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.

ALIGNMENT-BE CREATIVE, NOT OUTRAGEOUS.

Workers who get promoted are usually running in the same direction as the company. They find ways to help give the company a boost in that direction.

Part of what makes a company a company, is the collective of people, each with their own thoughts and agendas working on common goals to help make the company continuously succeed. Once that collective has invested time and resources into a company direction, it will welcome ideas that fit with that company direction which doesn’t require a reset of their previous efforts. Once that collective has made itself comfortable in its chosen commitments, objectives, goals, it does not appreciate disruption or misdirection.

If you want to be noticed and considered a rightful part of the collective, your ideas must fit and must be helpful.

You can certainly contribute to the team by taking on more of a workload in the same direction, ALIGNED WITH, the company goals and objectives. Your contribution must fit smoothly. More along the lines of, “How can I help?”, and less along the lines of “Let’s give this revolutionary breakthrough a shot.”

Then, once you are aligned, it is up to you to work harder and smarter, to do it faster and better than someone else who would otherwise have been given that assignment.  A company appreciates workers who do more and better with what has already been proven to be successful strategies and tactics, especially if those are now embedded within the current and foreseeable company direction.

When you do make a suggestion or offer an innovation, be sure it fits smoothly with the chosen goals, objectives, and especially the corporate culture. Be sure it is not so progressive, so expensive, or so distracting that it disrupts, slows, or draws resources away from the committed direction.

Another way of saying, “check your alignment”, is:

“Get with the program!”