Getting Ahead for Young Professionals
Intangibles and other dark arts for those who want to work and win.
From the desk of James D. Blythe -
So there I was, taking in the sights and sounds of Rome, Italy. Peroni in one hand and an Oliva Maduro Double Robusto breathing softly nearby. As I watched the people mill-about — tourists rubbing elbows with locals as they dodged traffic — I started to think about the potential of young people and the many things said about twenty-somethings in the workplace today.
So I dragged slowly on my curated cigar, let myself move along with the flow of the day, and threw my thoughts back to a younger man. Where had I seen success and failure when new to my career? What had I seen accelerate, or hold back, my peers? Much has been written on “advice for young people”[1]. So, how does one contribute any greater thought, more poignant advice, or elegant rhetoric on such a tired topic?
Perhaps there are a few things that might bear repeating.
If you — dearest reader — are a young person looking for advice on developing your career, this article assumes you are competent, engaged, and hardworking. As such you won’t get any “show up on time” or “eat your Wheaties” speeches here. One assumes you’re already doing these elementary things. Rather, I hope to address the question, “how does one stand out from the crowd?”
Let us, for a time, discuss some of the intangible items that can build — or break — the career of a young professional. That is, someone just starting out in their chosen career who is ambitious and looking to advance up the corporate ladder. Likely, you are direct out of some educational program or schooling. There are many prejudices against twenty-somethings in the workplace. How does a young professional make a name for themselves and advocate for their career?
The maxim of this essay is as follows –
Your reputation as a professional is the single greatest asset for your career growth. There are intangible skills beyond basic competence you must develop to be successful in a corporate environment.
If you are not a high performer, this article will not be helpful. Competence is the bare minimum needed to be successful in your job. Everything here comes after. Additionally, this advice is compiled by my experience working at a large company in a mature industry with an established hierarchy. Those working in more fluid environments at very small companies or startups may find some wisdom here but should understand that there will be caveats associated with the working culture within your team.
What is the Model of a Young Professional?
The goal of this article is instruction in the age-old art of professionalism for young people. To me, the model of a young professional is someone who is “going places”. They are moving up in the world and are ready to conquer new challenges. They are courteous, capable, trustworthy, and curious. They are ambitious without being mercenary. They are direct without being cruel. All the advice herein is targeted at developing such a personality and reputation with the goal of advancing your career.
This advice will be dispensed in no particular order, starting now.
1/10 Life is Unfair
Let’s get this out of the way.
If school taught you that the true-and-just-way of things is in fairness and equality, I’d like to disillusion you of that right now. That’s a lofty goal, but this mindset will not serve you well in a competitive professional environment. It will give you excuses to underperform and hinder you from taking accountability for failures. The reality is that people will disagree with you. Sometimes the bad guys win. Sometimes people make bad decisions for good reasons or good decisions for bad reasons. All that matters are results and “what have you done for me lately”.
This does not mean that I’m encouraging young people to put up with great injustice and intolerable working conditions. Rather, it is necessary that you remove your ability to excuse your own bad behavior, failings, or lack of progress on others. With few exceptions, the company you work for is not good or evil. It simply is. The company, like any organization or individual, acts in its self-interest.
Young people struggle with accepting this. Commonly, there is an expectation that every good or bad action is reciprocated with immediacy. Large, cumbersome corporate entities don’t respond to hardly anything with speed and their decision-making processes can be extremely opaque. This can be frustrating for those raised in an environment that champions transparency and immediate feedback (negative or positive).
In the end, this means “just doing your job well” is not sufficient to get you noticed and advanced within a company. [2]. Is that fair?
Remember, you are not a dog. You should not expect a treat every time you do something good or a rolled-up newspaper every time you do something bad. You must manage this on your own and should not expect other people to shield you from consequences. As soon as you accept that life is unfair, you are ready to begin the journey to become a true professional.
2/10 Be Intellectually Honest with Yourself
You should be intellectually honest with others as well but let’s start with “you”. To be intellectually honest in a professional environment means being able to step back from yourself and assess situations objectively.
