Why the most successful employees treat their careers like a business
If you’re like many professionals, you spend more hours every week working than doing anything else, including sleeping. The idea of spending any more time thinking about or working on your career probably falls at the very bottom of the list of how you want to use your free moments. But if you zoom out, spending 45, 50, 60+ weekly hours working for a company without ensuring this massive investment is helping you get where you want to go in your career is a huge miss.
It’s like being on pace to PR the Boston Marathon then stopping and strolling the last mile, just because you’re tired of running.
It’s like building the best new direct-to-consumer widget, generating demand, creating a waitlist, manufacturing the product, then never fulfilling any orders.
You get the point. Most of us dedicate so much time to working in our careers that we fail to work on our careers. We grind away in a sub-optimal situation because we don’t invest the extra 5% that will catapult us to where we want to be.
It’s easy to fall into this trap, even if being there doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. The good news is that it’s also relatively easy to start climbing out of it.
Start with a brief thought experiment. Pretend for a moment that you’re a new entrepreneur. You’d probably begin by figuring out what product or service you plan to sell and building or buying version 1. You’d then need to ensure product/market fit and generate some positive feedback. Essentially, you’d invest a significant amount of time and energy in creating an offering and then ensuring you have something others want to buy. Once you’d proven your offering, you’d refocus your investment towards growth.
Now, recognize that you’ve already created and validated an offering! Regardless of your field of employment, you’ve spent years — perhaps decades — building a fantastic product: yourself. You may have trained in professional school, and you’ve certainly done so on the job. You’ve tested the “product” in the marketplace and made improvements based on customer feedback (aka employer reviews and other constructive criticism). You’ve honed the offering, and it’s pretty darn good. In fact, your customer has demonstrated a fairly high willingness to pay, once you sum up annual salary, bonus, any stock, and benefits.
But if you’re like most career professionals, you may be skipping one critical step that highly successful employees and entrepreneurs do: reinvest. Professionals who look at their careers like they would a business make strategic, consistent investments over time. This enables them to make the most of their “product” by maintaining a competitive edge, growing a following, inspiring brand loyalty, and — as a result — commanding a much higher price in the marketplace.
So how do you reinvest for success? Here are a few ideas to help you better leverage your greatest asset:
Cultivate sponsors. Attracting sponsors within your organization is essential for career progression. If you’re unsure how to do so, start here.
Commit to a standing strategy session with yourself. Identify your next big career goal and figure out what you need to achieve or demonstrate in order to make it happen. Create a plan, then hold yourself accountable. Your strategy might hinge on accomplishments within your current role, or it might sit squarely outside your day job, like building a reputation as a thought leader.
Find a mentor, if you don’t already have one. Building a meaningful advisory relationship takes time, but it’s well worth the investment. Look for a mentor who has achieved goals similar to those you’ve set for yourself.
Ask yourself the tough career questions and expose yourself to different perspectives on a regular basis. Joining the Happy High Achiever newsletter is one way to do so. Sign up here to receive actionable advice, robust resources, and career considerations in your inbox every other week.
Reinvesting for success takes commitment, but so does showing up for work every day. You’re putting a lot of energy into this career of yours; make that effort worth it!