APPENDIX C

GROW YOUR CAREER

In Chapter Five you identified the new abilities and knowledge you wanted to acquire and developed your personal professional development plan, your Abilities Opportunity Map. Now you may be thinking, “What about my current skills, expertise, and talents? How can I use these to progress in my career and increase my professional opportunities?” These can be used to GROW Your Career, which is based on the acronym GROW:

Get clear.

Recognize your results.

Own your impact.

Where and what else?

Follow the four steps below to create a plan to leverage your current skills, expertise, and talents so you can expand your professional opportunities and use your talents to advance your career.

You will complete the four GROW steps for each of your jobs and volunteer positions.

STEP 1: GET CLEAR

If you are not clear on the experiences and capabilities you possess, it is difficult to imagine how you can use them differently to expand and advance your career.

Let’s do a Career + Life Walk. It is a simple, yet powerful, process that enables you to methodically assess each professional role and position throughout your career history, as well as your volunteer service. It is important to include your volunteer service because there may be experiences and aptitudes you gained through volunteering that can be valuable to you now.

You’ll need a few things to complete your Career + Life Walk:

•  Your résumé

•  Your curriculum vitae

•  Your LinkedIn profile bio

•  Your bio on your company’s website

•  Any other documentation that includes your entire career history and complete list of your volunteer service

It is important that you have your entire career history because you want a complete inventory of your experiences and expertise.

1.  Start with your first job and answer the three questions below:

•  What was your specific role?

For example, operations manager for a conference center.

•  What were you responsible for?

For example, overseeing and managing the staff and operations for six departments including Guest Services, Human Resources, Event Planning and Programs, Housekeeping, Kitchen, and Facilities and Maintenance.

•  What did you do?

Focus on the actions you performed as part of your responsibilities. These are the physical, tangible steps you performed. Here’s a hint: all actions start with an action verb. For example, set, met, develop, analyze, coach, or explain. Remember, your goal is to get clear. Remove any abstractions and any consultant or MBA school jargon and assumptions.

For example, what did you do to manage the staff? Set customer service rating goals for each team member. Met with each team member once a month to review the member’s customer service rating report. Developed a performance improvement plan for each team member to increase individual customer service ratings to five stars.

2.  Answer all three questions for each of your job and volunteer positions.

3.  Review your responses to the third question, “What did you do?,” and identify the following:

•  Any actions you had forgotten about

•  Themes or clusters of actions that you do not use in your current role

•  Actions that intellectually stimulated, challenged, or motivated you

You will come back to the answers to these questions in the last step, “Where and What Else?”

STEP 2: RECOGNIZE YOUR RESULTS

Your results are the benefit you bring to an individual, a team, and/or a company. This is important in the employer-employee social contract of give-and-take because this is what you give to an organization. To better use your existing skills, experiences, and talents, it is imperative that you know and can articulate the advantage of each of these for your manager, team, and company.

1.  Start with your first job and answer the three questions below:

•  What were my quantitative outcomes? So what?

Quantitative results can be counted, measured, and expressed with numbers. Specifically identify each quantitative outcome, and then ask yourself the “So what?” question. Numbers without context allow other people to tell your story. You need to tell your own story and clearly communicate the value of the outcome you achieved.

For example, you increased supplier diversity by 35 percent. So what? This promoted innovation in your company through the introduction of new products, services, and solutions. It provided multiple channels to source goods and services, and it drove competition (on price and service levels) between your company’s existing and potential vendors.

•  What were my qualitative results?

Qualitative results are descriptive and conceptual. They can be categorized based on traits and characteristics.

For example, a member of your team enhanced their communication skills to be more succinct, precise, and factual in their presentations to your customers.

•  What was my overall impact in the role?

When I started in this position, our revenue was __________, our customer service ratings were __________, the team’s engagement level was __________, the team’s internal reputation was __________, and the team’s contributions to the company were __________.

If some of the above items are not relevant to you and your position, replace them with what is applicable for you.

When you left this role, what was different in each of the above categories or the categories you added?

2.  Answer all three questions for each of your job and volunteer positions.

STEP 3: OWN YOUR IMPACT

In each of your professional and volunteer positions, you made an impact. Your customers, your team, the company, the community, or an individual was changed because of you and your work. For example, maybe your department had the highest customer service ratings in the company, or maybe the high school student you mentored was the first member of their family to go to college.

1.  Read the results you achieved and pause for three seconds.

2.  Acknowledge yourself and your contributions.

In our always-on, fast-paced, push-and-strive-to-achieve-more world, we rarely stop, notice, and celebrate what we did and the impact we made in and for the world. Stop. Pause. Celebrate. You obtained that result. Own it!

3.  Identify the feeling you experienced when you read your results.

You may be tempted to skip this step because it appears too soft, woo-woo, or insignificant. I get it. However, there are positive feelings associated with each of your results. Positive feelings are one of the five elements that help people reach a life of fulfillment and meaning according to Martin Seligman, one of the founders of positive psychology.¹ So, what do you feel when you read your results? Joy? Hope? Confidence? Contentment? Enthusiasm? Pride? Satisfaction? You are on a transformational journey to find more happiness and fulfillment at work. Feel the feelings. Let them move through your body. Now, don’t you want to feel those feelings again? Or more of them?

STEP 4: WHERE AND WHAT ELSE?

Ask yourself two questions:

1.  Where else can you use the actions you identified in the “Get Clear” step that intellectually stimulated, challenged, and motivated you, and that generated positive emotions from the results you achieved?

Think about how you can use your actions to increase the scope of your current responsibilities.

•  What do you want to do more of in your current role?

•  How do your results demonstrate that you can expand the scope of your responsibilities and take on a new project or assignment?

•  Where can you volunteer for a company-wide project or committee that would enable you to use the actions you identified?

2.  What else can these actions be used for?

Often my coaching clients get stuck thinking that they can only use their expertise in one way. This one-track thinking limits your possibilities. Our goal is to expand your opportunities and use your talents to advance your career.

For example, you developed a performance improvement plan for each member of your team. The results? A 40 percent increase in five-star ratings across the team, and your company won a customer service award at your industry’s national conference. You felt pride and joy in these results. So, what else can you do with the action “developed a performance improvement plan”? You could develop a performance improvement plan for any person, project, or company-wide initiative that is underperforming. Could you stretch and put together a plan to launch a new project? Could you design a training program to improve customer service? Be creative and don’t limit yourself or your possibilities

It can be hard to brainstorm alone. Ask a coworker, mentor, friend, or significant other to help you dream, ideate, and explore possibilities.