In this issue: Answers to last week’s Self-reflection. Why a career can empower you – and how a job can often make you a victim.

Recap of last week’s post:

In my last post I talked about the difference between treating what you do in your professional life as a job or as a career.

A job is a transaction. You sell your time and your skills to your employer. As soon as that period of time is over, you stop thinking about what you do for a living.

A career is much more like an investment. You invest your time and your skills on your employer’s behalf. In return, you get paid, but you also enjoy opportunities to grow as a professional and as a person. You have the chance to add more Value and Move Up Faster.

And if you follow a career, then you’re much more likely to find yourself in a role where you can do something about which you’re truly passionate than you would if you were simply doing a job.

So if you want to Move Up Faster, it’s a question of adopting a ‘career-focused’ mindset.

What framework am I using to structure my ‘personal 5 cents’, when considering last week’s questions?

Please note: I repeat this framework again and again, in every other episode of this newsletter. The idea of using Return on Marketing Career (RoMC) as a framework for career development is explained in great detail in the first newsletter in this series.

Why? Because this has served me well over the 25 years of my career, and because I find that we are all so distracted today (myself included) that unless we see something multiple times, we forget about it.

If you’re already familiar with this way of thinking, please skip this section and go straight to the next one.

My fundamental belief is that marketers who want to Move Up Faster should treat their marketing career just as we would a marketing campaign. Instead of Return on Advertising Spend (RoAS) we can measure our success by Return on Marketing Career (RoMC).

There are four steps to this RoMC process: 

Step 1. Get out of your Comfort Zone as much as possible, even if that scares you because it’s new.

Step 2. Doing new things will increase your professional skill-set. That’s the only way to learn.

Step 3. A broader or deeper skill-set will increase your Value to your colleagues, your team, your firm and your clients.

Step 4. The higher Value you deliver in your role – now that you have a bigger skill-set – the faster you should move up in your career.

Now that we’ve reminded ourselves about the RoMC framework – here are my ‘personal 5 cents’ on last week’s post.

LEADER (managing Managers)

Step 1, Get out of your Comfort Zone: What if you didn’t give in to the narrative that the new generation is entitled? Many marketing leaders who I speak with complain openly about how some people in their 20s and 30s are asking you ‘what will you do for me?’ But while some younger people are definitely entitled, most are not. And making such a negative blanket statement about the next generation of marketers seems a bit like giving up. It feeds a narrative in the heads of the seniors (i.e. you and me) that says there’s nothing we can do to motivate younger people to flip it and start to ask us ‘what can I do for you?’

Step 2, Develop a New Skill: Learn how to communicate to your direct reports, and the younger individual contributors on your team, that A) satisfaction = B) expectations vs C) reality. When people in their 20s and 30s are constantly seeing examples on social media, of people who appear to ‘work 4 hours a week and make $50,000 a month’, then why wouldn’t they see their role as a job, and not a career? Who is going to set them straight? Who will explain that to earn $200,000 or $400,000 a year will require them to show exceptional enterprise and to work with an exceptional work ethic and intensity? If a young person expects a lot – for little effort – and you don’t have the courage to reset their expectations and be straight with them about what’s realistic (because it’s easier for you to be victimized by the ‘younger entitled generation’) whose fault is that? How are they supposed to know what they don’t know, if you don’t tell them?

Step 3, Create More New Value in your Role: Create Value for your team by explaining that if they want to have a fulfilling marketing career, one that provides them with plenty of emotional, financial and personal benefits, the more they put in, the more they actually get out. Have the courage and conviction to explain clearly in performance reviews what it takes to reach the next level, not only in terms of effort, but also in terms of their attitude, their willingness to lean into their roles. Make it clear that the more Value they create for the organization and others around them, and the faster they create that Value for others, the faster that Value is going to come back to them in the form of a fulfilling career, as well as raises and or promotions.

Step 4, Set Yourself Up for a Bigger Future Role or a Promotion: Leaders who move up Faster know how to get the most from their team. Some members of your team want to go above and beyond. You should invest in them, put your time into those people, because they will respond and surprise you, by giving you back more time and effort. And yes, have the courage to tell those team members who don’t go above and beyond, that average effort will get them average rewards, and that their role may feel like a job, not like a career.

MANAGER (managing Talent on the Rise)

Step 1, Get out of your Comfort Zone: What if you investigated your own attitude towards work: How reasonable or unreasonable are you about your own career trajectory? At this stage in your career, it’s 50% about teaching others how to make the best use of marketing tools and processes, and 50% about your project management and people management skills. Here’s the deal: How far are you willing to go, to be a top 1% manager, one of those for whom people management is a lifelong career? What if you actually aspired to be that ‘best of the best’ professional manager?

Step 2, Develop a New Skill: Learn how to always push yourself to acquire new managerial skills. If you aren’t reading articles about how to manage and inspire people, if you aren’t listening to relevant podcasts, reading books, or asking your boss to send you to training – are you sure that managing people is really a career for you? Or is it just a job?

Step 3, Create More New Value in your Role: Create Value by never stopping wanting to learn how to manage others better. The wonderful thing about managing others is that it’s more of an art and less of a science. I’ve yet to meet an artist who was ‘done being an artist’. Art is about constant re-invention and re-creation. To master the art of management, you must never stop learning how to manage better.

Step 4, Set Yourself Up for a Bigger Future Role or a Promotion: Managers who move up faster become top 1% managers before they become leaders of managers. If you decide to be that top 1% manager, you’ll find a way, especially today where so much managerial knowledge and best practices are available freely or inexpensively online. A mindset of ‘I want to be a top 1% manager’ will absolutely drive your actions and maximize the possibility of you stepping into a leadership role in the future.

TALENT ON THE RISE

Step 1, Get out of your Comfort Zone: What if you honestly evaluated your typical week. Are you really going above and beyond? I’m not asking if you are working 80 hrs a week. That’s nuts. And that’s going 100% above and beyond what a normal week looks like. Instead, how about always going just 5% above, always delivering just a bit more, in terms of your time and brainpower? What if you didn’t just do what you are asked to do, but went that 5% above and beyond, every single time?

Step 2, Develop a New Skill: Learn and accept that when you do what your manager asked you to do, you are actually doing ‘just enough to get by’. Why would your manager move you up faster, pay attention to you, when you only do what you are told to do? Don’t you pay more attention and appreciate it more when others surprise you with their time and generosity, when they exceed your expectations outside of work? Why should your manager be any different when dealing with you? Learn how to always deliver a bit more than is expected from you.

Step 3, Create More New Value in your Role: Create Value by going above and beyond, in terms of the time and enterprise that you put into your role. This can be just that 5% more than is asked of you. And that extra 5% – when compounded across many small projects – is going to enable you to grow your skill-set faster.

Step 4, Set Yourself Up for a Bigger Future Role or a Promotion: Talent that moves up faster stands out for the effort and enterprise they put into their role, for their ‘fire in the belly’. These are the people that a manager will pick for that next interesting project. They get access to interesting high-impact work, because their manager knows that she can rely on them to not only do what’s asked of them, but to always be on the look-out for new innovative ways to get the work done, because they see work as a career, and never as a job.

If you’d like to discuss your career journey with me one-to-one, please feel free to email me at Greg@moveupfaster.me or message me on LinkedIn.

Thank you for reading.

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