Too many thoughts whirring around?
A sense of drifting without being able to specify the direction?
Wondering, is this it?
Careers rarely offer a clear signpost.
A difficult review.
A missed promotion.
Watching someone else move up the ranks quicker.
These moments may prompt reflection but they aren’t necessarily accompanied by the tools to act.
Most of us build our career through experience.
Many of us look back and wish we’d clearly understood our trajectory, and what to do about it, sooner.
Too few of us operate with the intent that makes a big difference.
Here are some thoughts.
Are we actually drowning in too much volume or choosing to have no breathing room because we haven't found a more strategic way forward?
Is getting each task done, each report out, each fire extinguished and each request attended to really a way of rationalising our distance from a state that we feel we ought to be at but which we haven't yet figured out how to reach?
If that's the case it's very understandable as I don't think the leap is taught very well.
Too much of our career destiny comes down to how fortunate or not we are to find a senior colleague that helps show us a way that could work for us.
And finding that individual is a particular challenge because many senior colleagues themselves haven't yet found a way to be more strategic.
The big picture is so easily lost in a sea of operational volume.
It takes determination to shift our state, and it begins with the reality of where we are today.
Are we clear headed enough about where we are, or are we too deep in the operational to see it?
Don’t accept a leadership and customer facing role if you don’t want to invest much of your time with others and if you don’t want to run a business.
Actually this isn’t really an option.
Because all of us are in customer facing roles.
All of us have stakeholders, many are internal customers.
Our line manager is one of our most important customers.
And all of us are in business.
We all have to deliver something to someone.
And we never have limitless resources available to us to deliver what we must deliver.
And we never operate in isolation.
We always need at least some help from others.
And we need to find ways to lead others, most of whom don’t report to us.
And they don’t have to go out of their way to help us.
And we get a lot more help when they want to help us.
We can choose a role that requires not so much of our energy on commercial considerations, communication and collaboration.
But we can never fully eliminate it.
How well developed is our business and people acumen?
And how do we want to allocate our energy?
Curiosity is about more than asking questions.
Being hungry to learn through asking questions and exploring answers is one of the ways to practice curiosity.
There are other ways.
Among them, experimentation.
A great way to find out where it could take us is to try it out.
What happens if I do this?
It may work well for us, it may not.
We won’t know until we try it.
Do we have enough of a trial and error mindset?
We need all four.
Careers tend to follow a similar pattern.
As our career evolves, the demands placed on us evolve.
Career stages tend to direct us to a focus on one or two of the four.
We still need all four.
Think of these collectively as the four big picture acumen’s.
Technical acumen.
People acumen.
Business acumen.
Cognitive acumen.
Without strength across all four, our road is treacherous.
Wherever we are on our journey.
How consciously do we work on our four acumen’s?
Curriculum For Your Short Free Programme
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Introduction
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Recurrent Challenges
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A Quick Question
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Powerful Curiosity
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All In
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Twelve Areas For Conscious Development
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Wrap Up
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About this course
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All of the above is drawn from 35+ years working inside 150+ businesses worldwide. It's not theory, it's what I discovered and observed working and where I saw people come unstuck.
'Luck may play a part but outperformance is never a fluke.'
- Rob Evans, Founder, Outperformance Highway