A good exercise is to look around the company at your peers. Who is “getting ahead” faster than you? Who is doing so slower? Why? If you tell yourself, “Mike is a kiss-ass, that’s why the boss likes him,” or “the management here doesn’t care about doing what’s right,” start over again. This type of commentary makes for a good one-liner over drinks but clouds your judgement. Try to develop assessments that have meaningful feedback and actionable resolutions.
In my experience, if you can’t take away an actionable item from an assessment you are missing information or are not being intellectually honest with yourself. You’ll find that not only will this hold you back, but your coworkers will notice it and have a hard time taking your feedback seriously. Life is unfair. Being intellectually honest with yourself allows you to ride the waves and make it back to harbor.
3/10 Don’t Complain
I don’t mind commiserating over beers with a coworker but there are limits. Everyone knows who the whiners are at work.
They always have an excuse. They are always being sabotaged by someone or something else. Everything stresses them out. As a young professional, you should be working on cultivating an image of cool and collected competence. Energy and ambition. A desire to learn, even when it makes owning up to mistakes.
Complaining in the workplace is bad for several reasons. First, if it’s a real issue you should be fixing it, not mouthing off. Second, it creates a negative atmosphere and culture within your organization. This effects your team. Third, it’s hard for people to “turn it on and off”. If you get in the habit of complaining — even in a private setting — it tends to bleed into other interactions. This will get you in the habit of complaining more openly which can come out in a customer meeting — be they internal or external — which reflects poorly on you and your team.
In summary, complainers are a drag on teams. Who do you want for a new and exciting project? Who do you want to work new opportunities with? The whiner? Or the optimistic, energetic, earnest young up-and-comer?
When something is a real problem, address it with action. If it’s not a real problem, don’t whine about it. If you can stifle your complaints and be intellectually honest with yourself about the situation, you can quickly decide the best path forward. Do you let it go or does it need to be addressed? How is it best to be productive rather than reductive in such a situation?
4/10 Don’t Take It Personally
I like the age-old adage, “never ascribe to malice what can be explained by incompetence.” That’s a sort of curmudgeonly way of saying, “don’t take it personally.” I dig it. Remember, everyone has their own life to manage. Some people are more diplomatic than others. Don’t ever assume that someone is taking a personal shot at you if there’s another possible explanation. I have known many individuals who couldn’t “let it go”. They took offense to any challenge to their authority, real or perceived. They built bad reputations as a result. Inevitably, it caught up to every single one of them.
No swearing. No fighting. Always take serious disagreements offline. I’ve seen a lot of new professionals get into the mindset of “right is right” and force issues in a public forum. Even worse, they get into arguments with coworkers in front of customers. The reality of working in teams is that issues need to be discussed. Feedback should be solicited from all parties. A decision must be made. At that point, individuals need to come back together, align, and move ahead despite dissenting opinions.
Here are a few tactics to implement the new, benevolent you in the workplace.
If you get “into it” over email, avoid an immediate response. This can be mentally painful but must be done. Read the message, move on to something else [3], and let it sit for twenty-four hours. If it is urgent, it may be best to have a phone call with the person or a face-to-face discussion. A personal touch can diffuse many situations so long as you’re willing to have an open and earnest discussion.
If the altercation happens in-person or over the phone, that’s a little trickier. In those instances, politely and gracefully disengage. How does one accomplish this? My preference is to acknowledge the disagreement and ask to set a separate discussion or meeting to hash things out. That way, you and the offending individual can talk one-on-one without derailing the rest of the team (if present). Something along the lines of, “that’s an interesting point. I hadn’t thought about that. Do you have some time tomorrow to run me through those points?” This lets you take the discussion offline and gives you both an off-ramp from hostilities.
In instances where you are really and truly stuck in a confrontation, you can utilize the Socratic method. Rather than taking offense and forming counter arguments, assume you have misunderstood something. Ask questions for clarification of the issue rather than making verbose and contrary statements. Be careful. People are very good at picking up on when you are being disingenuous. If you use this tactic as a way to pick apart people’s arguments in a passive-aggressive manner, they — and those listening — can usually tell and it reflects poorly on you. If you ask for clarification to diffuse the situation, you need to mean it.
