Career Advice: What do you want?

In today's episode, I help you unpack tactics for moving your career forward through three sharp questions.

We'll unpack the question, discuss strategies and give you practical tips to take away and apply back with your own team.

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Episode Transcript

Unknown (00:00):
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 kicka$$ leadership topic to bring
you through today focused on aquestion or theme for the day.
Today's theme is going to be afun internal one as well, I
think it's always interestingwhen we focus the sessions, on

(00:22):
deep diving into a particularpersonal focal area that you've
maybe been struggling with, orothers certainly been struggling
with, and how you can pick thatapart to make meaningful
progress. That's what we'reabout here. What I'm deeply
passionate about is takingpeople who are on the track to
leadership and those inleadership positions, and
helping them understand, boy Ineed to be doing to be a kick

(00:46):
ass leader, and what might I bedoing, that's maybe not taking
me to exactly where I want tobe? Great. So today's theme
centers a lot around career.
And the question I received tofoster this theme for today is,
what advice would you have forme in progressing my career?

(01:10):
That's the question, what advicewould you have for me in
progressing and to progress mycareer? It's a bit ambiguous.
And as a good coach, my initialresponse, of course, was: Are
you asking me for advice on howto move forward with your career
in this specific moment, or forgood career practices? Now the

(01:34):
person knowing that I am a coachthat would have not given them
the answer to their career,because no one can give you that
answer. But I can help you beguided on a path. Instead said,
No, I'd like to understand howdo I get really good at moving
towards the career I'm after?
Perfect. So this session, ofcourse, will not cover that
conversation, because we neverdo that. But I will talk about

(01:55):
some tips and tricks for youabout how you can progress your
career and what those focalpoints might be.
So I'm going to give you threequestions to start with, and
we'll unpick each of them. Butthe three questions I want to
start with and don't switch offjust because I give them to you
not that you would. But once Igive them to you, we need to
understand what's the contextand the subtext to each of

(02:17):
those. And when we do that, thenwe can come up with some good
strategies to progress thoseforward. So the three questions
just for a short sharp Sessiontoday are, what do I want?
1. That's not a really easyquestion as much as you think it
is.
2. Who can I help along the way?

(02:39):
3. How do I know I'm on theright track?
So if we think about those threequestions, they each do
something a little bitdifferent, but they work
together really well. They'requite complementary. What do I
want? We'll dive into in asecond each of these but what do
I want kind of sets the NorthStar? Who kind of help along the
way helps me build my crew ofmisfits are people who I can

(03:01):
serve along the way that willpossibly in turn, look after me
and help me on my journey? Andthen the last one, how do I am
on the right track? Is myspeedometer or map kind of
guiding me along the way? Andcombination of the two showing
me what am I heading in theright direction? And do I have
the right velocity to headtowards the career I'm
ultimately trying to achieve?
Three questions. Now, let'sunpick each of them. Because I

(03:25):
think within each of them,there's a lot of nuance. And if
you miss the nuance, and youmiss the opportunities, you can
take these questions away andgo, Ah, this, this and this, and
you'll just missed so muchopportunity to have a real
robust response to thesequestions. So the first one on
what do I want? You be shocked.
And you may even have the samedilemma yourself, but you'd be

(03:47):
shocked at the number of leadersand people just generally trying
to progress their careers, thatwhen I say what do you want,
from your career, your job, yoursalary, whatever, cannot give
you an answer. They can say veryeasily what they don't want,
well, I don't want to work inthis type of environment. I
don't want to deal with thesetype of people. And I don't like

(04:08):
bosses that do that. Well,that's all cool. You know, it's
good to have a list of thingsyou don't want. But what do you
want? Do you want to high flyingcareer in a particular sales
area? Do you want to be the headof a discipline in a particular
type of organization? Do youwant to just, you know, focus on
one skill set and do thatreally, really well. So I mean,

(04:29):
you just want to be the mostkick ass web developer that you
could possibly be. All of thoseare fine. There isn't an
incorrect answer for that. Andwe need all of those things. But
the friction, agitation andconcern and questions like What
should I do? Come usually fromnot being clear on what you
want. Now over time, that willchange there is no way that's

(04:50):
going to stay the same the wholetime, it will change. It's fine.
We all go through that. But ifyou don't know what you want, at
any particular point, you'll beguided down certain rabbit
holes, you'll deal with certainthings
People who are not taking you onthe right path, and you'll get
distracted by what I call SOSshiny object syndrome, you'll
see opportunities to buy things,do things or see things, and

(05:10):
they will not be taking you inthe correct direction. So I

really want to hone in on (05:15):
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, Iknow 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 thepeople around you, you build

(05:36):
strong networks of support, youget really clear on the things
you need to achieve throughoutthat process. And you just do
the right thing by as manypeople as you possibly can then
that's a huge career accelerant.
The mentors I've personally hadalong the way; all strong female
mentors who are really kick a$$people have done amazing things
that I still admire to this daywere helpful along the way. But

