Four Easy Steps To Building Career Success
By Uma Li*
If you google the words “career success”, which I just did, you get more than 109 million hits. This tells me two things: first there must be a lot of interest in the subject for so much information to have been posted on the world wide web. Secondly, there is an awful lot of information out there – more than any one person could ever sift through; and you can leave it to google to decide what’s important for you to read because these hits are prioritized according to mathematical formulae created by some geek who’s been living on a steady diet of pizza, soda and Internet chat rooms for the past 15 years.
So what’s a young upwardly mobile professional – what we used to call “Yuppies” back in the day - to do to get the best advice to start building career success?
At the risk of sounding smug – you need look no further. Having spent the past few years of my career hiring, firing, training and retraining people, I have a few insights – four actually – to share with those who are interested in achieving success in their professional lives. But, before I get to them, let’s define what success is so we can be sure we are talking about the same thing.
Career success is about being recognized by your peers and superiors as an outstanding professional in your chosen field. It is not about money or title, though those often do come with recognition for one’s abilities.
Now it’s very easy to look at a definition like this and say – that’s easy: The geek who graduated dux of the class is going to rise to the top. Maybe. But probably not if the geek was a geek. The person who is going to be successful in their career is the one with the right mix of hard and soft skills. Hard skills are the knowledge and expertise the person has in their chosen field. If they graduated there’s a good chance the person at least has that –no guarantee though as blockheads occasionally get through Harvard Business School, for example. Even law schools and medical colleges have been known to graduate their share of dolts.
So what are the soft skills that are important to long-term career success?
Communicate like you know what you want to say
The first is probably obvious, but sometimes watching recent graduates in job interviews I wonder. But good communication skills are the base building blocks. If you don’t have these or can’t acquire them it’s probably time to think about a career selling shampoo over the Internet or something similar.
Good communication skills come in two forms and these days you need both. Written communication is fundamental given the amount of work that has to be done in writing – business reports, e-mails, proposals and plans. If you can’t write to save your life, as the saying goes, then your career is also unsalvageable.
Can you do anything to improve your writing skills? A lot. First spend less time chatting on line because that’s not writing – it’s cryptography understood only by the initiated, usually teenagers who have too much time on their hands. As your boss doesn’t spend as much time in chat rooms, chances are he’s not going to understand what you call spelling. Start reading good books. Professional books are a good start because you can learn more about your career as well as picking up good pointers on how to write well. Secondly practice writing. Just write for the sake of it. Keep a diary or write a short story; but write. The more you write the better you get at it. Who knows, if you write well enough your blog might become a hit and Google might buy it for US$100 million or more – eliminating the need to fret about career success at all.
The second type of communication is oral. Learning how to talk is important. Again, you won’t learn this on the Internet. It’s about talking and sounding professional and articulate. The more you do it, the better you become. But to really move up the food chain you need to become a good public presenter and speaker. There are courses you can do, such as via Toastmasters International. There are also training companies, such as AC Capital Strategic Public Relations that can tailor courses to suit your company: Talk to your human resources director, we’re friendly people eager to help staff improve their abilities.
But practice, practice and then practice some more.
A third part of communication is about learning English. It’s the new lingua franca, which is Latin for a language that is widely used as a means of communication. (And you have to learn the lingua franca as much as it might gaul you; sorry, bad pun.) Most global companies now – even French and German ones – use English as their language of business. So career success these days does require a good working knowledge of the language. If you’re having trouble reading this, duibuqi kids, but you’re going to have to brush up your language skills. One way to do that is by taking a course, of course. And again, practice, practice and practice some more.
Of course the secret to good communications is what my good friend
Alistair Nicholas calls the Kippling Maxim. Rudyard Kippling was a great British journalist who lived in India in the last century and wrote wonderful stories such as The Jungle Book and Kim. Kippling said that every good journalist has six friends – Who, What, Where, When, Why and How. If you follow this maxim to structure your communications you will go a long way towards becoming a great communicator. It will help you to also eliminate the circumlocution to which Chinese writing and speech is held hostage and which frustrates bosses who are standing by waiting for you to get to the point. You’ve got to learn to talk fast and talk direct.
Network till you drop
The second soft skill to learn, and very closely related to the first, is how to network. If you are going to succeed in your career you can’t be the Invisible Man in the company. You need to learn to network both within your organization and outside it. And again, Internet chat rooms are not where this networking takes place. Nor is it about the idle gossip that goes on around the office water cooler. Leave those two to the geeks and gigglers of the office. Serious networking is done over lunch and coffee where you talk about serious issues affecting the company and offer practical solutions. This networking positions you as someone who cares about your company and someone who is thinking about how to solve the problems it may be facing. Bosses don’t like employees who bring them problems; but they certainly like team players who bring them solutions. In other words, make yourself part of the solution, not part of the problem in the company – whatever the problem might be.
External networking is equally important to being recognized as a professional. Therefore it is important to join business associations such as chambers of commerce and industry associations or professional associations and clubs. These organizations are always looking for someone to work on one of their committees or to help out arranging a networking event. Volunteer to help. That way you will be seen and respected. One of the things you find on these committees is that the most successful of professionals tend to be on them. If you have something to contribute, don’t snipe from the sides; join in and make a contribution.
When you get high enough up the tree you can do your networking on the golf course or in the corporate box at the Hong Kong Rugby Sevens. But when you’re starting out you need to do it by rolling up your sleeves and pitching in to help. The long-term dividends will be worth it.
Be a quick learner, too
The ability to learn new things quickly is increasing in importance. In a world that is increasingly moving at the speed of light there is no room for slow learners. We all need to master new technologies quickly and technology is changing every day. Being able to chat on MSN is one thing that speeds up communication for companies. But MSN is the grunt end of the business food chain. Fourteen year olds master it in the blink of an eye. But if you are going to really be successful in your career you need to master the company’s database software and other mission-critical programs and technology that the firm uses. Bosses don’t like to hear excuses about why the technology doesn’t work. They usually have a view, right or wrong, that it doesn’t work because there is a Luddite or technophobe trying to use it. Ironically, even if they can’t use the technology themselves they will hold a poor view of you for not mastering it. So the best thing to do is master the technology that your company uses. And by all means demonstrate that you are a quick learner when new technology is introduced. If you think you can change the way the company works or the way your boss thinks it should work, think again. You won’t succeed; therefore you need to adapt to the company’s work processes and your boss’ requirements.
Analyse this
Analytical skills are also very important in today’s world. This is because leading companies don’t just make widgets any more. What successful companies do is process information – and vast amounts of it. A pharmaceutical company doesn’t just make drugs. It looks at trends in disease development and contagion and finds solutions to those problems. At the top end of such a company, the smartest people are employed to process everything from scientific data to market research information, to financial data, etc. in order to develop solutions that will bring products to market profitably. Obviously an ability to analyse information quickly and accurately and develop solutions is going to make someone indispensable to their company. A successful “analytical aggregator” - for want of a better term - is someone who can get to the nub of a problem quickly and then bring the right information to bear in solving it. The few who can do this are the few who will make it to the very top of their careers – provided of course they have the other three parts of the formulae for success. Analytical ability combined with good communication skills, a networking sense and flexibility to learn new things puts you at the top of the food chain.
Master these four things and you will be sailing. But, of course, that’s the trick; if everyone could master them we’d all be equal. Those who can master these talents will tip the career success balance their way.
* Uma Li is a human resources development consultant living in the United States. She previously worked in public relations in China.
