How many of you go to work each day and feel like you are operating within a straight jacket? As if your corporate culture restricts your ability to stretch your capabilities? There’s only one way to get ahead within the company, so you’d better toe the line and make sure that you meet all of their criteria for performance review.
Huh? What’s up with that?
Perhaps you need to take a 10,000 foot eagle’s eye view of your situation. It may look a lot different – and more promising – if you can step back from your situation and include their perspective in your assessment of you and where you want to go.
Even if you are a contracted worker (which is a new breed of professional in and of itself), your current job provides you with tremendous latitude for growing your knowledge of how businesses run themselves, acquire customers, and grow their revenue.
Are you taking advantage of this opportunity or simply waiting around for them to notice how wonderful you are? If you are doing the latter, you may be waiting a long time.
Business development is part of your job description, even if it’s not specifically stated. Read that sentence again, please.
Even if you are loading trucks or answering phones. Even if you don’t feel you are an important part of the equation. Even if you feel that your intelligence makes your job security a given (guess again on that one, please). Even if you feel that you bring in so many sales – no matter how dubious the quality of your negotiations – that your company can’t afford to let you go.
All of you are part of a continuous, and not necessarily straight-line, business equation. And that equation adds up to your company’s bottom line. Do you understand how your individual contributions create a whole that is greater than the sum of the parts?
Perhaps you should speak with your colleagues and figure out how what you do impacts what they do, and so on. That’s how you learn more about your company, how it is organized, the business and revenue model, and where there is wiggle room for you to make yourself into a much-needed more than instead of the same old, same old that you feel your job description restricts you to.
Are you up for this task?
In today’s globally competitive business environment, everyone factors into their company’s revenue stream. Your willingness to reach out beyond your cubicle mindset creates that all-important business and technical acumen that translates into value-add, if not at your current place of employment, at your future one.
Your job function is a portal for increasing your knowledge about industry, marketplace, business model, financials, sales, technology, you name it. It’s like that all-encompassing college course you never took, because there isn’t one like this one.
Walk through that open door called your job and take a good look around and what everyone’s collaborative knowledge creates for each other. There’s a vibrant learning environment. And it’s up to you to take advantage of it.
Take that first step. Reach out to individuals within your organization. Start understanding how their job description impacts the output of others throughout your organization.
You just may grow yourself into your next promotion, and your next company.
What are you waiting for?
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