More often than not, it isn’t as bad as you think it is and a quick chat person-to-person will resolve the issue. This is usually why I recommend young people also “just pick up the phone” and call their peers. In instances where things become more dire, there’s rarely any profit in getting into a direct confrontation. It is almost never acceptable to “have it out” in a public forum.
5/10 Don’t Fly Home After the Meeting
This is a great piece of advice I got when I started. An enormous portion of business occurs after hours and outside the office. I tend to find that the conference floor, the meeting room, or the facility tour is largely for the purposes of appearances (at worse) and information gathering (at best). Rarely is serious dialog had in these formats and I don’t often see an informed decision being made as a result. There are exceptions to this, of course.
When you attend an event (on travel or otherwise) and commit to being somewhere else immediately after, you rob yourself of the ability to develop meaningful relationships with individuals. Going out to grab dinner with a client or talk sports over a drink is much more important than new hires think. The point is not to brown nose, impress, or influence people. You need to get that out of your mind. Go out, relax, and have a real conversation. Get to know your coworkers, customers, and vendors. This gives you an informal atmosphere to talk candidly when the suit jackets come off.
Pick-and-choose these interactions carefully. I have never wanted to cultivate the image of being in the “boy’s club” in my business dealings. You should be wary of those that do. A young professional should be respected in many circles and among different crowds. Similarly, I’m not big into doing scripted team building exercises. There are plenty of opportunities to have meaningful interactions in a casual environment which might be as simple as dinner, going bowling, or attending some other, low-key event.
Having this forum is extremely important. Cultivating those relationships gives you people to call when you have problems. It’s also critical to make you “more than some guy/gal in a suit” to your peers and superiors. Word of warning. If you go out and get drinks, don’t get hosed. [4] That is most definitely not good. In instances where conflicts arise, this can also be an effective forum to commiserate offline and show people you aren’t taking “it” personally.
6/10 Make the Rounds
There has been a lot of discussion about the perils and benefits of remote work. One of the biggest pieces of semi-technical advice I can give to the young professional is that you need to get away from your desk. Maybe that’s walking around the office. Maybe that’s touring the shop floor. Maybe that’s seeing your customers and vendors. It’s critical. This means leaving your cube or home office. Yes, for some of us this means getting on an airplane to see customers and coworkers. There are a few reasons for this.
First, this is your opportunity to learn. Everywhere you go and everyone you talk to has something to teach you. If you only show up when you need something, that’s all you will talk about. Alternatively, showing up to “stop by and say hi” you pick up all sorts of useful information. Maybe it’s a new customer opportunity for you to work on. Maybe it turns out this individual has a skill or expertise in an area of interest to you. Maybe it turns out they are a key decision maker on something that affects you. Maybe they just happen to know the best places to wine and dine in Tupelo Mississippi where you regularly meet with sub-vendors or customers. The point is, you won’t know if you don’t strike up a conversation.
Second, much like the previous point, this is a chance for you to be “more than a guy/gal in a suit”. It’s important people understand your day-to-day contributions to the company and skill set. If no one knows you exist, how can you justify to the company you are worth promoting? It’s amazing how much goodwill you can generate just by making the rounds, stopping in to say hi (with no agenda), and expressing interest in what other people are doing.
Finally, this is the best way to understand what is going on in your company and how business is conducted. I don’t know how software companies work, so I’ll reserve judgement on that. If you’re in the business of “physically making stuff”, however, it’s important to understand what goes into your product. I don’t care if you’re in marketing, or sales, or accounting, or legal, or engineering, or manufacturing or what. Even if how your product is assembled or produced is immaterial to your function, walking around gives you a better perspective on your business and its health. If you don’t do this, you really have no idea what is happening within your organization.
Making the rounds is also easier and more natural if you have some other, unrelated reason to be in the area. This means that if you aren’t flying home after the meeting, you can get a lot of extra career value out of an activity.
