Everyone is always looking for tips and tricks to move ahead in their career. Why struggle to learn all these lessons on your own? How can you leverage what someone else has learned and adapt it for yourself? This article called the Top 10 Tips to Fast Track Your Career by Talane Miedane offers some suggestions to leverage in your own career.
I will highlight a few of them here:
- Strengthen Your Strengths – We used to focus so much on developing our weaknesses and didn’t spend enough time strengthening the things we were already good at doing. Such a waste of time to focus on the wrong things. I love her advice here “Focus instead on developing those strengths and delegating your weaknesses.” Find people who are strong where you are weak and you will build a stronger team.
- Under-Promise and Over- Deliver – one of my former leaders said this phrase over and over. It was good advice at the time because our group was not always consistently delivering work on time. There were good reasons for it, but to the client, that doesn’t matter. No matter what the excuse, they aren’t getting what they asked for when they asked for it. Instilling this mindset into us actually helped us think about things differently when we estimated the work to ensure we were being realistic to deliver on time. It was about changing how we thought about things that ultimately changed how our group was perceived.
- Convert Compliments Into Acknowledgements – Do you think about compliments and acknowledgements in the same way? When I read this it did make me think about it differently. “An acknowledgement is about who the person is, while a compliment is about what a person has or does.” Both are great to say to someone, but the acknowledgement will have a more positive impact with them.
Although these things may seem like common sense, everyone can use a reminder once in awhile. Focus on what is going to improve what people see in you. Remember that changing how you think drives your behavior. These are the behaviors that will change the perceptions that your management has of you and will ultimately help you progress in your career much more quickly.
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