If you want to earn more money, you’ll need to get a promotion.
This is a 10-part series of “Nuggets” to help lay out a path to a better, higher-paid, job that is better fitted to your competencies. But you’ll notice, you’ll have to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps.
Your QUALIFICATIONS May Be Holding You Back…
It may surprise you to learn that many workers plateau in their careers because they continue to seek recognition by the very same things that got them promoted. Once promoted you need to adopt a new mindset.
You start at the bottom in a company by doing. You are hired to do and to produce excellent work. That’s why a company has lots of doers.
When you get your first level of promotion, your mindset has to start changing to supervising and managing. You may be tasked with still continuing with some of the doer tasks. If so, try to slowly transition out of that without disrupting the apple cart. In a supervisory role you have your chance to show the executives that you are learning and grasping the principles of supervising and managing.
At some point in your rise up the corporate ladder your job will transition 100%, or almost 100%, into managing resources and other workers. By then you ought to be an expert at the principles of managing and effectiveness.
Finally, when you are at the very top, you must have a general knowledge of the most critical functions and resources of the company, but your job is going to largely be that of making the entire company highly effective. By then you have to be an expert manager.
Here’s a simplified pyramid I created to help you to visualize the transition from doer to an expert manager:
Almost every career path will include some supervisory responsibilities. If you plan to rise through the ranks, be continually adding supervisory and managing skill sets to your personal repertoire. A good place to start your education is by voraciously reading advice on the topic of managing.
In the attached pyramid, the distinctions are arbitrary, and artificial. However, use it to remind yourself of your need to transition from doer to effective manager. Whatever got your promoted may be different than what will once again get your promoted to the next level.
