Career Advice: What do you want?

Ahoy legend. Welcome to another episode of the Team Buffalo podcast. As we've said, I'm your host, Travis Thomas. Today, I've got a another kick a$$ leadership topic to bring you through today focused on a question or theme for the day. Today's theme is going to be a fun internal one as well, I think it's always interesting when we focus the sessions, on deep diving into a particular personal focal area that you've maybe been struggling with, or others certainly been struggling with, and how you can pick that apart to make meaningful progress. That's what we're about here. What I'm deeply passionate about is taking people who are on the track to leadership and those in leadership positions, and helping them understand, boy I need to be doing to be a kick ass leader, and what might I be doing, that's maybe not taking me to exactly where I want to be? Great. So today's theme centers a lot around career. And the question I received to foster this theme for today is, what advice would you have for me in progressing my career? That's the question, what advice would you have for me in progressing and to progress my career? It's a bit ambiguous. And as a good coach, my initial response, of course, was: Are you asking me for advice on how to move forward with your career in this specific moment, or for good career practices? Now the person knowing that I am a coach that would have not given them the answer to their career, because no one can give you that answer. But I can help you be guided on a path. Instead said, No, I'd like to understand how do I get really good at moving towards the career I'm after? Perfect. So this session, of course, will not cover that conversation, because we never do that. But I will talk about some tips and tricks for you about how you can progress your career and what those focal points might be. So I'm going to give you three questions to start with, and we'll unpick each of them. But the three questions I want to start with and don't switch off just because I give them to you not that you would. But once I give them to you, we need to understand what's the context and the subtext to each of those. And when we do that, then we can come up with some good strategies to progress those forward. So the three questions just for a short sharp Session today are, what do I want? 1. That's not a really easy question as much as you think it is. 2. Who can I help along the way? 3. How do I know I'm on the right track? So if we think about those three questions, they each do something a little bit different, but they work together really well. They're quite complementary. What do I want? We'll dive into in a second each of these but what do I want kind of sets the North Star? Who kind of help along the way helps me build my crew of misfits are people who I can serve along the way that will possibly in turn, look after me and help me on my journey? And then the last one, how do I am on the right track? Is my speedometer or map kind of guiding me along the way? And combination of the two showing me what am I heading in the right direction? And do I have the right velocity to head towards the career I'm ultimately trying to achieve? Three questions. Now, let's unpick each of them. Because I think within each of them, there's a lot of nuance. And if you miss the nuance, and you miss the opportunities, you can take these questions away and go, Ah, this, this and this, and you'll just missed so much opportunity to have a real robust response to these questions. So the first one on what do I want? You be shocked. And you may even have the same dilemma yourself, but you'd be shocked at the number of leaders and people just generally trying to progress their careers, that when I say what do you want, from your career, your job, your salary, whatever, cannot give you an answer. They can say very easily what they don't want, well, I don't want to work in this type of environment. I don't want to deal with these type of people. And I don't like bosses that do that. Well, that's all cool. You know, it's good to have a list of things you don't want. But what do you want? Do you want to high flying career in a particular sales area? Do you want to be the head of a discipline in a particular type of organization? Do you want to just, you know, focus on one skill set and do that really, really well. So I mean, you just want to be the most kick ass web developer that you could possibly be. All of those are fine. There isn't an incorrect answer for that. And we need all of those things. But the friction, agitation and concern and questions like What should I do? Come usually from not being clear on what you want. Now over time, that will change there is no way that's going to stay the same the whole time, it will change. It's fine. We all go through that. But if you don't know what you want, at any particular point, you'll be guided down certain rabbit holes, you'll deal with certain things People who are not taking you on the right path, and you'll get distracted by what I call SOS shiny object syndrome, you'll see opportunities to buy things, do things or see things, and they will not be taking you in the correct direction. So I

