Designing Career Acceleration
When you think of the word acceleration, what do you think of? For most of us, a car or bicycle might come up. Many people treat their career like it’s a long road race than treating it like a strategic campaign. Almost how politicians or marketers plan and execute a campaign. Career acceleration isn’t about adding more, but rather doing the right things, in the right order, with ruthless prioritization.
One client’s career had slowed down because he was optimizing for being helpful vs essential.
Research from the University of Virginia shows that people possess an “addition bias,” preferring to add Lego bricks to solve problems even when removing them is easier, faster, and perhaps more beautiful.
As such, you have to get comfortable with the uneasiness of subtraction at work. If you want to move faster, it’s important to focus on P0s and P1s, which are the initiatives that are big bets that will shift the needle for the company. And thus, the organization sees you and the value you provide.
To do this, requires a level of Vision and Decision-Making, the ability to look at hundreds of tasks and choosing the handful that genuinely matters for the company. Being strategic can be hard, because it requires being a master at ignoring the noise.
Where does this take us? You change from being the person who “gets things done” to the person who is trusted to “see around the corners.” This is how leaders can get invited to bigger conversations.
It should be noted that visibility is not self-promotion. It’s ensuring that the right people understand the way you think. This leads to creating sponsors, which are senior leaders who are willing to bet on you and speak highly of you when you aren’t in the room. These relationships begin because you show Accountability and Communication over time.
I learned the importance of pruning from my father who was a botanist for many years. I recommend his technique to step away from work that you’ve outgrown. Do you need to be going to that recurring meeting? Has that project or task force become a treadmill? Perhaps it’s time to delegate or even recommend killing it.
Next Steps: Career acceleration is the difference between being ‘always busy’ to being ‘positioned for tomorrow.’ It happens when you step back, reassess your behaviors, and start modeling Executive Presence in everything you do. It’s not always what you do, it’s also how you do it.
Are you thinking about accelerating your career? Book a 1:1 chemistry session with me