7/10 Read Everything
This bit of advice has been espoused in different ways, situations, and media formats. That should tell you how extremely important it is. I don’t care if it’s fiction, non-fiction, business, or self-help but you should be a life-long reader. It is a warning sign to me if I don’t see someone with a full bookshelf or assortment of reading materials they maintain. It tells me that the person is not interested in learning.
Let’s get a bit more granular.
First, I always advocate reading anything relevant to your industry. Having a better view of the world that surrounds your business is important. After that, I like self-help books. It sounds stupid, but the point is not necessarily that you “need to help yourself”. It demonstrates a willingness to acknowledge you aren’t perfect. A willingness to acknowledge there is room to grow. A thoughtfulness to engage other points of view to expand your own. That is important to a young professional. A well-read individual is capable of so many things.
This gives you access to insight from outside your area of immediate expertise. They can solve problems that stump others. For those in technical fields, Google Scholar can be a huge asset as there’s a ton of free technical reports out there in subjects that are sure to interest you. For those in non-technical fields, your mentors and managers and peers should have good recommendations. For the rest, the Amazon top charts are usually a good pull.
Let’s do the thought experiment together, shall we? If I flip over to Amazon.com right now, what comes up under Best Sellers? The Creative Act: A Way of Being by Rubin, Atomic Habits by Clear, The 48 Laws of Power by Greene, Straight Shoot by Smith, and Michelle Obama’s The Light We Carry. I’m not endorsing any of these books and have only read a few of them. The point being you can quickly and easily generate a reading list that is compelling and interesting to you. I set a goal to read 22 books a year minimum and blow past that pretty quick. Recommend you set a goal of your own.
You will be amazed at what you can learn and how that will help you as a professional and a person when you read everything.
8/10 But First, Listen
This is a problem for highly motivated young people. Sometimes you need to know when to shut your mouth and take it all in. I think some readers will take this as, “what does a young person or new employee know? They need to let the adults talk and make decisions.” That’s not what I’m saying. Your first mode of communication should always start with listening. Certainly, it gives you the opportunity to learn what others know or what they think. That’s a good thing. You should always be learning. Especially when you enter a new workplace. But wait, there’s more…
If you listen first, you grant yourself a moment to “read the room” before making a fool of yourself. I tell you this having lived through several major blunders. Sometimes the purpose of a meeting isn’t clear. If you’re not leading the meeting, give someone else a moment to set the theme. Sometimes, if you let a conversation develop organically you may learn something. When you talk over people, you set a trajectory for a conversation that is based on, “what you already know.” Where is the profit in that? There are times when this is appropriate, but at the start of your career that’s the exception.
This doesn’t give you permission to get on your cellphone or tap away on your laptop. You need to be invested and engaged in the conversation. It just means that instead of directing the conversation, a young professional should start by listening and then asking questions where clarification is needed. I have not seen a meeting or professional interaction where the participants were annoyed or reacted negatively to a well-meaning question. If that’s happening, it’s a warning sign. You need to assess the culture at your place of work.
Learning to listen ensures that you develop a reputation as a thoughtful, considerate, intelligent person. Young professionals often get swept up in the feeling they need to talk to prove how smart they are to peers. I don’t think this is (usually) a conscious decision. Rather, it’s natural to want to prove ourselves and be excited about our work. I think it’s wise to resist that to some extent. Don’t monopolize a conversation.
9/10 Learn to Read & Write
Oddly, I find that many individuals direct out of college can’t read or write. No, I don’t mean they are illiterate. Rather, they struggle to digest information thoroughly and communicate concisely. School incentivizes students to play for arbitrary points during assignments. If they can illustrate to the teacher that they are “learning” that gets them points. The output is semi-irrelevant so long as it is demonstrated the student can follow the process. I haven’t necessarily seen that this requires much attention to detail either as understanding the “formula” of a successful school paper is relatively easy.
In the corporate world, young people need to work on being concise with their language and detail oriented as they collect information. It is your job as an employee to “do the work”, crunch the data, and output the result. You coworkers and peers don’t need to know how much effort you put in or all the little things you tried (and failed at) before getting a good result. Just give them the bottom line. This is especially true as you begin to communicate with individuals in leadership positions.
