Move your career forward faster
You grow in a school and education system that comes to you served on a platter. Your teachers, parents and caregivers often take the lead on driving your education. These people are interested in you. You are encouraged (and sometimes cajoled) to study and complete assignments. They recognise and reward you when you’ve done well.
When you move into the big wide world of work nobody seems that interested anymore. Actually, it's not that people don’t care, it's more that people are busy. You have to seek out learning and growth. You have to put your hand up and start some conversations about your development.
It can be a trap to look at people senior (critically) and wonder what they do. Sometimes you might even be tempted to think their job looks easier than yours. Often it’s not until you are at that level of leadership that you understand the increased demand that comes with it.
Getting interested in your boss's world and how to help them be successful is a career accelerator. When you get more interested in their world you start to see that it is more complex than yours. They have more relationships to manage, more problems to solve and more things to connect.
Knowing more about their world readies you for that next level of leadership. Furthermore, if you can bring solutions that help them, you’re going to benefit from that. It should be no surprise that bosses, either consciously or subconsciously, promote the people who bring them solutions and help make them look good. Most importantly, they promote the people they trust.
Your career will get so far based on your expertise and your ability to deliver results. Then you hit the glass ceiling of meritocracy. Getting beyond that ceiling is about alignment and whose agenda you’re joining. You need to hold the bigger picture here. This is a growing up moment when you realise it’s not all about you. This is when you start to invest energy and attention considering what’s going on across the larger landscape.
It’s at this level that you have to navigate power and politics. Not everyone is comfortable with that. It can be useful to remember that sometimes politics is just agenda by another name. That agenda might be different to yours but that doesn’t make it wrong. It can be really helpful to recognise influencing and aligning as a new and interesting skill set, rather than something that's machiavellian or unfair.
Often success in the first half of your career is based on leveraging your strengths. However, it is impossible to talk about strengths without talking about weaknesses - they are two sides of the same coin.
If you have a strength for being driven and direct, it’s likely you risk insensitivity or leaving people off the bus. If you have a gift for ensuring harmony and cohesion, it is likely you avoid healthy confrontation and difficult decisions.
Your strengths when overplayed become weaknesses. Getting really curious about what your weaknesses are, and how you can work on them so you become a more rounded leader helps your career.
We are all part of the problem. If you've been on the planet more than a couple of decades, you start to realise that your biggest problem is yourself. At this level of self-awareness some focus needs to go into how you get out of your own way - for the success of yourself, your team and organisation.
Mature, confident leaders understand this. They know they're part of the problem and they get comfortable, open and curious about it. They engage with people, relationships, and conversations to understand where: they are hindering rather than helping; how they might better add value; and how they create space for others to grow in.
This kind of a leader is curious about seeking more information from others so that they have a broader, deeper, and ultimately more realistic understanding of how progress can be made.
Matt helps leaders and teams develop mindset and resourcefulness so they can relate productively, communicate effectively, and navigate challenge and change with confidence.
Through coaching and training, he empowers leaders with better choices and more options for progress—building better leadership from the inside out.
Curious what that could look like for you or your organisation? Let’s talk.