How to Increase Your Chances of Having the Best Career

We all have physical needs that if not met, will put you in danger quite quickly. These include, for example, food, water, shelter, and sleep. Without these, you will not survive for long.

However, there is more to life than getting our physical needs met. To feel truly alive, several emotional needs must also be met. These include, for example, belonging, agency, purpose, and connection. Without these, you will not experience the fullness of life.

If you stop and think about it, we spend a large part of our adult lives at work. For many people, work provides a large portion of their physical and emotional needs. It's no wonder that when people suddenly lose their job or retire even, this can send them into a tailspin. It is also one of the reasons why when we feel stuck at work, it can feel like torture.

One tradeoff that comes with working for a company instead of yourself is that someone else gets to decide how far you advance. What this means is no matter what you do, if those "deciders" don't want to advance you, you will be stuck. After a few rounds of this, your career can start to feel like a sadistic, rigged game of Monopoly. No matter how hard you work, how much you contribute, how much value you provide, the result is always the same. It's like year after year, you draw the same Chance card -- Go directly to Jail, Do not pass Go, Do not collect $200. To add insult to injury, you see others move past you as they draw a very different Chance card -- Advance to Go (Collect $200).

I'm not here to judge whether what is happening to you is right or wrong. My only goal here is to point out the way the game works because if we choose to play the game, we should know the rules.

However, there is one important difference between Monopoly and our careers. While we cannot control which Chance card we will draw (i.e., we cannot control what others will decide), we can stack the deck in our favor. The way we can do this is by developing Executive Presence.

Have you ever wondered what really determines how far most people go at work? You've probably seen lots of "good" leaders get stuck and "bad" leaders advance. What is going on here? For most people, it's not our technical ability, character, or loyalty that determines how far we advance. It's not even how much we contribute to the company. At the end of the day, it all comes down to what the "deciders" think about your ability to lead. Who will get the next assignment, opportunity, or promotion?

Will it be you or Jack? You or Jill?

This is why Executive Presence matters. It's not about having a title, the best clothes, or the deepest voice. It's about how other people perceive your ability to lead. Whether they are right or wrong is, at least initially, sort of besides the point. It's about getting the chance to prove them right or wrong. Most people would like to at least be given the chance to fail, but the stakes are high, so only a few are chosen. Never being given the chance is demotivating, demoralizing, and can even be heart-breaking at times. In order to avoid falling into this rut, it is important, no matter what level you are at, to cultivate Executive presence, which I define as follows.

"Executive Presence is the ability to inspire confidence that you can lead well in a given situation."

Simply stated, "deciders" give opportunities to people who they believe will get things done. Period. If they don't believe you can, you won't get the chance. Executive Presence is not just a nice to have, it is the ultimate key to unlocking your full career potential.

What this means is it is never too early to cultivate Executive Presence.

Executive Presence is the engine that powers your career.

When it stalls, so does your career. In the articles that follow, we will discuss how to generate Executive Presence so you can drive as far and as fast as you would like. The other option is to sit in the back seat while others drive past you. The choice is yours.

Let’s get moving!

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This article was adapted from the new leadership book, Unlock Your Executive Presence: Feel Like a Boss. Find it here, along with other books from the Unlock Your Leadership series.

Joe Kwon, the Connection Counselor is a leadership coach and keynote speaker who helps elevate careers by unlocking the ability to better connect with yourself and others. Contact him if you'd like his help.

To find out more and to access his podcasts, EZPZ blog and free leadership guides, go to www.connectioncounselor.com.

To learn more about Executive Presence now, check out the Connection Counselor’s YouTube series, the Executive Presence Spotlight series here.

You’ve got this! You’ve done this project hundreds of times before so you know exactly what is needed and how to get there. Only this time in recognition of all your previous efforts and to invest in your professional development, you are being asked to supervise instead of implement. So you hand-pick your team, let them know the plan and what you get back is…totally different that what you wanted!

You are understandably frustrated because the team you picked is 100% capable of doing what you asked them to do. So how it possible that what you asked for and what they delivered are so totally out of sync? You rack your brain and cannot find any obvious disconnect. Maybe there is something you are missing here?

THE FIVE PRINCIPLES OF FLOW

Earlier, we explored how the 5 Principles of Flow can help us change directions more smoothly and effectively. Now, let’s take a look at what they can teach us about leading others more effectively.

When you ask someone to do something, and what they do is so far off from what you wanted, what do you think is happening?

There are two basic types of explanations. The first is the one the most people reach for – we assume that the person just didn’t understand what we wanted or they did understand, but ignored us. Notice at whose feet we’ve squarely laid the blame. Certainly, you could not have been part of the problem! You have excellent communication skills. People are stupid.

But what if there is more to it? Enter the second explanation. What can happen, and I’m guilty of this myself, is sometimes we do not clearly understand ourselves what we want. As a result, we make a vague or inaccurate request. It is only after we see what the person delivers to us that we start to get more clarity on what it is we really want and it is not what they delivered. If we had known what we wanted in the first place, both of us would have saved time and frustration.

Principle #5: The more unambiguous your movement, the better your partner can respond.

Look in the mirror. Point a finger at your image, lock eyes with your reflection, and let loose, “J’accuse!” Notice how the blame has shifted here?

Have you ever tried to follow someone who was really lost and terrible at directions? Apologies if that person was me. How easy was it to follow them when they kept changing directions, backpedaling, and going in circles? Contrast this with someone who is a human GPS and signals confidently before every turn as they drive smoothly, with the fewest number of turns, to the final destination. Notice how one person is much easier to follow.

