There are five pieces of career advice that you think
are going to get you promoted.
But in reality, they're almost guaranteed to get you stuck.
So what are they?
How can you avoid them? A
nd what should you do instead?
We are digging into it in this video.
This is a follow up a short that I posted the other day that was
slightly controversial. Let's begin with an old favorite here on this channel
You need to work hard to get ahead.
And I know a lot of you got this because on my former videos,
I've seen it again and again in the comments:
The reward of working hard is more work.
This is absolutely not to knock having a strong work ethic.
I think having a strong work ethic is absolutely crucial non negotiable to career success.
That said, I want to ask you a question:
When citing evidence that someone is working hard, what do you typically say?
Or what do you typically hear said?
Because in my non empirically non peer reviewed experience,
it sounds like this...
"Emma is working so hard, she's working 70 hours a week."
Which is to say my problem with the phrase work hard to get ahead is that
it typically means work a lot in order to get ahead,
completely disregarding the quality of the hours spent,
for instance when someone is working 80 hours a week,
what are they doing in those hours?
What impact are they making?
What visibility is their work getting?
What are they getting out of it?
We know from research coming out of Stanford that after 55 hours,
productivity essentially falls off a cliff,
which means that any time spent above those 55 hours is performative work,
I'm gonna look like I'm doing emails,
but what I'm really doing is watching tiktoks.
And I know that that performative work can be necessary
when you work in a work culture that you can't advance.
If you're not doing 12 hour days,
I'm looking at you consulting,
but not only is working an excessive amount of hours,
bad for productivity, it's bad for you, for so many reasons.
It is going to impact your health, your social life, t
he amount of sleep that you're able to get.
And all of these things, although they're not related to work
are extremely crucial to your success,
which I will talk about more in my next video.
So make sure and subscribe, so you don't miss that one.
Now, what do we do instead of working hard?
Well, we already have a slogan for it.
The message has been that if you're going to be good enough,
you have to be great at everything that you do.
Of course, we bring the story to the workforce with us,
you're just going to submit an expense report,
you're going to submit the best Expense Report ever,
you won't just take notes in the meeting,
you'll take the most meticulous notes ever in the meeting,
there are going to be areas of work that this is going to serve you
and it's going to serve you well when you're working on high visibility tasks or
projects or anything that is really attributing to the key KPIs
and goals that leadership is paying attention to keep that vibe with you.
However, when it comes to the tasks that you've been doing to
the best of your ability, and no one seems to notice,
I'm sure that you've had those complaint sessions with your best friend
that your boss doesn't notice the work that you're doing
this is the work that I'm talking about. For those tasks, you need to stop doing them.
Done isn't better than perfect - done is just done.
Not everything needs to be done to the best of your ability.
Some things just need to be done.
Obviously what needs to be done exceptionally versus what just needs
to be completed is going to be unique to you in your job.
So I can't tell you in this video,
but it is something that I go through in my career glow up program
and we dive into it in my book,
what you can do now is start to notice the things that other people don't notice.
What are things that your boss never asks about have nothing to do
with your goals or their goals and have no impact on the big goals
that you're working on. Those are the things that you should
meet expectations and move on, which should basically be your new mantra.
Now there is one exception and one caveat that I am going to put on this
and that is anything that aligns with your unique awesomeness quotient,
your UAQ, these are things that you should continue to excel at
and position yourself and build your professional brand.
Don't work hard, work smart.
If you don't know your UAQ yet you can grab my free UAQ starter kit
following the link down below and this actually brings me to my third point
there's been a lot of viral videos that I've seen about this,
and it drives me nuts every time I see it, and that career advice is:
To just do your job?
Well, yes, I think that you should just do your job.
But there is some nuance here.
So let's talk about it. Let's say that your boss comes to you.
And they ask you to take on a task that really is at the next level,
it's above your paygrade. Now, if you follow the bad advice of these viral videos,
you're going to reject that work until you're getting the pay for it,
which if it's a long and ongoing thing might be something that you need to consider.
However, in most cases, rejecting that work is going to be incredibly self limiting.
You've probably heard about the Peter Principle before,
and that is where people are promoted up until their level of incompetence.
