentoring/coaching

10% training - classes, courses, etc.

Important note: contrary to your happiness list, this one is a little more complex. It depends on your self awareness, feedback, mentoring, coaching... and that is because we usually have blind spots, it is more difficulty to see our own gaps.

 Draw a map to your destination

Get to know all the existing positions between where you are now and where do you want to go. 

Take your “happiness list” and your development areas under consideration (here is where you work on your development plan 70% on the job), mark the positions that will get you there.

Literally, draw a map with the areas and positions taking you to your “end game”. Like the example below:

You will notice that, differently from a linear career path, this model opens up several movement options that can get you to your development and to your destination.

In a linear model, if somebody gets the position you wanted, you get frustrated and have to stay longer in your current position.

In this model, you just go to your map and find another position that will meet your development plan and keep pointing you to your end game! Lateral moves, forward moves, international moves... many more options!

 Build a strong network

You can do all the steps above, but without a strong network, your way will be much harder.

I love this Life Hack article. It is very pragmatic: https://www.lifehack.org/articles/work/10-ways-build-stronger-networks-work-and-life.html

To that I should only ad one important but underestimated tool, in my point of view: mentoring.

Mentoring will help your development but with two simple twists, it will also help your career:

1 - choose an influent mentor - he/she will connect you to more people and situations that can positively impact your career.

2 - find s new mentor every year, keeping the connection with the old one - considering the twist #1, the more influent people you have on your side in your organization, the better!

So, if you don’t have a mentor or never had one, get one!

There are a lot of things that influence your career. But in my case, all the learning I had in my professional life about career helped me to put together a few steps. It helped me to have clarity and focus in a relatively simple way.

I hope it can contribute to you as an additional input or your first step! And I’ll be very happy if you share your point of view and to get into more details in comments below!

About me:

?20 years working in high performing FMCG companies and 10 years leading people. I am passionate about people development and leadership and I believe this is the greatest legacy I can leave to contribute to a better world.

Currently I am General Manager for Coca-Cola Perú.