You’re ambitious, competent, and an absolute gem to be around. You not only work your butt off, but thanks to your quiver of skills and abilities, you bring insane amounts of value to whatever company you call home.
And yet, despite all this, you’ve hit a glass ceiling.
Your boss doesn’t seem to grasp just how vital you are to the team. Your accomplishments go mostly unnoticed, and no matter how hard you try, your career just isn’t gaining any upward traction.
If this is you, rest easy: You’re not alone.
The frustration of being undervalued, much less unnoticed, is a common theme in workplaces across the globe.
There’s a good reason for this, but it’s probably not one you want to hear.
Nevertheless, you’ve stumbled into this article and I assume it’s because you want to jump-start your career/life and start climbing the ladder of success, so I’m going to lay it on you and trust that you can handle the truth:
You’re not indispensable.
That is, you’re not bringing enough unique value to your boss or company to really differentiate yourself.
You do good work, but it’s probably not 10x better than your comrades (which is what it’ll have to be if you really want to separate yourself from the pack).
Your boss/company is satisfied with your work. You’re reliable. But they don’t see how much more difficult their lives would be without you.
We can change that.
The 6 strategies below are easily implemented and incredibly effective.
They’ve helped not only my own career, but they are the metrics by which I distinguish between A-players and B-players on my own team.
Your manager might not articulate their list in the same exact way, but I can almost guarantee if you take these steps to heart and begin implementing them, your boss will sit up and take notice.
If they don’t, well, it’s probably time you start looking for another job, ’cause chances are good that individual has already put you in a little black box in their mind, and you’re likely never to escape.
But that’s a different conversation for another time. For now, let’s talk about 6 Proven Strategies of Top Performers.
1) Don’t Wait For Directions
As a general rule, as long as you’re moving forward and making progress towards a goal, nobody will complain.
Taking the initiative is almost always the right move.
Even if you make a mistake and chase the wrong car, the end result is almost always preferred to not having done anything at all.
Not doing anything is always worse than doing the wrong thing.
You might have aimed at the wrong target, or made a bad shot, but the type of individuals who rise through the ranks are the ones who are not afraid to put themselves out there, who default to action, and who are pushing and striving to make measurable improvements.
Your boss will notice. Your boss will appreciate.
2) Listen More Than You Talk
Repeat after me:
I do not have all the answers.
Great, now that we’ve accepted this super basic, yet super universal truth, let’s put it into action.
We do this by going into interactions with others more interested in whatthey can teach us, than we are in what we can teach them.
This is hard, I know. Reality is shaped by our perception. In a very real way, everything you perceive is simply a series of interpreted electrical impulses taking place inside your brain. This makes it pretty hard to look outside ourselves for answers.
And yet, those individuals who’ve distinguished themselves as top-performers, have done so by absorbing as much knowledge, context, and information from the people around them as possible.
They do this by listening more than they talk.
They ask great questions, and then they give the other person space to answer.
This differs from the people who ask a question only as a means of setting the conversation up for them to answer.
If you want to get ahead, use this simple trick:
Go into every conversation asking yourself, “What can I learn from this person?”
Armed with an answer, ask probing questions that give the other person an opportunity to share their expertise or perspective.
This is how top performers fast-track their progression.
3) Timeliness Is More Important Than Quality
Quality is important, but not if it’s late.
I’m not saying turn in low quality work. I’m saying strive to make it the best you can within the allotted time.
People are far more forgiving of substandard work than they are of late work.
One indicates a lack of training, the other indicates a lack of reliability.
If you want to be a top-performer, that’s one label you can’t afford to get tacked with.
Remember, quality is subjective. You, the person creating the thing, are rarely the best judge of it’s ultimate quality.
Because we are our own most critical judges, it’s important to remember this little truism:
Perfection is the enemy of done.
Don’t get lured into chasing perfection if it’s going to make you miss a deadline.
4) Stop Complaining
Nobody wants to be around a whiner.
We get it, the universe is one big wibbly-wobbly ball of entropy that’s sole purpose is to ruin your day.
Life is hard. Work is hard.
But hey, we’re all in this together. So let’s put our heads together and find ways to make it better.
Over the course of your life, you’ll spend more time with the people at work than you do with family and loved ones.
Don’t make this any harder on the rest of us than it needs to be.
If you see something wrong, don’t complain.
Take initiative. Fix it.
5) Consider the Big Picture
Nothing will impress your boss more than putting yourself in their shoes to consider a situation from their angle. It’s easy to get caught up in your own personal, ground level view, but if you want to make your manager’s life easier, and really put yourself on their radar, start imagining the world through their eyes.
Nobody is an island upon themselves. A company is a multifaceted beast relying on the careful coordination and interplay of countless tiny cogs.
You, my friend, are nothing but a single cog.
If you want to rise to the top, you have to learn how to zoom out to see the entire machine for what it is and understand how your cog fits into the bigger picture.
This is how you create interdepartmental win-wins.
Make a practice of this and you’ll be so far ahead of the curve your manager might start coming to you for big picture advice.
6) Constantly Improve
What do you plan to do today such that, by having done it you will be 0.01% better tomorrow than you are currently?
If you don’t have a good answer to that question, I suggest you find one.
If you want to climb the ladder of success, you have to constantly improve.
The skills and abilities that got you here will not get you there.
Managers love workers who push the limits of their skills.
It’s fairly easy to tell which employees have stagnated in their skills, content to have simply mastered their job.
It’s also fairly easy to tell which people are going out of their way to learn as much as they can, consuming information not only pertinent to their work, but the work of those around them.
This fire in the belly to improve will not go unnoticed.
Other Resources
With the above 6 tips, you’ve got a solid launching off point now to take your career to the next level.
If you’re super ambitious and want to dive even deeper into this topic (well kudos to you!), here are two fantastic books on the subject.
First, from marketing guru, Seth Godin, is a little book called Linchpin, which is almost exactly what it sounds like. The key to long-term success within a company, Godin points out, is your ability to make yourself absolutely indispensible.
Second, is from Cal Newport, So Good They Can’t Ignore You, which is such an aptly named book that I don’t even think it bears explaining to you smart folks at home.
