What Drives Career Advancement - Development of Skills or Development of Connections?

How many times have you heard this one? “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know.” This  career advice drives me absolutely nuts. It is often quoted by people who are planning to just schmooze their way to a great career path without applying themselves to studying their field, honing their skills, doing some planning, getting some coaching or trying some good old-fashioned hard work.

Do the right connections give you a leg up towards advancement? Absolutely. Can development of strong relationships give you an advantage when planning your career path? You bet they can. However, knowing the right people is not an adequate substitute for knowing the right things. An employee could know the CEO of the company but if that CEO thinks the employee is an idiot then that employee is not likely to see much career advancement. In fact, it might be better for his advancement if the CEO never heard of the poor fellow in that case.

Good connections only work when the influential people you know see you as a talented individual capable of making great contributions to their business. You should be planning to show the folks at the top that moving you along a career path will benefit the company by giving you a greater opportunity to apply your skills to meet corporate objectives. This principle is illustrated by the guidance given in Proverbs 22:29:

“Do you see a man skilled in his work? He will serve before kings; he will not serve before obscure men.”

Kings (or high ranking executives) who are planning to hire and promote people do not do so just because they know them. Leaders generally focus their career development, coaching efforts and advice on people who they know are really good at what they do.

Notice there are two parts to this path to advancement. You have to be really skilled in your work and the folks upstairs need to know that you are really skilled in your work. If either of these two ingredients is missing it will be hard for you to experience much career advancement. If you are planning to achieve them both it will be hard for you to avoid career advancement.

The order of these two factors is also very important. You should not be planning to hook up with all the bigwigs without adequate development of your skills first. If they meet you too early in your career path while you are still inexperienced their first impression will be that you are still inexperienced and in need of more development and guidance. Even as you grow you will still have to overcome that first impression before you will see any advancement. My advice would be to focus on development of your talents first. Get all the coaching and guidance you can early on. Then reach out to the top decision makers after you have improved so they will recognize you as talented and experienced right from the beginning.

So how do you know if you are truly skilled in your work? My advice is to start tracking some type of metric to measure your skill level. What you need is an objective statistic or set of statistics to quantify your development. People too often rely on subjective opinions when sorting out who is good at something and who is not. They follow the path of combining preprogrammed bias with superficial appearances to arbitrarily declare someone talented or incompetent. One person would consider Picasso the world’s best painter while another would say Michelangelo was the best. It is critical to throw subjective methods away and replace them with a precise scale that can be applied equally to different people at different times.

This is really easy for some careers. If you are in sales the natural question is how much stuff did you sell lately? If you are a teacher or guidance counselor you can look at your students’ grades. A coach can measure his coaching skills by looking at the team’s win/loss record. A paperboy can keep track of how many newspapers are on his path and how often they were delivered on time.

The problem is more challenging in other professions. What makes one astronaut better than another? You could measure which one has more training but does that automatically make one of them better? You might go by which one scores higher on a test but will that really provide enough guidance to determine which one will perform better in space? Maybe…. maybe not.

My solution to this dilemma is pretty straightforward. Track whatever metrics are most important to your boss. Even if it seems like the advancement criteria should be obvious you should still ask your boss what the one or two really key criteria for measuring your performance and development are. This guidance could prove invaluable.

For example, think back to our salesperson for a moment. You might think the path for measuring a salesperson’s job performance is to track the total dollar value of goods sold. However, the boss might be focused on net sales after customer returns are factored out or perhaps the development of new accounts or maybe it’s the number of units sold. When planning your career advancement it is critical that you and your boss define outstanding job performance the same way.

This gets really important for a more inherently subjective career. If you are a junior computer programmer planning to become a senior programmer you had better understand what constitutes a great programmer in your manager’s mind. Some software development managers are impressed with programmers who know lots of different technologies, can pick up new ones quickly and can provide coaching or guidance in those skills to the more junior team members. Other development managers base advancement on deep expertise in one or two core technologies. Still other development managers take human interaction, communication and planning skills into account. The point is there is often no standard formula for advancement other than this. The people who move up the fastest are usually the ones who are great according to how management defines greatness.

We see then your task is to find out what the definition of great performance is in your particular environment and to start measuring your development accordingly. The idea is to first get a measurement of where you stand right now. Then keep tracking your performance over time and planning ways to improve it. If you need some coaching or guidance be sure to get it. Try to get a higher score next month than you did last month. Then try to score even higher the month after. Your goal is to demonstrate consistent improvement over time to yourself and to your boss.

Stay tuned for Part 2 of this post where we will look at ways to become more skillful at your work.

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Tags: advancement, career, Christian, job, work