Lindsey Pollak* shares three strategies for building career success.
I have total confidence that you are successful at the core responsibilities of your job — the work itself.
But how much time do you spend on all of the factors surrounding the work of your actual job, such as communication, interpersonal skills, networking, company culture, office politics?
As I talk about in my LinkedIn Learning course, these activities comprise what is often called organisational awareness, and thriving in these areas is just as important as the specific work of your job description.
Why? Because your job is one piece of a larger system, and you have to stay cognizant of that larger system to get ahead.
Understanding how to navigate the social and interpersonal dynamics is especially relevant for Learning & Development (L&D) professionals.
Tasked with reskilling and upskilling the workforce to meet the pace of market change is no easy feat.
It requires insight into overall business strategy and the granular mechanics of how to create and encourage impactful skill-building experiences for every person.
Here are three strategies to help you develop organisational awareness to increase your career success:
- Become an expert on your organisation’s leaders
Your relationship with leadership is incredibly influential on your success as an employee and on your day-to-day happiness and productivity.
It also gives you a direct line to overall business strategy and happenings around the organisation.
That’s why I recommend becoming an expert on how your leadership team works and communicates — as if you’re in sales and these people are your most important clients.
Act like a detective and research questions like:
- How do they spend most of the day?
- What success metrics are they judged on?
- What’s their preferred communication method?
- How do they see the ultimate purpose or mission of their work?
When you can answer these questions, you can make sure that your work is aligning to your leaders’ work and, therefore, to the overall organisation’s.
- Stay informed
Do you take time to review company emails when they’re sent? Very few people can answer yes to this question, and I want you to be one of them.
While you don’t necessarily have to be a stickler for knowing every single company update word-for-word, it can come in handy to know about policy changes that make you an expert in how to get things done, like knowing how to add a new vendor to the system.
Since most people don’t read the fine print — or often any print for that matter — you’ll have an advantage by knowing official protocols.
You might even become the go-to person on your team who knows how to help your colleagues navigate systems.
You won’t have to call your colleagues to explain things to you.
Instead, they’ll be coming to you.
- Study your organisation’s stars
As you’ve been observing your organisation in the time you’ve been employed, it’s likely you’ve identified some people who are highly regarded, aka the “stars.”
Sometimes when we identify these people, it can bring up feelings of envy — for their position, their title or their popularity.
That can be an uncomfortable feeling, but I suggest you choose to use it to your advantage and turn those feelings into a catalyst for positive action.
Instead of feeling jealous of your organisation’s stars, decide to study them.
Position them in your mind as role models and inspirations.
Study their career progressions.
Watch how they interact in meetings and on video calls.
Check out their LinkedIn profiles to see how they describe themselves and what networks they belong to internally and externally.
Then, brainstorm ways that you can take action to be more like these stars.
For example, let’s say you really admire your boss, Sam, because she’s a great public speaker and everyone listens closely when she speaks in team meetings.
Instead of feeling jealous of Sam’s confidence, or inferior because you’re not as well-spoken, see if you can channel that into some action ideas.
Maybe you can take a public speaking training course on LinkedIn Learning.
Or join a local public speaking club.
Or commit to speaking up at least once on every conference call to build up your experience and confidence level.
Final thoughts: Focus on your own learning
The thing about building organisational awareness and career success is that you are surrounded by people and resources to learn from.
Role models provide living, breathing ideas for continual success in your specific organisational culture.
And there are plenty of ways to nourish those learnings with continuous skill-building.
All you have to do is stop once in a while and look around.
*Lindsey Pollak is a New York Times bestselling author and a leading career and workplace experts.
This article first appeared at linkedin.com.