You can always expand on technical details later. You can tailor individual communications to your audience as you become familiar with them.
Similarly, if you are copied on an email stream or are in a meeting, you need to make sure you digest all the available information. On an email, that means you should read the entire email chain before responding or taking on a task. In a meeting, you need to be paying attention and taking notes. Word of warning, don’t let note taking prevent you from listening (which is the most critical thing). Consume information critically and communicate results concisely. Learn to read and learn to write.
10/10 Be Uncomfortable
I’ve worked many jobs in many odd-ball areas — retail, food service, contracted event coordination, public relations, and finally a more traditional career in engineering which has spanned several different functions. When I got my first “big boy” gig as an engineer, I felt like a fool. I had nightmares for years that I would make the wrong decision or miss some key information and someone would get hurt. The pressure was semi-soul crushing. That forced me to learn quick and stay hungry and take my work very seriously.
As I approached mid-career, I found that much of that stress had gone away but I also wasn’t learning anymore. That was something I had to fix. Similarly, as I looked out at coworkers, they too seemed to settle into a comfortable arrangement as the years progressed and became stagnant. Don’t do this. Staying hungry is key to being a professional. It means you are learning. It means you are reaching. It means you are growing into a task.
If you want to push your career, I say “comfort” is the biggest indication that something is going wrong. [5] Someone is always out there carrying a bullet for you. When you are comfortable, is when that bullet will find you. It might be that they’re looking to — metaphorically — eat your lunch. It may be that your reputation becomes solidified as the person that does that “one thing” which excludes you from taking on new challenges. Regardless, if you aren’t stretching and challenging yourself, you aren’t taking on newer and bigger things. If you aren’t taking on new challenges and responsibilities, you aren’t worth promoting.
What are the Next Steps?
That’s up to you. For my part, I recommend giving some thought to what kind of person you want to be when you “grow up”. How do you want your coworkers to think of you? What reputation do you want to have at work? The trick is you can’t have a laundry list of items spelled out. You have to prioritize. [6] Do you want to be known as a hard worker or a smart worker? Do you want to be known as reliable or dynamic? Do you want to be known as daring or conservative? Do you want to be known as a leader or a follower or a facilitator?
Every year — be it as part of your official goal setting or some private standard — pick one area of your reputation to focus on. It should have some tangible goal with an obvious win/lose condition attached. Maybe that’s number of customers served, skills learned, papers published, or programs/clients captured. These goals should be results or performance based and not process oriented. Here’s an example.
Year 1 Goal: Become a respected technical authority at my company.
Metric 1: Publish 1 paper and present at 1 conference on a technical topic.
Metric 2: Complete 3 technical programs successfully — on-time and under budget.
Metric 2: Identify a potential mentor in my technical area of interest and contact them.
Over the course of your early career, you’ll only have a couple items that you are truly “known for” in terms of your reputation. You need to pick what those will be and really focus in on making that a reality. If you are any good at your job, you will tend to get pulled in many directions. Do what you can to learn quickly and get focused soon. You don’t have to exclude opportunities, but make sure you are not letting yourself get distracted by things that are frivolous. This isn’t everything you need to know about career advancement in the corporate world.
My hope is it sets you on the start of the path. Happy hunting.
Footnotes and References
[1] Among this body of work, Curmudgeon’s Guide to Getting Ahead by Murray comes to mind.
[2] The notable exception to this is your first promotion from “associate schmo” to “real employee”.
[3] Feel free to fume in a non-public forum to yourself.
[4] Being drunk in a public forum is not acceptable in most situations, let alone professional ones.
[5] Reference Only the Paranoid Survive by Grove. Not only is it an excellent lesson in “staying hungry” in business but it’s a very interesting look back at a different age of technology and what thinking was at the time.
[6] That’s read “pick one” (thing). There is no such thing as a list of priorities. Like Highlanders, there can only be one. Everything else is secondary.
