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The Politics of Progress

Timing might not be everything when it comes to corporate leadership, but failing to read the signals of success has derailed many a career. We all have roles to play, and nothing shows hard work, dedication, loyalty, and commitment like helping your team achieve unprecedented goals.

Staying in your lane is important, but so is knowing when to move—up, around, or even outside the organization. This chapter discusses the politics of progress, one step at a time.

Follow the Road You’re Traveling

At different times in our lives, we follow different roads. In high school, we’re on one track; in college, we’re on another. At our first job we’re learning and growing as we go down one path, which won’t necessarily be appropriate to follow after our first promotion.

The key to staying in your lane is to follow the road you’re traveling until it leads somewhere else. In other words, it’s important to stay where you are until it doesn’t make sense to stay there anymore.

Depending on your company, your leadership, your industry, or your skill set(s), taking a different road may mean remaining in your current organization while taking a different position or transferring to another department or site. It may also mean leaving the organization altogether and finding the “fast lane” in some other company.

It’s important to pull over and check the map from time to time, but if that’s all you’re doing, all day long—scoping out the next opportunity, looking for jobs, tightening your résumé, looking for the nearest “exit” or detour—you’ll never be able to lead effectively where you are.

Leadership is a transferable skill. But if you can’t lead at Company A because you’re so busy trying to find an opening at Company B, you’ll never be able to lead at Company B either, because you’ll be so busy trying to finagle yourself into Company C.

The lane you’re traveling in right now might not be ideal; it may be full of challenges, potholes, conflicts, and politics, but the way out of it is through it. Don’t suddenly jump lanes and abandon the track before it’s appropriate to do so.

Stay in Your Lane

Regardless of the career path you’re on, there are times when you really do need to stay focused on the road in front of you and not get caught up in solving everyone else’s problems.

Women in particular often slip into the familiar role of being the “fixer,” the comforter, of constantly trying to help someone else regardless of our own needs. Not only is it in our nature—it’s often part of our personality. But where does it end?

We all know “those people” who need our help—folks we are constantly rescuing, often from their own selves. We wind up doing their work as well as our own, which causes us to lose focus on the road ahead and remain stuck on the side of the road, waylaid by our “den mother” status on the team or in the department.

I’m not recommending you become a heartless, cold machine, but know your limitations and how much you can give to others before it becomes unreasonable. Staying in your lane is about being focused, resource savvy, and not taking on the burden of your peers who are not stepping up and doing their role.

I am formally giving you permission to keep your professional “blinders” on to a certain extent. Stop getting caught up in the drama of the naysayers or those who are constantly coming into your office and wanting you to solve all their problems. This is a business, and you have timelines and deliverables in your own lane.

At Half The Sky, when we talk to women about self-care, we absolutely encourage relationships and workplace friendships, but we stress that women try to avoid getting distracted at work and instead focus on the task at hand. You have to put on your own oxygen mask before you help others with theirs.

Sometimes staying in your lane is easier when you roll up the windows, crank up the music, and motor down the highway while focusing on the scenery rushing by and not worrying about where the other cars are going!

A Case Study in Dealing with Distractions

Dealing with distractions is never easy, particularly in today’s modern, fast-paced corporate workplace. Meetings, memos, cubicles, open-door policies, departments, teams, projects … it all adds up to full days with frequent, numerous, distracting interactions. If we’re not careful, those distractions can chip away at our daily performance and set us back, even throw us off of the path.

Case in point: I knew a woman—we’ll call her April—who was very compassionate and caring at her workplace. April was the fixer, the den mother, the unofficial “ear” to everyone—and everyone’s problems.

We all know someone like April, but do we ever stop to wonder why April is there, in her office, available to us at all times of the day or night? Is she there for our personal consultation, or is she just being nice while doing her work “around” her many visitors and their intrusions?

Well, there came a time when so much of April’s attention was being given to those people who would come into her office just to complain and take up time, sometimes for up to an hour, that she simply wasn’t able to get any of her own work done. April finally came to me, frustrated, and asked for help. In return, I asked her to tell me what was important to her. After thinking for a moment, April replied that her two children were most important.

So I told her to put a picture of her family on her desk. That way, when folks came in to ask her questions or ask for help with their problems, she could remember that she was working for her two kids. This would help her keep her focus, stay in her lane, and know where to invest her time and energies.

For a more practical answer, I told her she should just let these colleagues know she would love to talk and help them, but not at the moment because she was working. However, if they still needed her advice, they could set up a time to talk over lunch.

She was so relieved! These simple tips helped April tremendously and, as a result, she was able to stay in her lane and not get sidetracked by the colleagues who were constantly distracting her at work, pulling her focus away from what needed her attention. Two takeaways: First, if you are like April, know what’s important to you and what you’re working for. Second, figure out how to solve your problem (getting your work done while at work) but also be true to yourself (a compassionate and caring person who enjoys talking with others) and fair to your team and employer.

Politics, Progress, and You: How to Know When It’s Time to Switch Lanes

Every organization is political, by its very nature. The corporate structure is such that everyone wants to be at the top, creating bottlenecks at various points along the way—from entry level, to management, middle management, higher management, leadership, and the C-level.

The key to using politics to your advantage lies in understanding the environment you are in and doing your own work while also maneuvering around this political climate. We call it taking the “political temperature” of an organization. What everyone (especially women) needs to understand is that every company has a political temperature.

When we ignore the political climate at work, we can often get blindsided, personally or professionally. Once upon a time in the cable industry, for example, my colleagues and I thought we were invulnerable to competition and/or global or economic threats. But look at the climate today. Getting too comfortable in our lane can close us off to opportunities that may arise as we travel.

Also, as our positions grow and evolve, there will be times when we need to leave, for our own good and the good of the company. I think we’ve all experienced that period in a job or career or company when we’ve essentially “quit but stayed.” In other words, our heart is no longer in our work even as we sit at our desks every day.

It’s important to pay attention to the climate at work in our own company and in our industries, and to think about, act, and react when it’s time to finally shift lanes. To help you know when the time is most appropriate, pause periodically and ask yourself:

• Am I growing in this function?
• Am I learning anything new?
• Is there anywhere else for me to go?
• What’s happening in the industry that I work in?
• Am I being fairly compensated?
• Am I experiencing creative and professional freedom at this job?
• Are my efforts being respected and rewarded?

Often, we are able to answer “yes” to most, if not all, of these questions. But the more “no” answers you give yourself, the more likely that your time to change lanes, and even companies, is closer at hand than you might have thought.

The Takeaway

It’s important to pay attention to the road we are on and to ask ourselves questions. Would I have done a few things differently in my career? Certainly. Absolutely. Who wouldn’t? But the reality is, I wouldn’t know what I know today, or even be who I am, without all the roadblocks, detours, and, yes, dead ends I experienced along the way.

Sure, maybe I stayed at Company A a little too long, or left Company B a little too soon, but learning from those mistakes helped me at my next position, and the one after that. You always want to keep your eyes open for an opportunity that may be at the next off-ramp, but not to the exclusion of the good work you’re doing in your current lane.

Stay the course, learn the road, complete the task, and, when it’s time to change lanes, you’ll know because you’ve learned from the exits you took too soon—or not soon enough.