Rise: 3 Practical Steps for Advancing Your Career, Standing Out as a Leader, and Liking Your Life

by Patty Azzarello

Highly successful people seemed to get there by breaking through limitations of how their jobs were defined—by conceiving and doing extra things above and around their job descriptions.

I want to help people recognize that taking care of your career is not selfish. When you start managing your career on purpose, you end up doing a better job because in order to advance your career, you must add more value to the business. In fact, adding more value is the only reliable way to advance. So taking control of your career is not just good for you; your team and your company also benefit because you become more capable and more valuable. Conversely, if you never focus on taking care of yourself, you will get buried with work, burned out, and used up and you’ll miss the chance to grow.

DO Better is about producing exceptional results. DO Better is about working on the right things in the right ways. It’s about rising above the work. DO Better is about freeing yourself from your overwhelming tactical workload and identifying and delivering on the few most critical outcomes—the ones that really count. DO Better is about tuning your job, knowing yourself really well, and putting yourself in situations where you can thrive in your work and accomplish exceptional things. It’s also about how you lead, build trust, delegate, make more time, and build up your energy. Successful people are not burned out and used up. And they are not the ones who were less busy along the way. They deliver remarkable results and leave room to DO even better after that.

LOOK Better is about building personal and professional credibility and becoming more relevant with your key stakeholders. People with high credibility get more done because they face fewer obstacles. Successful people are widely known not just for doing their jobs really well, but for the extra value they contribute to the business. They have risen above the work and proven their greater, wider-reaching value to their companies.

As you advance in a company, success becomes less about the specific work you do and more about who you are as a person and a leader. It’s about your ability to create broad visibility, credibility, connections, and support outside your organization. The higher you go, the more your results come from enabling people who work for you to deliver great things and from working with people around and above you to eliminate obstacles, get ideas, negotiate for resources, secure cooperation, and build momentum on a large scale. It’s not about the work you deliver personally.

But when you are a manager, the value you add to your company is no longer based on the hours you spend at work. It is based on the value of the outcomes you create. If you take an extra hour for lunch and take a walk, and you return with a new idea to improve the efficiency of your team by 20 percent, you’ve added more than one hour of value. If you think of a new marketing approach or customer service offering that increases revenue, or you solve a persistent issue that is holding up your team or business, not only are you not stealing an hour from the company, but you are also building value.

Then, while they were working at this frantic, nonstop pace and delivering all this output, the company laid off half the team. It’s a sad lesson: not only did the company not value all that extra work, but they decided that they didn’t even need half of it! You need to pick where you are going to add value (DO Better) and make sure the company actually values it (LOOK Better). Then do it in a sustainable way so you can keep delivering important outcomes.

No one will ever give you permission to be less busy. It can feel scary to stop appearing really busy if you associate your value with the amount of time you spend working. Just know that it’s not the work that matters; it’s the outcomes you deliver. You don’t win the game for running up and down the court; it’s the points on the board that count.

KEY INSIGHT: The ability to work this way is not a status that is granted to you. These people were not given permission to focus on a few things and drop others. They were not less busy or less constrained than others. They took risks. They worked it out. You need to work it out.

KEY INSIGHT: Welcome to being a leader. This is your job. Your job is not to deliver work when everything lines up to support you. Your job is to get the most important stuff done despite everything that lines up to kill you.

But more important, that’s the wrong job anyway. If you don’t apply strategic thinking and judgment to tune the workload, your boss doesn’t need you. She could just as easily assign all the work directly to your team. Your job is to make sense of it and prioritize it correctly and show how a redefined workload delivers the necessary results. This adds real value—and lets you succeed.

Here is the secret. Your boss wants you to push back. Your boss is expecting you to think through the business strategy and the workload and offer advice—not to just try and do everything. I know that what I wanted from my staff was for them to catch all the work, analyze it, make judgments about business priorities, and come back to me and negotiate. I wanted them to debate with me about what is most important and why and suggest how to rework the plan to do the most important things first. Your boss needs you to help her with her thinking. You are being paid to judge and decide, not to just do everything you are told.

