As a career coach clients often come to me complaining about their languishing careers: lack of growth opportunities in their company; ignoredor, even worse, maliciousperformance reviews that prevent them from knowing where they really stand and where they need to improve; and, finally, lack of a pay increase for years, which keeps them priced below market points, despite their diligent work.
Sounds familiar?
These clients are suffering from the badsometimes deliberatemanagement practices of their companies leadership and it is difficult for me to find ways to send them away after our session by saying: Do these three things and call me in the morning; your management will change its ways and make you happy again, right where you are. No, it does not work that way! Ive written about dysfunctional management in many of my published blogs and that percentage of dysfunctional or downright incompetent management (nearly 80%!) has not changed over the decades and is NOT going to change anytime soon.
So, what is my suggestion to these frustrated and dispirited clients? It is this: Take charge of your own career using these five hacks and see how it changes your life:
Uncover your story: Most do not start working on the rsum until after they are out of work and are forced to look for a new job. Even then when they prepare their rsum most read like their respective job descriptions written in the past tense. For example, a Program Managers rsum bullet may read: Completed five projects on time and budget delivering new releases during one year. Now having worked with thousands of clients from all levels up to CEOs I can say that they all sound similar.
A rsums message must be written to not just list your work output, but also to energize you in how you verbally see yourself. Shifting your focus from your output or activity to Accomplishment can change the way your message shifts its energy. So, instead of the statement above, if the same Program Manager writes her bullet as: Despite shifting resources, changing customer requirements, and woefully limited budgets, delivered all five projects on time, which were originally expected to take much longer (3-5 months).
When you are in a position to write your rsum accomplishments in this manner it provides you two distinct benefits: For one, it will energize you by reminding yourself how you were able to accomplish this feat despite the difficulties your faced; and, secondly it will provide you the ammunition you need for your Annual Performance Review, even if your boss does not believe in formally giving you that review.
Digging into your leadership stories to pull your rsum together, even when you do not need to create one, will help you realize your own value and energize you to continue until you cannot.
Create your own growth plan: Everyone knows where they come short in their everyday work and what they need to do to overcome those limitations. For example, I have many clients, who do not speak up in meetings and complain to me about someone else taking their ideas and presenting them in meetings as their own and thus hijacking away the credit for that idea away from my client. In most of these cases I find that they suffer from an ability to assertively communicate and influence others to see their point of view.
This limitation can stem from shyness, lack of language skills, or inability to understand what it takes to present a compelling point of view in meetings and to persuade others to see its merit. Each of these can be worked on as development areas. So, when clients come to me with the complaint that someone is always hijacking their ideas and taking credit for it I work with them to develop a plan on how to improve and communication and influencing skills. Other such areas can also be remedied with the right growth or development plans.
Grow Your Network: Before the advent of social networks, such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter Introverts excused themselves from social networking by hiding behind their Type: Im a natural Introvert, so I have difficulty socializing with others was their refrain. As a result they kept to themselves and were unable to develop meaningful relationships that helped them to expose their talents to others within their networks.
Since the social networks now do not require in-person interactionsdigital interactions are their proxyto build and develop relationships everyone must take charge of building meaningful networks that grow at least their professional footprint. Contributing meaningfully to these networkssuch as posting blogs, articles, or Tweetsmakes your presence known and builds your brand even as you stay in your Introverted space!
Build your Profile: LinkedIn provides a great opportunity for you to passively market yourself. But, to make this possible you must have a searchable Profile that ranks high with the right search strings that define your areas of activity and that invites action from those looking at your Profile. LinkedIn has easy tools to allow you to score your Profiles effectiveness (look at the right side of your Profile page with a circle and a light blue shaded area that fills it as you launch your Profile page to show how complete your Profile is).
After your build your Profile keep at it to see how you rank using the right search strings and keep tweaking it until you rank on top of page one. Once there, see the action you get from those visiting your Profile and calling you to see if you want to change jobs.