“Surely, you are not telling me that I am the only one responsible for steering things?”

Your responsibility is to move with as much clarity as possible, so that the other person can respond properly. If you are confused, you can’t expect them not to be confused. The other person will always have their own responsibility around how they steer themselves, but by moving with clarity, we make it easier for them to stay connected.

When we are more clear about what direction we are moving in, it helps others to stay connected and find the flow.

This article was adapted from the new leadership book, Unlock Your Connection. Find it here, along with other books from the Unlock Your Leadership series.

Joe Kwon, the Connection Counselor is a leadership coach and keynote speaker who helps elevate careers by unlocking the ability to better connect with yourself and others. Contact him if you'd like his help.

To find out more and to access free leadership videos, podcasts, and guides, go to www.connectioncounselor.com.

Picture this. You are leading a project and things are off to a great start. This is large part due to your leadership. At the start of the project, you gathered perspectives, did the research, and came up with a stategy that everyone agreed with. All your prep work and fine-tuning was worth it and when the project officially started, the team launched off the starting line like a rocket ship.

Just as you are about to reach the finish line, you get a nagging feeling in the back of your head. You check your project plan and notice that due to a miscalculation or error, the approach you are using - you know, the one you came up with and everyone agreed with - is in fact not going to work without some major changes. What should you do and how will you break the news to the team, who has been running 200 mphs for weeks based on your brilliant strategy.

In Unlock Your Executive Presence: Feel Like a Star I share the Six Degrees of Executive Presence. One of them is the state of being of being Resolute, defined as “marked by firm determination.”

In other words, you don’t change directions at the slightest sign of discontent or pressure. People know that your decisions have weight and they can trust you not to be fickle with decisions that impact their lives. However, this doesn’t mean you are stubborn and when there is a good reason to change and you do, this is also part of having Executive Presence.

However, none of this changes the uprising you fear will occur when you tell your team that things will need to change in order for the project to succeed. Through no fault of their own, they will have transition from the orderly path they have been on to a new, less familiar path. This change will potentially hurt morale, negatively impact productivity, and besides the ding on your reputation, threatens to derail the project. That said, not changing things is definitely not going to work either so you will have to break the news to the team one way or another. Let’s take a look at a few approaches that will improve your chances of success and decrease the likelihood of a team mutiny.

THE FIVE PRINCIPLES OF FLOW

Earlier, we discussed how sometimes we may need to do a little extra heavy lifting to get things going in the right direction. Let’s take a look at what the 5 Principles of Flow can teach us about changing directions smoothly and effectively.

Principle #4: The bigger the turn you want to take, the bigger the change you need to make.

Imagine you are in your favorite car zooming down the highway. If you want to veer slightly to the left or right, this is easy. All you need to do is slightly turn the steering wheel. Now what if you want to making a bigger turn? What if you suddenly decided to make a perpendicular turn or a full 180-degree turn?

To make bigger turns without losing control and crashing, you need to make bigger changes. Let’s look at two turning techniques.

Technique #1. Turn by incremental degrees to turn while maintaining most of your speed.

Think about how a highway curves to the left or right. The change in direction is gradual so you can continue to keep pretty much the same speed while turning.

In the same way, after you are connected to a person and heading one direction, if you want to change the direction both of you are heading as smoothly as possible, this is better done in degrees. This will take longer, but has the added benefit of causing less strain and allowing you both to continue moving at full speed. It’s like when you run at full speed while making a wide, sweeping turn until you are heading in the opposite direction.

“But Joe, what if I have neither the time nor the patience to accommodate such incremental change?”

Great question. That leads us into our second turning technique.

Technique #2: Turn by slowing to a complete stop, turning, then heading in the new direction to turn in the shortest time and distance possible.

Think about the impossibility of a car traveling at highway speeds being able to suddenly and instantaneously reverse directions. I don’t think this is even possible due to modern safety features, but if it were possible to throw the car recklessly into reverse, I imagine something horrible would happen. Again, don’t try this at home . . . or on the road.

What works better is a technique that anyone who has taken a driving test has had to learn. Commonly called a K-turn or 3-point turn, this maneuver allows you to change directions by slowing the car to a complete stop, then executing a series of back and forth turns until the car is facing the opposite direction from which it started.

In the same way, after you are connected to a person and need to change directions quickly, you will both have to stop moving in the direction you were, coordinate a series of back and forth turns, before starting to head in the opposite direction. This requires you to halt the momentum you had, but has the added benefit of taking less time to execute. It is like running at full speed, slowing to a complete stop, pivoting to face the opposite direction, then accelerating again to full speed.

Both techniques work equally well and one is not better other than the other. Which one you choose will depend on how much time you have, the difficulty of the change, the people who are being asked to change, and your own personal intuitions. By remembering to use one of these techniques, you maximize the ability to keep the flow of the project and the team as high as possible and reach a successful result for everyone involved.

I hope the first four of the Five Principles of Flow, starting here have been helpful. For the last one, Principle #5 we will look at what you can do to make it easier for people to follow your lead.

This article was adapted from the new leadership book, Unlock Your Connection. Find it here, along with other books from the Unlock Your Leadership series.

Joe Kwon, the Connection Counselor is a leadership coach and keynote speaker who helps elevate careers by unlocking the ability to better connect with yourself and others. Contact him if you'd like his help.

To find out more and to access free leadership videos, podcasts, and guides, go to www.connectioncounselor.com.