Over the last 2+ years, we’ve all learned how important relationships are—both personal and professional. In her March 21 “Your Best Next Move” video, Bobbie LaPorte shares a simple tip for cultivating (and maintaining) strong relationships as you broaden your network. You might be surprised how easy it is to increase the number of people who will value and support you as you advance in your career.
Transcript of Your Best Next Move: How to Increase Your Career Advancement Advocates
Hi everyone, Bobbie LaPorte here again with my weekly leadership tip for your Best Next Move, where I help you see continuing curveballs as an opportunity. We’re done reacting to them, or pausing, waiting for a new kind certainty to return. This year I will help you actively use your personal agency to accelerate what you want to accomplish in 2022.
If we’ve learned anything as leaders over the last 2+ years, it’s the importance of relationships – personal and professional. This is something we all knew intuitively, but I think it’s become more “real” and present for us to make a commitment, to act more intentionally to build, nurture and repair relationships with key people in our circles of influence.
Add this realization to the velocity of change in your networks due to increasing internal changes as well as “the great resignation” and you have a situation where the people you relied on for support, guidance and advocacy can disappear overnight.
Here is a scenario that a client shared with me last week
This might sound familiar to you. You are up for a significant promotion that your manager assures you is “in the bag” – you’ve met all the requirements and demonstrated your readiness for the role.
Then the promotion curveball:
You learn that a key member of the executive team is blocking your advance, seemingly on what you feel are some unreasonable expectations and incorrect perceptions about you. Nonetheless, this person has the CEO’s ear, is influential in a way that seem unfair – but that’s the way it is.
So how do you ensure you are building relationships with people who can support you in your career advancement – or at the very least be “neutral” and not block you?
You need to be prepared to widen your network, to ensure that you will not be left on the sidelines, wondering what happened and who you can turn to.
So, here’s my tip for this week:
Build a legacy of value in everyone and you’ll never be in short supply of people who are willing to go to bat for you if a key member of the executive team is blocking your promotion.
And here’s how you build that legacy:
Treat everyone like a client. And I mean everyone.
It may sound simple, and basically it is; but it’s not always easy. It means realizing that every person you interact with professionally has value, that they have something to contribute; that we all want to be successful.
So give them respect, show immediate action and solutions, not blame; treat them like a VIP and that might just make the difference with that key person who can make or break your advancement.
That’s my tip for this week. For more help on using your personal agency to make uncertainty a part of your success strategy check out my new book “When the Curveballs Keep Coming: A Leadership Playbook for an Uncertain World” and also my new online course, “Leading Through Uncertainty.”
Alright everyone have a great week and I’ll see you next Monday.
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