by Joanne Gehas, Ph.D.
Since the COVID-19 pandemic, shutdowns have caused millions of job losses with many people left to completely rethink their career path and make appropriate choices. They are deciding between new employment in a role doing what they had done previously, or whether they would like to make a career pivot at this time. Even those whose positions have not been eliminated and have now worked many months in our “new normal” are asking similar questions.
At the heart of resolution of any career dilemma is the definition of career success. Career success can mean different things to different people. I will define it for the sake of this article as: reaching a point in your professional life that fulfills and energizes you. Are you doing something that makes you want to get out of bed in the morning and start the day?
Once you have defined what career path you would like to move forward with, you should honestly assess your skills and experience. Are there additional educational degrees you need to be successful in this career path? What other types of training needed can be identified?
No matter what career path one chooses, there are key traits that provide the necessary fundamentals required to achieve career success in any field.
1. Excellent Communication Skills
First and foremost, you must be able to effectively communicate with others. Whether it be written or oral communications, you need to be able to present your thoughts and plans articulately. Good communication involves explaining, persuading, and motivating. Analyze and critique your own communications. Take the time to assess your communications to ensure that your messages are clear and concise.
Keep in mind, an excellent communicator must also be an active listener. You must be effective at listening to others and understanding their needs so you can effectively articulate your response or probe for additional understanding. Having the communication skills to deliver ideas and information so that recipients can easily understand you is critical. Excellent communications skills are a must-have to position yourself to be promoted to roles with greater responsibility and visibility within your organization.
2. Influencing Others
Your ability to influence people is also crucial. In most organizations, work is done in teams, and much of the time, work must be done with others in order to achieve organizational objectives. Your ability to work with everyone (regardless of whether they report into you), and to influence or persuade them is essential. Leadership skills are necessary to communicate in a manner that will inspire and influence others to align with your vision and plans in order to achieve shared goals and objectives.
To influence others, you also need to be a team player who is always looking out and contributing to the success of your team. If your team is successful, chances are, that you will also achieve success as an individual.
One measure of your ability to influence others is whether you provide mentorship to others. Do others seek out your input because they value your guidance? If so, you probably already exhibit this key trait.
3. Confidence
Everything begins with confidence. Confidence is essential to driving solutions and increasing your level of productivity. Projecting confidence will inspire others to trust you, which, in turn, will enhance your ability to lead and inspire others.
Confidence involves knowing your areas of strength and weaknesses as well as believing that you have the right skill sets to accomplish your goals. Confidence is not arrogance. It is the belief in yourself that enables you to use your strengths to your advantage. It is something that is physically noticeable by others as well. It manifests itself within the way you communicate, as well as how you hold yourself physically.
Having confidence is a key trait as it enables you to influence people in a positive way to gain their trust in your competence.
4. Results-driven
Your employment relies on getting things done. There are no benefits in developing these key traits for career success if you are not able to convert these skills into measurable results. You must know how to challenge yourself to deliver results and have a clear understanding of what you are trying to accomplish and the ability to map out a process to get there. Then, you must be able to execute to attain a measurable result. If the overall goal seems too daunting, think about reaching smaller, more easily attainable goals, and push to reach each individual milestone. Before you know it, you will be closer to your ultimate goal than you realize!
5. Focus
In today’s digital society, we are bombarded with so many daily distractions (social media, texts, emails, etc.) that it can be more difficult to maintain one’s focus on any given task. Try to set up blocks of time during your workday to focus on individual goals. Assess what things tend to distract you and think of ways to minimize these distractions during these blocks of time.
6. Self-Awareness and Emotional IQ
Being able to identify your key strengths and weaknesses is a lifelong process. However, the ability to understand these especially during challenging times like these can be one of your greatest assets in achieving career success. According to TalentSmart, emotional intelligence plays the biggest role in performance. TalentSmart tested emotional intelligence alongside 33 other important workplace skills and found that emotional intelligence is the strongest predictor of performance in all types of jobs.
7. Flexibility
Flexibility is the ability to adjust and change paths or use a different approach when needed. Albert Einstein is widely credited with saying, "the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results.” If you have worked extremely hard yet not achieved what you set out to do, it may be time to take a step back and reassess your approach.
8. Proactive not Reactive
Identifying obstacles and issues are keys to career success in the workplace. The ability to take initiative is key. If there is an issue, one must be able to identify it and be proactive about proposing creative solutions. Creativity empowers you to question certain assumptions and ways of doing things. Proactive people are better able to adapt to changing circumstances.
9. Positive Attitude
Those who live by the mantra of being positive are going to automatically project a positive attitude towards others. One needs to look for and appreciate the positive in any situation. This not only energizes you, but the positive energy will inevitably rub off on those around you. Let’s face it, no one wants to spend time with someone who is always complaining or emphasizing the negative in things. With this key trait, when you are given lemons, you will be the one to turn into lemonade!
10. Courage
The fear of making the wrong decision and making a mistake can be crippling to your career growth. Fear keeps you living in the comfortable status quo and does not offer any opportunities to expand your horizons. This prevents you from participating in growth opportunities that could be learned from.
If you are courageous, you understand that your mistakes always provide learning opportunities. Remember the phrase, “nothing ventured, nothing gained.”
Confident people tend to be more courageous than people with low self-esteem. This is primarily because they trust in their abilities. Having courage is that little push we need from ourselves to move beyond the current status quo.
Think of those you most admire and respect within your own workplace. You will probably agree that they are those who you feel have achieved career success. After some inner reflection of your strengths and weaknesses, you may identify some areas for self-improvement. Which key traits discussed above do they most closely align with? Identify colleagues or friends who you feel exemplify the key traits that you would like to improve upon. Seek out these people as career mentors. A great article, How to Find a Mentor, by Matt D'Angelo, published in Business News Daily, is a good place to start.1
Developing new skills that will keep you on the right path towards career success is a matter of realizing what you need to learn and finding ways to develop those skills. These key traits are a great starting point.
References
1. How to Find a Mentor
Joanne Gehas, Ph.D., has been a nationwide executive recruiter with FPC of Raleigh since 2005. Prior to that, she was a Director of Analytical with Cardinal Health (now Catalent Pharma Solutions).