Date: Monday, February 12th
Time: 1:14 PM
This is part two of the ‘5 Critical Career Lessons’ series.
You’ll come away with a deeper understanding of:
What to do once you get people on board
How to ensure you are never stuck
Lesson Four: Maximize valuable relationships
People are going to come and go in your career, just as passengers hop on and hop off a bus.
What do you do while they are on the journey with you?
— Do your best to form valuable relationships.
Why is this important?
Competence and knowledge alone will get you far, but if you cannot form valuable relationships — the end destination will be decided for you.
Suppose you are a talented creator who designs custom sweaters but has terrible customer service skills.
In that case, your talent will be reduced to a hobby — poor customer experiences are a death warrant for your business once a bad reputation spreads.
Maybe you're a corporate account executive who aspires to be a manager but operates as a lone wolf.
The internal hiring manager will have doubts about your leadership skills which will hamper your chances.
You have to provide consistent value to give people a reason to help you.
If you do this regularly enough — human nature will kick in and people will want to help.
When you build valuable relationships — it’s important to maximize them.
Don't confuse maximize with exploit.
Like the bus driver, when people feel ripped off — the bus will empty.
Maximizing relationships is about giving and receiving value.
A solid rule of thumb is to always provide more value than you receive. It will come back around.
In my early career, I maximized my relationship with my manager — which in turn led to him mentoring me in my first leadership role.
He was incentivized to do this because I made his life easier.
Challenging the status quo of systems and processes. Suggesting team incentive ideas. Educating peers using my experience and knowledge.
None of these behaviours were in my job description.
Why bother then?
Clarity of what mattered - My goal of progressing to leadership
Focused effort - Repeat the behaviours that would achieve my goal
💡Tip: Think about how you can apply this with your peers, leaders, mentors, or customers.
Lesson Five: Build the foundations of your base wide and deep
This is one of the most valuable lessons I learned.
A bus driver doesn't fret about someone jumping off the bus. They know that it leaves a vacant seat for another passenger to join.
Why is this?
They understand that passengers will join for varying lengths of time.
The bus driver will be going the distance but not every passenger will.
Colleagues, customers, and mentors are going to be front and center in your career for different portions of time.
Mentors will leave the organization. If you've attached your career to them — you can find yourself in a tricky spot.
They may not be able to take you on their new venture and leave you feeling bare — if you haven't formed enough valuable relationships.
You don’t want your career growth to depend on one person.
It's the same for customers. You will serve a purpose in their life for a period and then they move on.
If you’re a content creator — value your community but do not become attached.
You may want to evolve your content and some of your subscribers will leave. That's fine.
Be satisfied in knowing that you provided them value at some point.
The point here is to avoid placing all your eggs in one basket.
Build your base wide and deep.
Change is constant and you need to remain agile to opportunity.
Final Thoughts:
Like life, every career has a start and end point. You can go it alone or you can travel with others. You're going to arrive at the end regardless. It's just one journey will be more memorable than the other.
It's your route. Drive it how you see fit. Enjoy the ride. Just don't crash.
If you missed part one of the series —here's the link.
Live Free,
Niall
Readers Reflection
What steps can you take to build more valuable relationships with the people that matter in your career?
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