Strategy for the Long Run: Stage 2
The second stage to increasing the impact of your helping involves being selective about helping people who are primarily upstream from you. By upstream, I mean people who are ahead of you in some way. They’re further along in their career, they have more influence, experience or wisdom. Even people who are able to buy your service or product would be considered upstream.
A word of caution is due here. Everyone needs someone upstream helping them along, and being strategic about who you help is going to go a long way toward making you more helpful and, in a round about way, more successful. However, the moment you focus exclusively on helping those who are ahead of you is the moment you prove you're really only concerned with helping yourself. Keep helping people downstream from you and make it a priority. It’s tough to keep the focus off ourselves, but it’s possible.
Helping upstream is about being prudent. You can only help a finite number of people in the world so you might as well help those you can help most effectively.
Let's look at a practical example:
Let’s say you’re a manager at an F500 company. You would do well to find ways to help those one to three levels above you in the chain of command at your company and at similar companies that you might want to work for someday. Not only can these people help mentor you up your career path, they can offer valuable insights into how to perform in your current position, making you more valuable to your employer in the long run. You’ll learn more skills, gain insight and, since you’re focused on others, have more tools to help others with, both up and down stream, than you did before.
This post was originally posted at Inkliss.com
