3 foundational steps to maximise your career potential
Today I'm taking you back to basics.
The goal is to maximise your career potential.
Where I see most people struggle is that they are asking the wrong questions.
They start 4 steps down the process and wonder why they aren't progressing.
By at the end of this post, you'll have the first 3 steps nailed.
And that's a firm foundation on which to maximise your career potential.
Maximising potential needs conscious thought
You need to start by asking the questions that other people don't.
By doing so, you'll be able to steer your career more effectively than other people can.
So today I will cover:
- Establishing why you work
- Understanding what problem you really solve
- Focusing on effectively solving the problem
In that order, because the order matters...
The Foundational Flow
To maximise your career potential, you can't start with How do I get a promotion?
You have to start with understanding yourself, your role & your employer.
To do this, I use The Foundational Flow questions:
Step 1: Why do I bother at all?
A simple question about why you turn up to work every day.
The simple answer is Well I need the money to survive...
But you are ambitious - you wouldn't be reading reading Massive Effect(iveness) if you weren't.
So that is a cop-out answer.
You have far bigger dreams than mere survival.
You have to ask yourself questions like these:
- What would make me proud?
- What (beyond survival) do I want the money for?
- How is work going to improve my life outside of work?
This why you are searching for is the underpinning of all of your efforts.
Without it, it is supremely difficult to give your best every day.
With it, you can see the purpose behind the labour.
You're not just lifting a stone, you're building your Taj Mahal.
Matt's tip: revisit your answers to this step at least once every 6 months - they will change (I speak from experience)
Step 2: What problem am I solving?
You've established why you go to work.
Now you need to establish why your employer pays you to go.
It is for one of two things (and often both):
- To make money (more than they pay you)
- To save money (more than they pay you)
It is that simple.
Under those two headers, spend no more than 5 mins writing down every type of problem that you solve that meets those objectives.
Don't spend longer trying to get more, the important ones will surface quickly.
What you now have is a list of things that will make you effective.
These are the things that align your efforts with the goals your employer has for your role.
Prioritise these over the other assorted dross that comes across your desk every day.
These are the actions your employer pays you for.
Matt's tip: revisit your answers to this step once every 3 months, or every time your role changes significantly, whichever is sooner
Step 3: How can I solve the problem?
You now know what you're really working for - from your perspective and from your employer's perspective.
How can I solve the problem? is at the junction of those two perspectives.
You want to solve it to create value for your employer so they give you value in return.
Take the list of problems you wrote out.
Starting with the first ones you listed, add no more than 3 possible solutions to each problem.
This is back-of-a-fag-packet stuff.
You're looking for focus, not to have every angle covered right now.
Those potential solutions now provide you with an actionable path to mutual value creation - and this is the fundamental element of career-building.
You create value for someone else, you get value back in return.
Matt's tip: revisit your answers to this step once every 3 months, or every time you complete your actions list, whichever is sooner
Now what?
Now you are in the driving seat.
You have clarity on your own motivations - refer back to these when your enthusiasm wanes:
I'm not lifting a stone, I'm building my Taj Mahal.
You have clarity on your employer's needs - refer back to these when you find yourself confronted with busywork:
If I can't see in 30 seconds how this will make money or save money, I shouldn't do it.
Lastly, you have focus on actions that will solve the problems you are paid to solve.
Action is the only way to solve problems; solving problems is the only way to advance my career.
A final word
Maximising career potential is not about luck.
It's about taking a proactive, planned, conscious, written approach to how you will do it.
Set the foundations for the career that you want to build & actively consider those foundations in your daily work.
99% of people will not do this - so you're already ahead of them.
Until next time,
- M