Create momentum: Career momentum is important for you to get out and land a better job than the one where you feel stuck. Continuing to do the same humdrum tasks in your everyday job does not allow you to build career momentum. For this, you must identify what opportunities exists within your work groupor even outsidefor you to take on as additional initiatives on your own and deliver on them on your own. Find out what your boss is pursuing and ask if you can help them achieve the objectives they are after. Once you succeed on a few such initiatives that you take on your own, you are building your momentum. Having stories of accomplishments that reflect these initiatives will make your rsum shine even as you continue to do your routine, stultifying job.
So, there you have it. Regardless of how stuck you are in your job and how unappreciated you feel in what you do these five hacks can help you pull out of your despair and help galvanize your career.
Good luck!
| About Author | |
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Dilip has distinguished himself as LinkedIn’s #1 career coach from among a global pool of over 1,000 peers ever since LinkedIn started ranking them professionally (LinkedIn selected 23 categories of professionals for this ranking and published this ranking from 2006 until 2012). Having worked with over 6,000 clients from all walks of professions and having worked with nearly the entire spectrum of age groups—from high-school graduates about to enter college to those in their 70s, not knowing what to do with their retirement—Dilip has developed a unique approach to bringing meaning to their professional and personal lives. Dilip’s professional success lies in his ability to codify what he has learned in his own varied life (he has changed careers four times and is currently in his fifth) and from those of his clients, and to apply the essence of that learning to each coaching situation. After getting his B.Tech. (Honors) from IIT-Bombay and Master’s in electrical engineering(MSEE) from Stanford University, Dilip worked at various organizations, starting as an individual contributor and then progressing to head an engineering organization of a division of a high-tech company, with $2B in sales, in California’s Silicon Valley. His current interest in coaching resulted from his career experiences spanning nearly four decades, at four very diverse organizations–and industries, including a major conglomerate in India, and from what it takes to re-invent oneself time and again, especially after a lay-off and with constraints that are beyond your control. During the 45-plus years since his graduation, Dilip has reinvented himself time and again to explore new career horizons. When he left the corporate world, as head of engineering of a technology company, he started his own technology consulting business, helping high-tech and biotech companies streamline their product development processes. Dilip’s third career was working as a marketing consultant helping Fortune-500 companies dramatically improve their sales, based on a novel concept. It is during this work that Dilip realized that the greatest challenge most corporations face is available leadership resources and effectiveness; too many followers looking up to rudderless leadership. Dilip then decided to work with corporations helping them understand the leadership process and how to increase leadership effectiveness at every level. Soon afterwards, when the job-market tanked in Silicon Valley in 2001, Dilip changed his career track yet again and decided to work initially with many high-tech refugees, who wanted expert guidance in their reinvention and reemployment. Quickly, Dilip expanded his practice to help professionals from all walks of life. Now in his fifth career, Dilip works with professionals in the Silicon Valley and around the world helping with reinvention to get their dream jobs or vocations. As a career counselor and life coach, Dilip’s focus has been career transitions for professionals at all levels and engaging them in a purposeful pursuit. Working with them, he has developed many groundbreaking approaches to career transition that are now published in five books, his weekly blogs, and hundreds of articles. He has worked with those looking for a change in their careers–re-invention–and jobs at levels ranging from CEOs to hospital orderlies. He has developed numerous seminars and workshops to complement his individual coaching for helping others with making career and life transitions. Dilip’s central theme in his practice is to help clients discover their latent genius and then build a value proposition around it to articulate a strong verbal brand. Throughout this journey, Dilip has come up with many groundbreaking practices such as an Inductive Résumé and the Genius Extraction Tool. Dilip owns two patents, has two publications in the Harvard Business Review and has led a CEO roundtable for Chief Executive on Customer Loyalty. Both Amazon and B&N list numerous reviews on his five books. Dilip is also listed in Who’s Who, has appeared several times on CNN Headline News/Comcast Local Edition, as well as in the San Francisco Chronicle in its career columns. Dilip is a contributing writer to several publications. Dilip is a sought-after speaker at public and private forums on jobs, careers, leadership challenges, and how to be an effective leader. |
Website: http://dilipsaraf.com/?p=2533
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