The ONE Factor that Matters Most in Your Career!

Tweet: During job change the one factor that matters is your career momentum. If it is tanking, rebuilding your momentum can help you move forward.

As a career coach I am in the business of helping my clients to grow their careers, be engaged in their pursuits, and to guide them in choosing the right options when they feel that they are at crossroads. With the strong undercurrents of many structural forces in how jobs are getting defined and redefined due to technology, market, and geo-political shifts, professionals are often concerned about how to deal with these shifts and how to keep their careers on track.

One of the common client stereotypes is one who feels stuck in their job and sees no way to get to their next level. Their everyday role also becomes increasingly more routine, sucking any excitement out in their work. When they get into this spiral other things also start going in the wrong direction for them: they start getting poor performance reviews, their colleagues and superiors start giving them busy work and end up taking the spotlight for themselves when their projects succeed. It is at this point when these despaired clients come to me for help in finding themselves a new job that they expect would change their career trajectory and put them on a path where they would again control their career destiny.

The problem with this approach is when you lose momentum in your current role it is difficult to make a meaningful change that will put you on an upward career trajectory, allowing you to build a meaningful recovery plan. The interview and selection process for your next job will inevitably put you in a position of a disadvantage and culminate into another job that will not provide you the career relief you were hoping for. In such situations you must start all over again in a new place re-establishing your credibility and taking a chance that the new job would offer you what you came looking for. Often, this just does not work as youd expect.

So, what is the best way to get out of job and career funk, where things are spiraling down and you have lost any ability to recover from it? Looking outside as an escape from your plight by finding another job is the wrong thing to go after for the reasons just mentioned. So, what is the Silver Bullet when you are stuck in such a situation?

The single most critical factor in a career where you feel you are in control is your career momentum. What is career momentum? It is your ability to have control in how you get assignments in your work, how you deliver on your assignments, and how they impact your workgroup, department, and your company.

A person with a good career momentum will have their rsum communicate to the recruiter or a hiring manager with a very different energy that one without it. Also, how they present themselves throughout the selection process will make a difference in the outcome of that process because those interviewing them will see that difference. Additionally, when you have this momentum you would be more desirable to your current employer and you may not even have to be in a position to be looking outside for another job in the first place!

So, what must you do to build your career momentum right where you are, despite all the negative forces swirling around you in your current job? Here is the list of to dos that has worked for my clients:
1.As you keep doing your day job identify what is missing from your work group that if you decide to take it on, will make an impact in your groups overall work or how it produces that work. For example, if you are Project Manager, identify how many projects are late, miss the target deliverables, and get off-track during the past and find a pattern from these variances. Late project may result from lack of proper tools to manage existing projects or from lack of status visibility to management. In such a case identify ways to bring in some new project management tools and develop visible dashboards so that higher-ups are aware of which projects are on track and which ones are likely to get off track. Approach your boss and propose a solution to this problem and provide a plan that is practicable. Work with them to get it approved and find resources to implement that plan. Once it is in place and working it will transform the way your work group delivers projects.
2.Go outside your work group and talk to other groups that either deliver or receive work from your group. Here, you have two avenues to make a mark: the group that delivers work to you and the group that receives your work. Make a list of improvements that are apparent to people in both these groups and prioritize them. The higher priority must be given to tasks that make your work group look good and your boss a hero. Taking this list to your boss can result in your being assigned to a new task of your design that will change the way your work group comes across to other groups within your ecosystem.
3.Next, move up the food chain and uncover what else your work group could be doing, as you get closer to the customer (or supplier) and identify one or two critical items that your work group could change to make a difference to that final experience.
4.Talk to your boss and understand how the company (or their boss) measures the performance of your department. Find out what one or two factors you can work on that will move the needle on those factors in the right direction for your boss and for your department. Since this is in the interest of what is important to your boss you are likely to get all their support in your carrying out that initiative. Deliver on it and measure the before and after parameters, so you have the ammunition you need for your next rsum version.
5.Once you have taken this initiative youll have built significant career momentum and made yourself visible, not only within your own work group, but with others as well that touch upon yours. Now you have enough material for your rsum to make it more marketable and to get you the right opportunity to put your career in the upward trajectory.