Let's face it, the Peter Principle is most often exhibited in people of a certain demographic.
Now, in an effort to combat the Peter Principle,
there has been a growing trend,
because it has been standardized by companies such as Google and Facebook,
especially over the last decade for the promotion to trail the work.
and everyone follows what they do.
This is especially true if you work in the tech industry,
If you want to get promoted to the next level, you need to begin
performing at the next level, unless you're in that demographic
who is being promoted on their potential in which case go off.
Now what this means is that of course, you need to do your job.
But when you're ready for that next level, or maybe you're ready to
transition into a different role, you need to start strategically taking on
more indifferent work. This does not mean that you are doing
your lazy coworkers job or picking up the slack on another department.
But the fastest way to get to the job that you want is to
start showing up for that job today. If you want to get into the leadership,
start showing up as a leader, if you want to be promoted into a senior level roles
start taking on senior level work. That isn't to say that
all of the work offered to you is going to be the thing that opens up the gates for
your next promotion. It's not.
And that's why we need to talk about the fourth piece of terrible career advice,
say yes to everything.
Do managers and leaders love a yes person?
Of course they do! They can dump any work on them,
and it will reliably be done.
Do you want to be the person that your boss and your colleagues come to when
it's something that is not important, but urgently needs to be done?
Because that is typically what happens to the yes person,
will that person get promoted? Probably not.
Because when you're the go to person who's gonna get stuff done,
the stuff that you're doing isn't the stuff that's going to elevate your career
that we were just talking about. In fact,
you might be so trusty and so reliable, that they can't even promote you
to the next role, because then who is going to do all of this work that you're taking on?
This isn't to say that everything that is brought to you shouldn't be rejected,
what we need to do here is discern the tasks that are going to
elevate and accelerate your career and the tasks that are going to
bury you in busy work forcing you to work hard.
There is also an element of time management here,
if you are extraordinarily busy,
even if a career advancing opportunity lands on your lap,
you need to get rid of something and in order to take it on,
or you need to move around timelines.
And when it's not a career advancing opportunity,
then you need to reject that work referred to someone else so
that you can do the things that you need to do in order
to achieve your career goals. Ultimately,
But this is where things really start to fall apart.
Because yes, there's tactics like planning and time blocking that are
going to make you more effective with the time that you have.
The goal should be is that you establish your professional brand so that
you're the go to person for your UAQ,
the biggest impact that you can make your highest potential path or instance,
you want your coworkers coming to you about that,
not troubleshooting an Excel formula.
Relevant versus irrelevant, right?
And this actually brings me to the fifth piece of career advice.
And I think this is the most important one, because from what I've seen,
this truly is the difference between fast track career success and career stagnation,
that is wait for your opportunity.
I love the way that this is discussed,
because sometimes it is discussed as though there is a proverbial line for the people
who got promoted. And yes, this might be true if you're in a seniority environment,
but I think those have mostly gone away.
And if you've ever been passed over for promotion by someone who is
jumping the line, you know this, you don't have to wait to be handed an opportunity.
You don't have to wait for your boss to notice you.
You don't have to wait for the project of your dreams.
You can get out there and you can create this all right now today,
you have a shocking amount of control in your career success and
exactly what you're achieving at work. Instead of waiting for
a career advancement opportunity to be given to you find a way to go and create it.
Instead of leaning back and letting the quality of your work speak for itself.
Learn how to create buzz about the work that you're doing without having to
brag about yourself because we all hate doing that.
Stop overachieving on everything and making yourself invisible within
the company and start making a strategic impact aligned with your UAQ
and stop thinking that socializing at work is a waste of time when you have
work to do and realize that the relationships that you build
authentically and organically are going to relate to the opportunities
that you receive and are acknowledged for our work in all of my time
in leadership in startups and at a fortune 500 company
I never saw proactiveness be penal lysed in fact I always saw
proactiveness being rewarded with more opportunities e
specially when that proactiveness was related to a company priority
and was within the person's UAQ.
Now I'd love to hear your thoughts: what career advice drives you nuts,
and you think it's so bad but people keep on saying it anyways?
Let me know in the comments