How To Leverage Your Current Role - Even if You Hate It
First, if you think you hate your current job, you should read, Are You in the Wrong Job, or in the Wrong Career?…then come back to this post…don’t worry, I’ll link it there for easy access - I got you!
Unless you’re done growing in your career, the number one best thing you can do for yourself in your current role is:
figure out how to maximize your spent time in this role
understand how to capitalize on available experience and learning opportunities in this role to leverage for future jobs you want more
Make no mistake, a successful career doesn’t happen overnight…
AND MORE IMPORTANTLY - a long-term successful career takes a lot of personal work on yourself, outside of whatever you are putting into your actual 9-5.
Be Objective About Your Work Product & Work Presence
Let’s define the difference:
Work Product - is the final product you produce on any given work assignment. Is it well presented, clean and organized, grammatically correct, within company brand guidelines (if applicable), and something your supervisor would be able to take to their supervisor with little to no changes.
Work Presence - more nuanced than product, this is how you show up everyday. How you present yourself in daily attire, meetings, both formal and informal interactions with co-workers and leaders, communication reputation (i.e. responsiveness and clarity), and most importantly, the dependability of, you guessed it, your work product. See what I did there ;)?
Now that we’re clear on what we mean by work product and presence, ask yourself:
If a future manager asked my current manager or better yet, my manager’s manager, about my work product and presence, do I know what they would say?
If you don’t know what your current manager would say, that‘s something you should find out.
How? Ask them directly!
Most managers when prompted properly (and respectfully), can tell you exactly what they think. If they’re a good manager, they’ll be happy to share.
If you’re authentic and sincere - making sure to ask at an appropriate time, in an appropriate setting, the chances are higher that you’ll receive a real and honest answer.
If your manager can’t or doesn’t want to have this conversation with you…it’s better to know that now so you can decide what means for you and your future.
Be Objective About Your Now Before Moving Forward
Identify and take time to understand the value you get from your current role - regardless of how you feel about the job, your manager, the company, etc. Moving out of impulse instead of intention increases the risk of going in the wrong direction.
make a list of the benefits, what you’ve learned, the size of the company, the projects you’ve worked on + results
write 2-3 things that you will be able to do in the future because of each item on that list
then
do something with the information - without action your list will be cursory thoughts lost to whatever time you spent writing them down
reflect on the list and what it’s telling you
are there still sizeable skills and experience gaps between where you are and where you want to be?
is there more you can be doing to get everything you can out of this role regardless of the surrounding environment?
are you in a position to move onto the next big thing?
Whatever You Do Next - Know Why
Do you know the purpose behind the decisions you’ve made up to this point, the purpose that will guide the decisions you make in the future?
Throughout your life and career, your purpose may evolve or change, but it should always be your central reference point from which all major decisions are evaluated and made.
If you’re thinking about a move, whether it just feels like time to move on, you’re unhappy, or your feel stuck standing still - you might be wondering how you got here, and more importantly what that means going forward.
Depending on how far you are into your career, it can be helpful to start your analysis back at the beginning to take stock of what has brought you to this point.
Download my Current Career Analysis Worksheet to reflect on how you got here. This worksheet will ask some basic questions, but those answers will lead to prompts allowing you to process and put on paper the large and the small successes, obstacles, lessons learned, skills and competencies gained, etc., but most importantly will help you consolidate and deliver those critical experiences into a Leverage Story. What is a “Leverage Story”? It’s the story of where you are, how you got here, and what is most important to help you get “there”…wherever “there” is.
Your Leverage Story will help you decipher two critical inflections, the why and the when for your next move.
The next important step is to honestly evaluate your work product and work presence from the perspective of your current supervisor, and if possible, their supervisor.
If you want help putting together the right questions and prompts about your work product and presence, download this worksheet to walk through a short list of intentional questions to give you informative answers - Work Product & Presence Worksheet. As a bonus, this worksheet will include a debrief section to help you exercise the most important step - taking action.
The lynch pin of all of this is to take action on the feedback you receive. The most critical mistake you can make is to dismiss feedback you disagree with - don’t be so sure “they’re” wrong. It can be hard to admins, but there’s a kernel of truth in everything, and perception can matter just as much as reality. Even if you disagree with the assessment(s), it doesn’t make the opinion invalid, 1 - they’re still your supervisor, 2 - regardless of whether or not you agree with it, there’s still action to be taken, even if it just setting out to respectfully change their opinion. As a side note…changing someone’s opinion will not come during that one conversation, it will require time and action on your part.
Bringing this full circle, as a reminder, all of this take takes time, it takes work, it takes you taking an honest look at yourself and what YOU are bringing to the table. THERE IS NO WAY AROUND the time and the personal work. If you put in the time and the work, you will arrive at a place where you know you are in the right seat and there is more to learn, or you know you’re in the wrong job or at the wrong company or working for the wrong manager, and it’s time to figure out your next play, OR simply you’ve gotten what you can get out of this role and you’re ready to move up or over. However it all comes out it the wash, taking this journey will never be time wasted.