Career momentum is one of those factors most overlooked in how professionals manage their careers, especially when they want to make a change. What helps in deciding whether to make such a change is first to ask yourself the key question: Am I running away from something or am I going after something desirable? If you ARE running away from something, first figure out how to define it (see my last blog: Name it to Tame it), conquer it right where you are, and then decide if you should still make a change. When you use this mindset, change will attract you, rather than your chasing an elusive change. If you follow this path you can recover your lost career momentum and take charge of your career in more ways than one; you’ll have conquered yourself in the process! If you follow this path you can recover your lost career momentum and take charge of your career in more ways than one!

Good luck!

About Author

Dilip has distinguished himself as LinkedIn’s #1 career coach from among a global pool of over 1,000 peers ever since LinkedIn started ranking them professionally (LinkedIn selected 23 categories of professionals for this ranking and published this ranking from 2006 until 2012). Having worked with over 6,000 clients from all walks of professions and having worked with nearly the entire spectrum of age groups—from high-school graduates about to enter college to those in their 70s, not knowing what to do with their retirement—Dilip has developed a unique approach to bringing meaning to their professional and personal lives. Dilip’s professional success lies in his ability to codify what he has learned in his own varied life (he has changed careers four times and is currently in his fifth) and from those of his clients, and to apply the essence of that learning to each coaching situation. After getting his B.Tech. (Honors) from IIT-Bombay and Master’s in electrical engineering(MSEE) from Stanford University, Dilip worked at various organizations, starting as an individual contributor and then progressing to head an engineering organization of a division of a high-tech company, with $2B in sales, in California’s Silicon Valley. His current interest in coaching resulted from his career experiences spanning nearly four decades, at four very diverse organizations–and industries, including a major conglomerate in India, and from what it takes to re-invent oneself time and again, especially after a lay-off and with constraints that are beyond your control. During the 45-plus years since his graduation, Dilip has reinvented himself time and again to explore new career horizons. When he left the corporate world, as head of engineering of a technology company, he started his own technology consulting business, helping high-tech and biotech companies streamline their product development processes. Dilip’s third career was working as a marketing consultant helping Fortune-500 companies dramatically improve their sales, based on a novel concept. It is during this work that Dilip realized that the greatest challenge most corporations face is available leadership resources and effectiveness; too many followers looking up to rudderless leadership. Dilip then decided to work with corporations helping them understand the leadership process and how to increase leadership effectiveness at every level. Soon afterwards, when the job-market tanked in Silicon Valley in 2001, Dilip changed his career track yet again and decided to work initially with many high-tech refugees, who wanted expert guidance in their reinvention and reemployment. Quickly, Dilip expanded his practice to help professionals from all walks of life. Now in his fifth career, Dilip works with professionals in the Silicon Valley and around the world helping with reinvention to get their dream jobs or vocations. As a career counselor and life coach, Dilip’s focus has been career transitions for professionals at all levels and engaging them in a purposeful pursuit. Working with them, he has developed many groundbreaking approaches to career transition that are now published in five books, his weekly blogs, and hundreds of articles. He has worked with those looking for a change in their careers–re-invention–and jobs at levels ranging from CEOs to hospital orderlies. He has developed numerous seminars and workshops to complement his individual coaching for helping others with making career and life transitions. Dilip’s central theme in his practice is to help clients discover their latent genius and then build a value proposition around it to articulate a strong verbal brand. Throughout this journey, Dilip has come up with many groundbreaking practices such as an Inductive Résumé and the Genius Extraction Tool. Dilip owns two patents, has two publications in the Harvard Business Review and has led a CEO roundtable for Chief Executive on Customer Loyalty. Both Amazon and B&N list numerous reviews on his five books. Dilip is also listed in Who’s Who, has appeared several times on CNN Headline News/Comcast Local Edition, as well as in the San Francisco Chronicle in its career columns. Dilip is a contributing writer to several publications. Dilip is a sought-after speaker at public and private forums on jobs, careers, leadership challenges, and how to be an effective leader.

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