5 Ways To Keep Up In Today's Job Market
Share
Lately my job has been changing. For the past couple of decades, the business I started in 1990 was small enough that if I didn’t have a good month, the business didn’t have a good month. Now it’s grown beyond that: how much work I do for clients in a given period doesn’t have much to do with how well we’re doing overall. In fact, doing work for clients is no longer the single highest value thing I can do for the business’ growth and health.



It feels as though I’ve been running with a kite for 20+ years to keep it in the air – and now the wind has fully caught the kite. My job has suddenly changed to standing in one place and paying out the line properly to keep it in the air – a very different task. My business partner and I drew all of this out on a piece of paper at dinner the other night – noting the 6 broad categories of things we do, and then assigning percentages to each: what percentage of time we were spending on each part of our job 3 or 4 years ago, and how we ought to be spending our time now. It was an extraordinarily helpful exercise. And not doing it – not recognizing how our jobs are changing and what we need to do in order to keep up with that change – would have left us both frustrated and ill-prepared for the future.



I see this fairly often: someone’s job changes, and they insist on doing it the way it’s always been done…which can completely derail their career. Here’s a common example, one I run into in my work all the time. Let’s say a guy called Joe is leading the marketing department of a rapidly growing business, and his group is expanding. New people are coming on, and everyone’s needing take on more responsibility as there’s more to do. But Joe keeps doing his job in the same way he’s done it in the past: all major decisions go through him, and he signs off on every piece of creative work – no matter how minor – that comes out of his group. What may have worked when there were 4 people in the marketing function is making their work grind to a screeching halt when there are 17 people. Joe’s always been successful working this way, though, so he’s hesitant to delegate more. Sound familiar?




Sometimes the change that’s needed is in response to changes in the larger environment. I had an assistant for many years who was responsible, hardworking, and organized – but she never quite made it into the digital age. When I began to need someone who could support my presence on social media, work in Salesforce, and be available to me via text as well as phone…she just couldn’t make the shift.



In fact, I’d say that the single biggest reason someone goes from succeeding in a particular job to not succeeding is the job changes out from under them and they’re left behind.



Here are a few things you can do to avoid being left on the side of the road, career-wise, as the world moves past you:



Look at what’s changing. In order to do the useful exercise my partner Jeff and I did the other night, we had to look, clear-eyed, at how our business is different now than it was even a few years ago. It wouldn’t have been enough for us just to have said “yeah, our revenue is growing.” We had to dig under that, to the fact that we have more people – both consultants and admin staff – doing higher-order, more complex work. And that implies both that our processes need change and that our folks need more skills and knowledge. Which led us to the understanding that we need to spend more time leading and managing our folks and helping them build their own client base, and less time completing day-to-day processes – that those things should be automated or done by people other than us. Without getting clear about how things are changing in your company, it’s impossible to see how you may need to do your job differently.



Stay current. You may also need to find additional sources of information about what’s changing outside your organization. After my former assistant and I parted company, I realized that she knew very little about what was happening in her own field. As we began looking for her replacement, I discovered that many of the things she had told me were true in the world of executive assistants were based on information from before she’d begun working for us 13 years earlier. In order to know how you might need to change, in order to succeed, you keep up with what’s happening in your field as well as your company.



Find exemplars. If your job now requires you to behave in ways that are new to you (like our mythical marketing person, Joe, needing to delegate more), discover some people who are already good at the stuff you need to learn. As Joe starts to see how the company is changing (we hope), and looks around for people who have already made the shifts he needs to make, he might notice, for instance, that his colleague who runs communications is an excellent delegator. Once he’s recognized that, he can ask her to be a resource to him in learning to give his people more responsibility and authority. (If you wonder whether someone will want to help you in this way – my experience is that people generally love to share their wisdom and skill; it makes them feel acknowledged and respected).



Be willing to be a novice. However, Joe will have to swallow his pride to ask her, and then he’ll be kind of crap at delegating when he first starts doing it. One of the hardest things about doing your job differently is that you’ve probably gotten good at doing it the way you’ve been doing it – and trying new things means, by definition, that you’ll be a novice. E.g., lame. I think this was the sticking point for my former assistant: she had been really, really good at her job for decades – and to evolve into a great executive assistant for today, she would have had to be not-good at her job in some pretty significant areas for a little while. Learning new stuff when you’re not a kid anymore takes courage.



Change your mindset. Which brings us to the core requirement. In order to keep changing, growing and evolving in your job (which I believe is essential to success these days), you have to change the way you talk to yourself. Notice your self-talk (the mental monologue running inside your head) on the topic of your job and change. Are you saying some version of, “My approach has worked for years – why fix what’s not broken”? If so, you’re unlikely to be open to needed change. If you can change your core self-talk message to something like, “The world and our company are changing so much – I wonder what I’ll need to do to stay relevant and effective?” then you’ll be much better able to do the four things I’ve noted above: all of them require the openness that arises from curiosity-based self-talk.



And if you find yourself feeling overwhelmed by the idea that you need to keep changing in order to be successful, remember this great quote from Charles Darwin:



“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.”