(06:00):
they didn't come from a place ofwhere I started going, well,
what can this person do for me?
And that was actually never theconversation. It was more
around? How do I have positivereinforcement along the way? And
how do I ensure that I'msupporting them and what they
want to get done? And how doesthat become a mutually
beneficial relationship in aprofessional sense. And I think

(06:21):
a lot of people don't do thatanymore. We spend so much time
working from home, or working inthe office and living in silos
and not talking to each otherand just passing each other in
the hallway, and not reallygiving a $hit about the other
person walking past and whatthey might be trying to do. Once
you spend a bit of time withthose people, you start to
understand, well, hey, actually,we're trying to do the same
thing. And we're not, we're notcompetition, we're not

(06:41):
competitors, we could supporteach other, we could have each
other's back in meetings, or wecould be aligned in certain ways
that would benefit everyone, butwe just haven't made the time to
have those conversations. Sothink about that, as I said, who
kind of help along the way. AndI promise you, in almost every
instance that I've everencountered is that if you have
a track record of looking afterpeople around you, you fight off

(07:03):
the kind of villains or thevigilantes along the way who are
not doing the right thing. Thenthose aside, you will be better
off for having those people inyour company and for having
looked over them along thetrack.
Now, the last one is, how do Ithen know I'm on the right
track? What are the measures ofsuccess? You know, again, as

(07:25):
people I've once coached,people, actually not once
multiple times, I've coachedpeople who had really lofty
goals, which are fantastic, Youknow, I once coached someone who
was 18. And they had said, bythe time which is quite young,
in the professional sense, andsaid they wanted to be a
millionaire by 21.
Okay, well, that's your goal.
It's not my role to judge thatgoal, whether it's good or bad

(07:48):
doesn't matter. So how will youknow you're on track? They're
like, well, I'll have a milliondollars.
No, that's not what I meant. Andsorry, how will you know along
the way, you're making progress.
They're like, Well, I'm startingthis business. And it's gone
pretty well, so far, or it'skind of six months. And and it's
got the... I said that, well,that's your business. But how do

(08:09):
those things marry up, you know,you're spending all your time,
every kind of waking moment inthis business. And that's become
your real passion point, butwe've got this metric off to the
side, which is you want to be amillionaire? Fine. But how do
those marry up? What if thebusiness becomes a really great
business that you love workingin? But it doesn't net that kind
of figure? Oh, I'd be unhappy?

(08:32):
Okay, well, then, great. We needto understand that. Are you
building your business to bethat type of business? Oh, well,
no, I'm just whateveropportunities we get, I'm taking
them now. Well, you got to be alittle more strategic than that.
If you know where you want togo. You need to have progress
markers along the way. And thenyou'll know you're on track. So
what are the financialmilestones the business needs to

(08:54):
achieve along the way? And thenyou'll know if you're tracking
well, right, based on what youcan extract from that.
Similarly, another scenariowhere someone wants to be a CEO
of a large corporation, and theywere at kind of that frontline,
middle level leadership. Great,fantastic. Love the lofty goal.
Hell yeah, go out there and doit. But my question is, how will
you know you're on track? Like,is it some sort of project you

(09:16):
got along the way that helps youpropel your career forward? Is
it something that you maybe getbumped into? Is there a
particular role you need to bepitching for? How will you get
there? That's the big question.
And then the question that we'rereally asking is, how do I know
I'm getting there? How will Iget on track? What is the
measure of being on track?
Particularly? Does that makesense? Of course it does. So

(09:38):
knowing you're on the righttrack is super important to the
trajectory of where you'retrying to go. And the velocity
at which you can get to thatparticular Destination follows
from that.
So the three questions just torecap: What do I want? Who can I
help along the way? And how do Iknow I'm on the right track?
Obviously, if we were coachingand sitting through this and

(10:00):
mapping it all out, you and Iwould have much more in depth
conversations and really unpickthe nuance of it. But for today,
this is enough just to get youkind of turning those gears over
in your head and trying tounderstand well, what do I want?
Where am I going? And how am Ispending my time and all those
things that matter in answeringthese three questions. Now,

(10:22):
these all feed into a topic, Ilove to run on the political
prowess, you know, making surethat you're harnessing your
internal drivers and yourexternal relationships and
drivers to achieve kick @ssstuff and organizations and
really land your goals, yourteam's goals and progress your
career. We are running aworkshop on that you can check

(10:42):
it out onTeambuffalo.co/workshops. You
will see that on there. It is agreat opportunity. Like I said,
it's Teambuffalo.co/workshopsand on there we've got our
upcoming half day workshop onpolitical prowess and leading
through organizational politics,which covers on this career
aspect for sure. Thank you fortuning in. I've been your host

(11:02):
Travis Thomas and I look forwardto seeing you in the next
episode. Keep being amazing.