How to shift your mindset for career growth

Look around your office and you will see many people with similar skill levels. However, everyone knows that some colleagues massively outperform others and progress more quickly. The difference between success and failure is rarely skillset, it is mindset.

If you want to progress your career, you must embrace five mindsets that many managers struggle with:

· Being ambitious is healthy, not toxic

· Seeking promotion is positive, not selfish

· Taking measured risk is safer than avoiding risk

· Politics can be positive

· Recognize that you belong and you are ready for promotion

Being ambitious is healthy, not toxic

Learning to embrace the right sort of ambition is vital for your career. Personally ambitious colleagues can be difficult colleagues to work with. But one of the top five attributes that managers look for in team members is ambition. What is going on? Your colleagues and managers are looking at two different sorts of ambition: “me, me, me” versus “we, we, we”.

Personal ambition is all about self-promotion, pushing yourself forward and others aside, claiming credit and spreading blame.

The sort of ambition that managers want to see is ambition for the mission. This ambition finds solutions, innovates, makes things happen and is a joy to work with. The ambitious team member will not just seek perfection, they will challenge the status quo and find different ways to serve customers, configure operations or do things differently. This type of ambition helps the whole team, not just one person.

Seeking promotion is positive, not selfish

Colleagues who are great team members often sabotage their careers. They naively believe that if they work hard and do well, they will get promoted. Then they see less talented but more personally ambitious colleagues get promoted and they become cynical about the whole idea of promotion. They start to feel like management is just talk and doesn't really add value and that moving into a leadership role takes you away from the front line, where you can make a difference.

Early in your career, you might get lucky and get promoted on a combination of hard work and potential. After that, you must seek promotion actively, by gaining the right experiences, finding your claim to fame, building your network of support and becoming visible to senior management. If you believe that this is all a waste of time, you will quickly go nowhere. If you want a promotion, you must seek it.

It helps to frame promotion the right way in your mind. It is not just about personal advancement. It is about making an even bigger impact and helping even more people. This marries “we, we, we” ambition with “me, me, me” ambition. You start to seek promotion, but for the right reasons: to help the mission even more.

Taking measured risk is safer than avoiding risk

Ambition isn’t just about doing a good job or striving for perfection. That’s what managerial ambition looks like. However, if you want to be promoted into leadership, your ambition needs to go further. Leadership ambition means challenging the status quo, driving change and taking people to places they couldn’t reach on their own. That’s what gets you noticed and promoted. And yes, that often means taking some risks.

Fortunately, there are plenty of ways to take measured risks, with crises and opportunities always emerging. These are the moments when no one is quite sure what to do and they are the moments of truth that separate the leaders from the rest. Followers step back to see which way the wind is blowing; leaders step up, take control and make things happen. The more often you step up, the better you become at doing so. Even if you occasionally fail, you will learn more than colleagues who have stepped back.

Ultimately, the biggest career risk of all is to take no risk. If you never step up, never push yourself, you condemn yourself to living in the comfort zone of mediocrity. Learn to make risk your friend.

Politics can be positive

Management has always involved gaining and using power. In the past, that power came from your formal position, such as having a larger budget and team, as well as greater authority over decisions. You had to climb the corporate ladder to get it. Back then, office politics was a zero-sum game and it could get cutthroat.

In the past, formal power was enough, because you made things happen through people you controlled: orders went down the hierarchy and information came back up. That is all over because now you have to make things happen through people you do not control (other departments, suppliers, customers) or through people who do not want to be controlled.

In this new world, you need to amplify your formal power with informal power.

To do this, you must:

· Build your networks of trust and support

· Become the colleague that others want to help, because you help them

· Become the manager of choice, which helps you recruit the ‘A’ team

· Know how to sell your agenda to secure the resources and support it needs

· Pick the right agenda to work on, where you have most impact

· Know how to win corporate battles without fighting

If you can do all of this, your impact will go far beyond your job title. You will also be proving that politics is how you shape the organization to work in your favour. If you see politics as a dirty word, you will always be limited by the formal power your role provides you and you will fall short of what you are capable of. Because if you do not engage with politics, politics will still affect you, whether you like it or not.

Recognize that you belong and you are ready for promotion

The stories we tell ourselves can be empowering or crippling. The two most crippling stories we can tell ourselves are “I don’t belong” and “I am not ready for promotion”. These are self-fulfilling stories that ensure that you will never progress. You need to challenge these stories.

The antidote to “I am not ready for promotion” is to realize that no one is ever ready for promotion. No leader ticks every box, because that is impossible and it does not matter. Leadership is a team sport. If you dislike accounting, learn to love accountants. Your job as a leader is not to be the smartest person in the room, your job is to get the smartest people into the room. You are ready for promotion when you realize that you can achieve more for the mission in a new and bigger role. Then promotion ceases to be a selfish act and becomes a moral necessity.

The antidote to “I don’t belong” is to realize that it is not a story about you, it is a story about them. In practice, all the greatest innovations have come from outsiders, not insiders. Insiders are caught up in groupthink and follow convention. If you think you don’t belong, you have an advantage because you see things differently and you think differently. Use that to your advantage.

In a world where skills are becoming a commodity that can be outsourced, offshored or contracted out, mindset is your secret sauce of success. Use it to your advantage.

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