The people who would come back to me with a thoughtful proposal for what to do and in what order, that would be good for the business, and doable for the team, were the ones who stood out as high performers. The ones who didn’t just accept all my ideas and requests, who helped me think through the strategy and priority stood out as high performers. The ones who tried to take on all the work and do everything, resulting in everything slipping, were not so impressive. The ones who simply ignored my inputs, kept their heads down, and did not step up to the strategic thinking and debate were not so impressive either.

Ruthless Priorities always start with the business objectives. You need to educate yourself on what the business values. Whatever is happening in your functional area must be considered in the context of what is most important to the business overall. Make sure you know how the business makes money, grows, and is being measured.

Here’s a trick: If you only think about why things are important, you will always be stuck thinking everything is important. Try another approach. Ask your team, “How bad is it if we fail?” You will then see an actual priority emerge.

You need to go to your boss and sell him on the idea of why it is so important that the top few things you have identified can’t fail. You need to get him as committed as you are to deliver on these few things. You need to inspire him with your plan to overachieve on them and why it matters. Once you do that, you can show him the rest of the list and get his agreement to support you if those less-critical things get done more slowly or at a lower level of excellence.

It’s critical to recognize that your job as a leader is to collect and respond to all of the requests that come from above, but not to try to actually do them all. You are expected to tune the workload, to change the game, to figure out better ways to do things. You need to show your executive management why some things are more important than others, and then to deliver on the right ones.

I don’t tolerate people being late to meetings. It is a huge waste of time. I don’t tolerate meetings without a clearly defined desired outcome. I don’t tolerate meetings where the necessary people are not in the room to accomplish the outcome. I don’t tolerate email in meetings.

In the first column, list the things on your to-do list that you are actually getting done. In the second column, list things that you have committed to get done to your boss or your customers or your peers or your team—but are not getting done. In the third column, list the things that you know are really important, but that you have no chance in hell of being able to do because of the existence of the first two lists.

KEY INSIGHT: Don’t assess your life or yourself when you are in a bad mood! There is no upside and no useful information will come of it. You are not [lazy, stupid, ineffective, unlikable, unattractive, slow, incompetent—wherever your mind goes]. You are in a slump. Wait till you are in a better mood—you’ll get a better and more accurate assessment.

Do what you love for free. Work for money. Change how you do your job to feel less tortured about it—and maybe even feel pretty good about it. Spend the money you make on doing the things you love when you’re not at work.

When you start your thinking, a good place to get started is to look for low-value, time-consuming activities. Identify your most soul-sucking, chaotic, or repetitive work activities. These are the workhorse traps. Use your thinking time to make it a point to either avoid them or to fix them on purpose.

KEY INSIGHT: No one cares how hard you work. It’s about results. Not taking vacations is not something to be proud of nor is it a precursor to great success. This is really only a sign of being so out of control at work that you are demonstrating you are someone who can’t plan and prepare enough to take a week off.

When you step up, it’s not about doing the work, or even worrying so much about the content of the work anymore. It’s about growing an organization beneath you that can get the work done even better than you could do it. It’s about figuring out how to do things better when the world and budgets are set against you, as we talked about in the last two chapters. Your value is in developing strategy, people, and teams, not in delivering the work personally. Do you want that job? What does it mean to be good at that job?

One of my mentors taught me something important: if, as a leader, you are not sure what to do, talk to everybody. You must regularly talk to the individuals who are doing the work and who are closest to the customers if you want to know what is actually happening in your business. This is also how you learn what your job needs to be. In all my executive jobs, I budgeted time every week to talk to the individuals doing the work. I relished the customer visits, not for the customer contact but for the ride in the car with the sales rep. Talking to the people doing the work shows you the way forward.

Much of what working at the right level—and working on the business—leads to is making your team more capable. As a leader, your job is not just about managing the work output of your team. Of course you need to make sure that the work gets delivered, but that is only entry stakes. That is not standout leadership behavior. Your real job as a leader is to make sure your team gets better and more capable over time.

