Being more efficient and more valuable to your company is the best way to put your career on the fast track. If you are always working hard, getting more done and bringing more value to your company than your peers, you will get noticed.
My wife is a great example of this. She is working as a writer, working on her first book. When we moved to Norway (we moved about 6 months ago for my job) she decided that she wanted to take a part time job.
She looked around and before long she was working as a salesman for a local gym chain. She worked 3 times a week. Every time she was at work she would work hard. She made about twice as many sales as the other salesmen because she was talking to 3 times as many people.
She also helped update their signs, their offers and presentations to make it easier for customers to understand the offer and buy a membership.
After three months she was promoted. Even though most of the staff had worked longer then she, she got the job and no one was surprised, she was doing the best work.
My wife and thousands of others practice time-proven techniques that make sure you move forward:
1. Ask yourself and your boss what the best use of your time is
If you don’t know exactly what your boss feels is the best use of your time and what the highest value activity is for you, ask! It is by doing that or those tasks that you can move forward quickly. Building the most value will get you noticed and to do that you have to find out what it is you are expected to do.
2. Ask your boss to help you clear away other tasks so that you can focus on the highest value task
Once you have found out what your most important task is you will probably notice that only a small portion of your time is spent on it. Talk to your boss about it and see if you can get rid of or delegate some of the tasks to other people so you can spend your time building as much value as possible to the company.
3. Plan your week so that you spend as much time as possible working on the most important task
Make a weekly plan trying to free up as much time as possible to your important task. List everything you do in a week and figure out how you can get the most possible out of your workday.
4. Organize each day
Once you have planned your weeks you can start organizing each day. What is most important? What needs to be done first? What second? Once you have that daily plan, get to it and start checking them off one by one.
5. Get in earlier, work harder, stay later
By working focused you will get a lot more done then your peers. But if you also make the great impression of being first to the office and the last to leave whilst all the while producing at a high rate, you will get noticed, appreciated and promoted.
6. Be proactive
Don’t let the circumstances control you. Instead, control the circumstances. If you want to be promoted you have to show that you can shoulder the responsibility. Ask for more responsibility and when you get it, do it well and do it fast!
Even if you aren’t given responsibility, you can do like my wife. She noticed that the signs weren’t working; the customers didn’t know instantly what they were offering. So she made new ones and presented them to her bosses, they liked them and before weeks end they were using her ads.
The fact that she proved she could take more responsibility is one of the reasons she was promoted over the others.
Conclusion
Your career is your choice. If you want to move forward quickly you have it within you. If you don’t do what it takes, you will not get promoted. Don’t be reactive and let others control your life. Take control of your future and do all that you can to be the best employee and the obvious choice to advancement.
Daniel M. Wood
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