What do I want? Then once I know what I want, that's my North Star, as I said, I can turn my attention to well, who can I help along the way? You might go, well, Travis, I know what I want. But I don't have a plan to 100% get there. How can I start helping people? Well, if you look after the people around you, you build strong networks of support, you get really clear on the things you need to achieve throughout that process. And you just do the right thing by as many people as you possibly can then that's a huge career accelerant. The mentors I've personally had along the way; all strong female mentors who are really kick a$$ people have done amazing things that I still admire to this day were helpful along the way. But they didn't come from a place of where I started going, well, what can this person do for me? And that was actually never the conversation. It was more around? How do I have positive reinforcement along the way? And how do I ensure that I'm supporting them and what they want to get done? And how does that become a mutually beneficial relationship in a professional sense. And I think a lot of people don't do that anymore. We spend so much time working from home, or working in the office and living in silos and not talking to each other and just passing each other in the hallway, and not really giving a $hit about the other person walking past and what they might be trying to do. Once you spend a bit of time with those people, you start to understand, well, hey, actually, we're trying to do the same thing. And we're not, we're not competition, we're not competitors, we could support each other, we could have each other's back in meetings, or we could be aligned in certain ways that would benefit everyone, but we just haven't made the time to have those conversations. So think about that, as I said, who kind of help along the way. And I promise you, in almost every instance that I've ever encountered is that if you have a track record of looking after people around you, you fight off the kind of villains or the vigilantes along the way who are not doing the right thing. Then those aside, you will be better off for having those people in your company and for having looked over them along the track. Now, the last one is, how do I then know I'm on the right track? What are the measures of success? You know, again, as people I've once coached, people, actually not once multiple times, I've coached people who had really lofty goals, which are fantastic, You know, I once coached someone who was 18. And they had said, by the time which is quite young, in the professional sense, and said they wanted to be a millionaire by 21. Okay, well, that's your goal. It's not my role to judge that goal, whether it's good or bad doesn't matter. So how will you know you're on track? They're like, well, I'll have a million dollars. No, that's not what I meant. And sorry, how will you know along the way, you're making progress. They're like, Well, I'm starting this business. And it's gone pretty well, so far, or it's kind of six months. And and it's got the... I said that, well, that's your business. But how do those things marry up, you know, you're spending all your time, every kind of waking moment in this business. And that's become your real passion point, but we've got this metric off to the side, which is you want to be a millionaire? Fine. But how do those marry up? What if the business becomes a really great business that you love working in? But it doesn't net that kind of figure? Oh, I'd be unhappy? Okay, well, then, great. We need to understand that. Are you building your business to be that type of business? Oh, well, no, I'm just whatever opportunities we get, I'm taking them now. Well, you got to be a little more strategic than that. If you know where you want to go. You need to have progress markers along the way. And then you'll know you're on track. So what are the financial milestones the business needs to achieve along the way? And then you'll know if you're tracking well, right, based on what you can extract from that. Similarly, another scenario where someone wants to be a CEO of a large corporation, and they were at kind of that frontline, middle level leadership. Great, fantastic. Love the lofty goal. Hell yeah, go out there and do it. But my question is, how will you know you're on track? Like, is it some sort of project you got along the way that helps you propel your career forward? Is it something that you maybe get bumped into? Is there a particular role you need to be pitching for? How will you get there? That's the big question. And then the question that we're really asking is, how do I know I'm getting there? How will I get on track? What is the measure of being on track? Particularly? Does that make sense? Of course it does. So knowing you're on the right track is super important to the trajectory of where you're trying to go. And the velocity at which you can get to that particular Destination follows from that. So the three questions just to recap: What do I want? Who can I help along the way? And how do I know I'm on the right track? Obviously, if we were coaching and sitting through this and mapping it all out, you and I would have much more in depth conversations and really unpick the nuance of it. But for today, this is enough just to get you kind of turning those gears over in your head and trying to understand well, what do I want? Where am I going? And how am I spending my time and all those things that matter in answering these three questions. Now, these all feed into a topic, I love to run on the political prowess, you know, making sure that you're harnessing your internal drivers and your external relationships and drivers to achieve kick @ss stuff and organizations and really land your goals, your team's goals and progress your career. We are running a workshop on that you can check it out on Teambuffalo.co/workshops. You will see that on there. It is a great opportunity. Like I said, it's Teambuffalo.co/workshops and on there we've got our upcoming half day workshop on political prowess and leading through organizational politics, which covers on this career aspect for sure. Thank you for tuning in. I've been your host Travis Thomas and I look forward to seeing you in the next episode. Keep being amazing.