When you delegate to someone, in your initial conversations, make the desired outcome and the time line really clear. Then ask her to come back to you with the plan and milestones. Ask her to define how she wants you to measure them.

Another great approach is to build in third-party checkpoints along the way. For example, instead of you being the one to review the quality for a product support plan, make one of the milestones review and approval by three salespeople, one in each region. That gives you a way to let your people really learn what “good enough” means for themselves. They are growing and will know better next time. You’ve done your job of getting the deliverable produced—and in the process you have also done your job of teaching and growing the capability of your team members.

This is a great exercise to do with your team. Tell your team, “Let’s list the stupid stuff we are doing.” You will get a rousing discussion and a lot of ideas for things you can stop and improve. Make sure you do this at least once a year. Go through your key programs and brainstorm on the stupid stuff you should stop doing and how you can improve so you can deliver a better result with less work or less money. You’ll be surprised at how many ideas you can come up with that don’t cost anything.

Clarity is very important here. You need to be very clear on outcomes, expectations, measures, and consequences. Then when something doesn’t happen as it should, you have a nonpersonal way of showing it and discussing the gap. If you didn’t complete the step of setting expectations clearly and you can have only a vague conversation to the effect that the result is not good enough, it too easily becomes a personal judgment. Clarity of expectations builds trust in itself because people know what to expect and what they will be measured and judged on.

I wish I had learned this much earlier in my career—building credibility should be a specific item on your task list. Good work does not stand on its own. Delivering results alone does not ensure you will get recognized and rewarded. It’s sad but true. You need to take it upon yourself to make your work visible and make it count.

For example: If you are trying to educate an executive team or a business unit manager about your brand campaign or data center investment or vertical market program, remember that those things are not relevant to them. Only their business initiatives are relevant to them. Trying to show and explain the value of what you are doing in your terms will waste time and annoy you and them. Instead, learn about their business and translate everything you say into their vocabulary.

Every year you should have one explicit goal to improve productivity in your team (and in yourself). Your team should be more capable next year than this year. Some ideas: have better meetings, make project review processes more efficient, build a process for handling chaotic ad-hoc work, implement a better measurement and accountability framework, use the Web for better employee communication.… The list is endless.

Make sure your hard work is recognized. You need to be the one to demonstrate why your results matter and how valuable they are to the business. Connect the dots for people. Make sure the points actually make it onto the scoreboard. Otherwise your hard work will just be absorbed and largely unappreciated by your company, and you will continue to waste precious time defending your decisions, resources, and career.

KEY INSIGHT: The trick is to create that opportunity in your own company. Create opportunities to sell yourself to the decision makers in your company. This doesn’t always happen naturally. No one may line this up for you. It is up to you to create that opportunity.

In fact, you are building genuine value by getting yourself and your team on the radar screen. It’s not just about pay raises and promotions. People with high positive visibility have high credibility, and they get all the benefits we’ve discussed—better projects, more resources, more support for who they get to hire, and better cooperation from other teams. So they get better business results.

Also think about the scope of what they worry about. If it is your boss, your issue may represent ⅛ or maybe even ⅓ of what they worry about. But if it’s your boss’s boss, it may only be 1/30. If it’s the CEO, it might be 1/2000. Keep this in mind when you request time or build communications. Be sure to fit your communications into their context and be sensitive to the scope of what they worry about. If you try to get too much time for something that is just 1/500 of what your audience cares about, you will lose credibility before you even get started. For example, don’t ask a CEO for an hour. You will lose all credibility just in making that request.

I have never been refused help when I’ve asked for it. It has never gotten me into trouble or damaged my credibility. It has only improved my ability to deliver. Asking for help actually builds credibility because you are proving that you know something because people see you learn it—and because you deliver! Your management does not want to be surprised by your failure after a long period of “It’s OK, everything is going fine.” As a manager of executives, I am always suspicious when someone never asks for help, an idea, or an opinion. I do not think they are extra smart; I actually assume they are less capable and will not advance because they are unwilling to learn from others. Asking thoughtful questions and showing that you are learning creates transparency and builds trust.

