Progression is not Passive
You have spent your whole career doing all the ‘right things’. You have pristine credentials. Your reputation is ironclad. Your expertise is refined. Yet, the time for promotion comes and goes and the nod fails to tip your direction.
Why?
Because your track record alone does not guarantee success. Progression is not passive. You can be on the right path, check the boxes, perform well and still find yourself stuck in your career progression — because it takes more than just performance.
The Other 2 “P”s of Career Progression - Planning & Persistence
Performance is arguably what careers are built on. No one would expect to get a promotion or elevation without first proving they can do what is expected, and then usually going beyond to do more than expected. We are taught from a young age that if we work hard, we will find success — and indeed that may be true for some. For most of us, however, it takes a bit more than peak performance to ensure we reach our professional goals.
Planning
“If you don’t know where you are going, you’ll end up someplace else.” ~ Yogi Berra
If you find yourself stalled, it may be time to look beyond what you’ve done and start asking what you will do next.
Planning is important for career progression because it requires you think ahead. Often times, we are so focused on doing a good job that we forget to look up and focus on the road ahead of us — and that is all fine and good until you come to your first curve. By planning, you are able to look into the future, investigate the various barricades or challenges that may (or will) get in the way of your career progression and prepare responses. Why is preparation important? To put it simply, if you have already thought through how you will respond to what could come down the road, you won’t get derailed if or when it does.
Planning isn’t just about preparing for challenges, though. Planning also requires that you know where you are headed. It is easy to fall into the rut of what I call “receive and respond”, or getting an assignment or project, executing on it, and then turning to the hopper for another assignment (or the next item on your endless ‘to-do’ list). “Receive and respond” is great when you want to establish goodwill, gain the reps needed to expand experience, or show your work ethic. However, “receive and respond” is not a way to establish goals or determine your professional ‘destination’. Instead, you must make the deliberate action of sketching out where you’d like to go.
What do you want your career to become? What does the next step in your progression look like? What do you want out of your role (or next role)? Asking these questions and knowing the answers (or at least knowing some of the answers) allows you to plan a path. Oh, and bonus tip: letting others know where you’d like to go can is also important. Communicate you plans. You’d be surprised how many people are willing to help if they know where you’re headed.
Persistence
“Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.” - Winston Churchill
You’ve heard it said a million different ways and relayed throughout your life through various idioms and fables — if at first you don’t succeed; try, try again.
The likelihood is that at some point in your professional journey you have been, or will be, told “No”. You will stare at a door closing. You will find yourself facing seemingly insurmountable odds. And when failures or challenges come, because they do, it is what we do with them that determines success — and giving up isn’t going to get you anywhere.
Persistence can be a super power. So how do we harness persistence?
According to the Oxford dictionary, persistence is “firm or obstinate continuance in a course of action in spite of difficulty or opposition.” In other words, stubbornness. However, persistence is only a super power when it is combined with a similar yet very different counterpart — resilience. Where persistence is the stubbornness to not give up, resilience is the fortitude to respond to what stands in our way. Resilience, as defined, is “the capability to withstand or recover quickly from difficulties”. It is understanding when to apply one’s ability to persist.
Luckily, resilience can be learned. While learning resilience deserves its own post (and there are some great articles out there that discuss learning resilience), in the simplest terms, resilience requires us to actively work against being reactive. When something bad or unexpected happens, it is easy to overreact and get caught up in emotions like fear, anxiety and stress — or worse, prompt us to give up altogether. These emotional responses can even be automatic or unconscious. Resilience is stopping the easy, automatic or unconscious response with mindful techniques meant to lower the ‘temperature’, induce higher-order thinking and ultimately lead to a greater ability to handle challenges.
Mastering (or at least getting comfortable with) one’s resilience allows space to learn from mistakes, adapt to change and withstand challenging situations.
Be Active
Performance, planning and persistence are not the only factors of success in career progression, but they are certainly good places to start. Focusing on these three factors can help you avoid waiting for your progress to happen and, instead, make you an active part of it. The important thing to remember: if you find yourself stuck or stalled in your career progression, don’t forget to look beyond what you are doing now (or what you have done to date) and start thinking about what you can do going forward — to get you moving forward.
