Are you limiting your career success because you’re focussed just on short term gains?
Let me expand on this thoughtful, but vague question.
Objective Aligned Career Success
Do you measure you and your teams career success against yearly objectives?
Of course, you do, that’s how the HR performance and compensation processes work. And, that’s how you and your team are measured and rewarded each year.
From my experience, objectives tend to focus on hitting a number of project milestones and as a consequence you can focus on growing a subset of professional skills towards the next level.
Bet that sounds familiar?
But how do these short-term targets that reset each year move you towards the success of your career as a whole?
A Stunned Silence
When I ask clients this question, I tend to get a stunned silence.
If you are still reading, then I assume you experienced the same silence.
When I work with my clients on this, we look at their success criteria with a longer lens.
Role
How do you and your boss measure the success of your role in three years from now?
- What impact have you made to the long-term strategy?
- What talent have you attracted and retained in the organisation?
- How have you made things better by challenging the that’s just the way it is mindset?
- etc
Career
How do you measure your progress towards your personal long-term career plan?
- What’s the steps to becoming an MD and where are you on this?
- How do these skills help you build a business in the future?
You
Do not miss this step as this will allow you to sustain your long-term success by balancing your work and home life.
How do you measure yourself against the criteria of being a good parent, good partner and more importantly being good to yourself?
Let’s Put It All Together
Once you have this holistic success criteria for your career, creating a yearly roadmap and action plan becomes easier.
It also allows you to focus on whether this role still meets you long term career goals and whether it’s time to pivot.
I hope you can see that just focussing on your objectives as success criteria can limit your view on what you want to achieve as a whole.
So, will you stop limiting your career success.
If so, then it’s time for you to do the same for your team.
Nick