By Vin Bittencourt | MBA Bites S1 Episode 3
When it comes to career advancement, nothing is more important than strategic, carefully orchestrated experiential learning. For instance, have you heard of the 70% rule?
The 70% rule says that 70% of your earning potential and all the money you’ll ever going to make professionally directly comes from work experiences and projects you handle and complete. In exchange, only 10% of it comes from formal education and training, and about 20% or so from mentoring and observation.
Companies essentially pay you for what you know, what you accomplished before and the kind of results you can bring to the table. And 90% of that does not come from school or formal training. In simple terms, project-based experiences accelerate your career more than any other factor combined. And that means you have to fight for high quality experiential learning and join organizations and industries that are growing faster if you really want to succeed.
While you see a lot of people investing time and energy to gain money making skills at the wrong place, including on expensive degrees with zero experiential learning involved, you should look primarily for organizations that somehow deliver the right mix of projects for your skills and career goals. If anything, you learn more and grow faster every time you contribute to high quality projects, in world-class organizations, where you indeed collaborate with talented, dedicated, and ambitious people.
Obviously, you still need formal education and training. At some point every professional needs a notion of a technical domain knowledge to advance, whether to become a marketer, a salesperson, a finance professional, a designer, an engineer, product developer, a data analyst or a network manager. But those are, for the most part, threshold capabilities. They may take you to the door, but once inside a company, the quality of the people and the projects you touch become the real accelerator.
The way most companies operate today, you have to bring solid original thinking, people and communication skills. As data and software gets cheaper, companies need workers capable to empathize and create, and those are human attributes that make you the perfect complement to computers, systems, machine learning and automation.
The future of jobs is grounded on a premise that work will be fluid, of undetermined duration in industries that are constantly being shaped. Think Android, Cloud, Mobile Payment, App Based Services, Music and TV Streaming, all relatively new verticals that didn’t offer any jobs ten years ago. Today, they offer some of the highest paying, fastest growing career tracks.
So how do you gain access to career accelerating projects and experiences?
At base level, it’s dangerous to believe on the myth of hard work and talent. Because it just oversimplifies what it really takes to get to the top of any career or profession. What actually leads you to unique experiences and great projects is the capacity to articulate your value, promote your interests and build relationships, so you become politically connected.
At some point, you have to ask yourself, “What is the most important goal of my organization right now?” “Where is my company and industry going from here?” At the end of the day, you need results. “We built this”. “We delivered that”. “We fixed this”. “We created that”. Results I like to call Oscar winning performances that get you visibility and access to key people in the organization.
On any profession, personal growth hinges on the ability to manage yourself and projects first, then manage people. Practice emotional intelligence, self-awareness – know inside out your character, your technical strengths, weaknesses, feelings, motives and desires. If you don’t have one, maybe grab a cheat sheet with the following questions answered:
"What are my strengths and weaknesses?"
"What’s my biggest professional goal in life?"
"What am I working for?"
"How do I respond to stress and conflict?"
"What’s my communication style?"
More important, what’s the communication style and personality of your boss? Does she/he like to get information during one-on-ones or casual conversation? Does she/he expect well-written situation reports? If you are to connect and nurture meaningful work relationships, you must know your communication style and the communication style of the people around you.
Does luck exist in career success?
Luck and randomness exist. People get a lucky breaks all the time, unexpected events create massive tailwinds even for greatest of all time kind of performers. But at least 80% of the results you’ll get in life depend on having a tough skin and a positive attitude. At the end of the day, you’re the only person who can manage how you’re going to be perceived by others.
And what exactly do you have control of, or responsibility to manage? Well, definitely your behavior, your resilience, your posture, your positive energy. Reputations are built one conversation, one interaction at a time. Focus on things you can control and things that have impact.
Two life-changing questions that everyone should be asking their bosses at the beginning of any assignment or relationship: “What do you want to be congratulating me on for my next review?”, “What can I do specifically to help you this quarter, this semester, this year? I bet millions of people out there are completely oblivious to this, working aimlessly on things they’ll never get measured on.
More top priorities when starting on a job or assignment:
Know who’s who in a division or team and what every person is responsible for
Know the sources of power, the people that carry influence in decision-making, who are they, what’s the chain of command?
Identify key performance indicators for yourself, for your team and for the project, and how you turn them into expected results.
Other ways to create Oscar-winning performances:
Make your boss shine, deliver on results, help others.
Be part of the solution, not the problem.
Find ways to be in front of senior leaders to present unique findings or insights – know how to design high punch ten-minute presentations.
Talk about your contributions whenever possible – people need to hear about your progress, your team’s progress.
Even if you are, don’t show you’re the smartest person in the room, especially when you’re a leader – let others shine. Everyone likes to feel they’re contributing.
Push for the roles and opportunities you want. Don’t take everything graciously just to please. Learn how to set boundaries.
Don’t worry about having all the answers, look for questions that spark quality dialogues. But when giving answers, buy as much time as possible and listen to as many people or perspectives before setting on a course.
Early winning is key. Build the most professional, political and social capital from the start. Again, the best behaviors to embrace:
Drive
Positive attitude
Good listening skills
Insightfulness
Curiosity
Not everything you do in a workplace is imbued with deep meaning – a lot of critical things in business are trivial, sometimes boring. You just have to do it. Remember, carry GRIT - Guts, Resilience, Initiative and Tenacity as a badge of honor.
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