Growth at any phase of a career.
Edition 24 of Forward+
1 big idea worth considering.
Growth in a career isn’t linear, and tends to look different from person to person.
But regardless of the reality that everyone’s growth looks different, I’ve observed similar patterns that highlight the most likely areas we can lean into, based on the point we’re at in our career.
For simplicity, let’s break down a career into three phases, and see where our leverage lies within each of those.
Phase 1 - Skills Acquisition
For someone starting out in their career, learning and building valuable skills is about the only thing that matters. Because without valuable skills, we never put ourselves in a position to grow.
Our opinions don’t matter. Our voice isn’t heard. And our influence is minimal.
That shouldn’t be a tough pill to swallow. That’s the nature of a business.
They’re led by people that have built decades of skills, and the best bet we can make is figuring out what skills are most critical in our role - selling, product knowledge, industry knowledge, etc. - and accelerating our growth as much as we can in those areas.
By putting our head down and learning - day after day, year after year - we set ourselves apart from our peers. We’re in a competition whether we view it that way or not. The peers around us that are making the same calls, sending the same emails, and doing the same tasks, are all on a journey of skill acquisition.
The people that take that task seriously inevitably grow at a significantly quicker rate.
Phase 2 - Candor, Courage, and Storytelling
Skill acquisition never stops. But in phase 2 that skill acquisition begins to look different.
When we’ve gotten to a point where we’re senior in our role, or leading a team for the first time, or our responsibilities are increasing, we have to start building the skills of great communication.
We’ve gotten to a place where our opinion actually does matter, yet it’s not obvious what we’re supposed to do with that opinion. The answer comes down to being a better communicator.
Communication matters because it’s the only way our skills acquisition manifests into something teachable, repeatable, and digestible by our peers.
We have to learn how to have candid conversations, and have them regularly.
We have to learn to have the courage for hard conversations - things that need to be done, changes that need to be made, tensions that need to be dealt with.
We have to learn how to tell a good story, because story is what the narrative of our career will be built around, and story is the way that important ideas are translated to employees, to boards, to investors, and to our industry and network.
Candor, courage, and storytelling are what help us take the skills we’ve acquired and make them accessible to the rest of the world.
Phase 3 - Career Capital, Energy Audits, and Lifestyle Design
In phase 3, we have the opportunity to take the years and years of skills we’ve built and grown and decide what we want to do with them.
Author and professor Cal Newport calls this career capital, and we start to have options about what to do with that capital. Which is where lifestyle design and energy audits come into play.
In any of our careers, there are things that give us energy and things that drain us of energy. When we can spend more time in the activities that give us energy and less time in the ones that drain us, we give ourselves the opportunity to express our strengths and superpowers on a more regular basis.
We can start to ask ourselves questions like how do I want to spend my days. And the answers to that question helps us shape the back third of our career into a daily rhythm that’s built by design and not by accident.
Our careers all look different. But I’ve seen these patterns show up repeatedly in my own career and those around me that.
What phase are you in?
What phase are your employees in?
And how can we grow ourselves and our teams within these phases?
Growth isn’t easy. But it also isn’t complicated.
Acquire valuable skills. Become a great communicator. And use those skills over time to build a distinct opinion about how and where we spend our time.
Hope that’s helpful, and have a wonderful weekend.
2 Kindle highlights worth considering.
The sword was not made to be used by the mouth.
-Warrior of the Light
One way of understanding capitalism, in fact, is as a giant machine for instrumentalizing everything it encounters—the earth’s resources, your time and abilities (or “human resources”)—in the service of future profit. Seeing things this way helps explain the otherwise mysterious truth that rich people in capitalist economies are often surprisingly miserable.
They’re very good at instrumentalizing their time, for the purpose of generating wealth for themselves; that’s the definition of being successful in a capitalist world.
But in focusing so hard on instrumentalizing their time, they end up treating their lives in the present moment as nothing but a vehicle in which to travel toward a future state of happiness. And so their days are sapped of meaning, even as their bank balances increase.
-Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals
3 links worth exploring.
📚 Clear the barnacles. (DHH)
📚 How to win repeatedly, the value of books, and a simple way to prevent future problems. (James Clear)
📚 What to do when your ideas aren’t landing. (Harvard Business Review)
That’s a wrap for this week’s edition of Forward+.
💡 Have an idea for a future edition or an interesting link worth sharing? Just reply to this email! I’d love to hear from you.
🔥 I’m looking for leaders and future leaders that are ready to level up with Forward Coaching and the High Performance Leadership OS™️. Is that you?