This is the greatest myth ever told.

Work hard and you’ll be rewarded; is terrible advice for your corporate career; in fact I was told “work smart, not hard”.

I was guilty of this myself; I would work overtime in every job I had, worked to keep everyone happy and shoulder all requests, this is completely the wrong approach to take.

I should have realised something was wrong, when I was leaving later than the people giving me requests; they didn’t care about my work/life balance and to be fair to them, why would they.

Working late does not = working hard, there are three main reasons, I have found people work late for:

You are inefficient.
Systems/process’ are poor.
There are not enough staff.

(There’s a phantom fourth reason…some people just like working long hours: whether it’s to show face, avoid going home or they truly love what they do, these are personal not business reasons).

This applies where people are consistently working late in medium to large scale organisations; naturally this excludes adhoc late work, which we all go through, keep this in mind.

Saying No, tactical complaining and picking your battles are crucial to your career; I made the mistake in my 20’s of working hard, firefighting and papering over the cracks so well, that I didn’t realise something.

All I was going was making it harder to replace me, on top of that, I was locking myself further and further into a role I had no intention of staying in.

I had a faulty mindset, that because I come from the black community, I was the representation of ALL black people, so I had to work extra hard to show “I was worthy of being here” and “you can trust black people”, now I look back and realise how stupid and detrimental this thinking is, but back then I didn’t.

In the end it kept in a job for 6+ years but it took a lot out of me; something people will never know, I remember learning during that tenure that my managers belief was, there are two ways to manage people.

1. You put a carrot on a stick.
2. You beat them with the stick.

Keep this in mind!

Also look deeply at the structure of the place, have people been in the same position for 5+ years? If the staff are very rigid, chances are you won’t be progressing as there will be next to movement to the senior structure.

To get progress in your career, you need to do the following:

• Build your skills, i.e. if the next level up requires SQL, learn it ASAP.
• Go to a company that respects your skills.
• Learn to disagree or more importantly say “no” to people who try to take advantage of you.
• Respect your time, if you don’t respect your time, why should anyone else.
• Learn the office politics, who has influence/power.
• Don’t fall for company loyalty, they are in business to get income and reduce costs, business’ actively work on both of areas, do the same with your career.
• Remember it’s a contract not a love letter, what I mean by this is, you are contracted to solve a problem/need, you are paid to solve the problem/need, if that problem/need becomes redundant; you could be made redundant.
• Process improvement, try and automate mundane tasks where you can.
• HR works for the company, not for you, keep this in mind.
• Don’t become difficult to replace, i.e. the harder you are to replace, the harder you are to promote.
• Know when and how to professionally moan and who too, the saying closed mouths don’t get fed is true.
• Become an acquaintance of the office gossip but never a friend, extract information but never give any to them.

This does not apply to every job role and excludes education, where often hard work will get you better results.

@Brainthrough

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