You are expected to be able to recruit the support you need when you don’t know something. Then you can learn how to do the things you need to do along the way and still get them done. Part of the reason you won your job is because people expect you to be able to find and get the right kind of help. Never risk your deliverables because you don’t personally know how to approach or do something. Never suffer alone. Get help.

Be appreciative of their time, be funny or interesting, be proactive, be open to their advice. I am always amazed when people ask me, or even pay me, for coaching and then act like they know everything and have no problems. This is very annoying and a waste of time for both of us. Listen to what they care about and are interested in. Offer inputs and insights that they will appreciate. Follow up and say thank you. It can be just a short email or a handwritten note if that is more on-brand for you. Just don’t let their invested time go by unacknowledged. Let them know that you did something they suggested and it made a difference. Mentors love this.

Follow up: When you ask someone in your network for something (like a reference, advice, an introduction) and she follows through, let her know what happened. Did you get the job? Did the idea work? Most people don’t do this either. I do all kinds of things people request of me and I rarely hear back about what happened. When I do, it is the exception, and I am thrilled. Once I got a call from an executive recruiter while I was driving; a referral I’d made had led to an actual placement, and she wanted to thank me. I almost drove off the road! That’s very rare, indeed.

Photos: It’s amazing how much of a difference photos can make. A colleague of mine at an agency tried to get a response from a prospect for over a year. Finally he decided to attach a photo from a trip to Italy to one of his emails and he got a response within minutes, thanking him for sharing the photo and opening the door for a conversation. Use photos of things you’ve seen and done, yourself, your family. You always look at them when people send them to you, don’t you? It is a real personal touch. But make sure to either send a link or resize them. Don’t email 8 MB photos!

There’s a hard reality we all need to deal with in our careers: even if you do everything right, you can still get stuck. Why some get their breakthrough comes down do two things: imagination and fearlessness. The combination of these two things is what allows those who make it to get beyond what every human faces from time to time—lack of confidence.

His message: Don’t ever back off, even when you are not confident. It never helps to second-guess yourself and approach a performance apologetically or tentatively in case it might not work out. Backing off never makes your performance better.

In fact, being cautious about what you are doing is guaranteed to make it worse. I have thought about this every time I was in a situation where I was not as comfortable or as confident as I would have liked to be about my role, my performance, my argument, or my task, and I can tell you, acting confident anyway makes a huge difference. Just going for it, full on, is always better than the moderated, apologetic version.

Deal with what is overwhelming privately. Don’t cancel meetings at the last minute; don’t act rushed and impatient. Don’t get upset or defensive when people do things that throw you off course. Just say, “Let me take that input and get back to you.” Then go off privately and scream, get frustrated, rework or not. Go back calm and in control.

If you talk about how you solve problems at a lower level in the organization, that won’t get you very far in your executive interview. Instead you need to be talking about how you will lead the people who solve those kinds of problems. Demonstrating that you will work at the right level in the new job is critical.

The more clear you can be about your true desired outcome, the more clear you can be in the moment about whether or not you are wasting your time. You can ask, “Is my role building capital to achieve my desired outcome or degrading it?” It lets you make judgments at different points to see if what you are doing in the moment is helpful, neutral, or damaging to achieving your desired outcome in life.

Remember, your job is to see that the work gets done, not to do all the work yourself. You are a human; you are supposed to be bad at some things. Don’t try to cover these up or just accept the fact that you are failing at them. You are the boss. It is up to you to change and build the organization that will thrive and deliver with you as the leader. This is your organization. This will be a different organization than one that would thrive and deliver well with someone else as the leader.

The path to success is not to make sure you know everything. Sure, you need accurate, deep knowledge about the key factors that drive your business. But you will never get to the point where you know the answer to every question. The fear of not knowing every detail about everything is one of the big hazards that gets you stuck, as we discussed in earlier chapters. The path to success is to retain your composure, make the best comment or decision you can with the data you have at the time, and rely on smart people around you to fill in as many gaps as possible.