Here’s a quick case study of a fairly common career trajectory. A college graduate finds a job they might like in a field they think they find interesting. That person accepts opportunities as they present themselves, and after a few years, their career feels like something that happened by accident.
This might hit close to home for many of you, which I think is important to respond to in two ways. First, it’s perfectly normal and doesn’t mean you’ve failed. More importantly, it’s not too late to take control of your career and architect a personal and purposeful career.
My work as a leadership consultant and trainer has given me opportunities to speak with leaders at companies of all sizes. One of my favorite questions to ask is how they navigated their careers. Over the years, I’ve heard several variations of one answer: the best leaders manage their careers–and they did so by adopting a handful of key habits.
In my forthcoming book on career habits, I dive into these habits and principles in more detail for individual contributors, while offering actionable tips for managers to help them support their employees’ career growth. However, in this article, I’ll offer a few of my favorite habits for individuals looking to take control of their careers.
Practice self-awareness
For decades, well-meaning professionals have argued the key to advancing your career is saying yes to everything, even if it means accepting tasks you don’t have the confidence, knowledge, time, or desire to do under normal circumstances. As a result, it almost feels taboo to admit that you don’t find purpose in certain aspects of your job. Even worse, you’re often so overloaded by information at work that it’s difficult to understand what you’re doing and why it matters.
Some of the most impressive leaders I’ve met with proactively practice self-awareness. There are endless definitions for self-awareness, but my favorite in the context of our careers comes from American psychologist Daniel Goleman, who describes it as “having a deep understanding of one’s emotions, strengths, weaknesses, needs and drives. People with a strong sense of self-awareness are neither overly critical nor unrealistically hopeful. Rather, they are honest with themselves and with others.”
This definition of self-awareness in our personal and professional lives can be incredibly helpful. When you’re more aware of your strengths, interests, and needs, it’s exponentially easier to articulate them to your colleagues and find opportunities to apply them to your job.
There are several ways to practice self-awareness more proactively, but I think it’s important to start with these four habits:
- Consistent self-reflection. While it’s often difficult to step away from the daily grind, pay attention to what you’re doing, what excites you, and how you want to spend your time—and then articulate those things to the people you work with.
- Proactively seek feedback. We have a clear idea of how we see ourselves, but we’re missing key growth opportunities when we lack insights into how our colleagues view us.
- Regularly review your work. You’re probably doing great work that nobody around you knows about. When you know what you’re doing and the impact of your efforts, you can create opportunities to lean into your strengths while making it easier for yourself to acknowledge the things you don’t like to do.
- Align your insights to actions. The insights you’ve gained about yourself are a great start. Take what you’ve learned to create a new opportunity for yourself.
Advocate for yourself
For every person who won’t stop talking about their achievement, there are a dozen others who are either too busy or too embarrassed to tell anyone about the good work they’re doing. This was a tough lesson I learned early in my career.
Leading up to an end-of-year review, I assumed I was on a fast track to a promotion. I got positive feedback on my work throughout the year from my manager. But when I sat down for the review, it became clear that I wasn’t getting promoted, and it had nothing to do with my on-the-job performance. The bigger issue was that the people who evaluated promotions hadn’t worked with me directly or seen my work, which made it difficult to make a case to promote me.
My story isn’t unique. I’ve met hundreds of leaders who learned that doing a good job doesn’t guarantee a promotion, garner public credit for your work, or make you the obvious choice to lead the next high-visibility project. As work environments continue to evolve, it’s never been more important to be your biggest advocate, proactively communicate what you’re working on, and share your expertise with others whenever you see an opportunity to chip in.
Explore your curiosity
Career paths used to be fairly straightforward for most people. You’d go to school, get a good job with a decades-old company, and then retire after 30 to 40 years. And throughout your career, not much would change about your responsibilities, team structure, or the tools you needed to get the job done.
Today, advancements in health and technology mean that most of us have non-linear career paths. People who began their careers as scientists are now leading revenue teams. Former customer service representatives have gone on to careers in software development. The possibilities are truly endless—and few, if any of us, really know where we’ll be in five years.
In response, the key to keeping up with the rate of change across industries and career paths is experimentation. When you give yourself the flexibility to identify things you’re curious about, it eventually becomes natural to explore that curiosity and run career experiments that can create future opportunities.
Since it’s really easy to get caught up in the day-to-day of your job, here are a few times when you should consider adding a bit of career experimentation into your schedule:
- When you want to switch roles or jobs. We all get the itch to change jobs or roles, no matter how happy we are in our current ones. Try a career experiment before you make a big move.
- When you’re bored. There are times in your career when you’re enthusiastic about your work, and others when you feel bored. Before that boredom becomes complacency, start a career experiment that allows you to explore something you’re genuinely excited about.
- Be a lifelong learner. If you’re a self-declared lifelong learner, run career experiments to help yourself learn more about what you care about and what you want your career to look like.
Generate your own opportunities
The habits we’ve discussed so far are muscles you’ll develop over time. So too is the point I’ll leave you with, which is to stop waiting for permission to create the opportunities you want for your career.
This is one piece of advice you may have gotten from your parents or grandparents, but it’s still remarkably relevant in today’s constantly changing world of work. Generating your own opportunities isn’t just an obvious way to take control of your career, it’s a clear path to standing out as a high performer at any organization. You can create new opportunities for yourself by identifying stretch projects with your manager outside of your core responsibilities, raising your hand to lead internal meetings or other leadership initiatives, or mentoring other employees and empowering them to be more effective in their roles.
The habits in this article are things that are all within your control. None of them require you to ask for permission or wait until they’re assigned to you. You can do them right now—and doing them right now puts you in a stronger position to have a longer, more fulfilling career that you can be proud of.
Want more Career Habits? Buy the Book today!
