The Secrets of Your Career Capital and How to Leverage It

Your opportunities to learn is an excellent barometer for determining whether it’s worth staying in any job. Learning is how you build your talent stack — skills, knowledge, wisdom, behavioral traits, and accomplishments. Your talent stack is your career capital. Think of your salary as your return on career capital. Think of the learning at the organization as a dividend. Knowledge increases your career capital. It is yours to take with you. I encourage you to take full advantage of every opportunity.

A great career gives you an ever-increasing opportunity to learn more. Even if you are not looking to change your role, ‘knowledge has to be improved, challenged, and increased constantly, or it vanishes.” — Peter Drucker.

To stay nimble and competitive, many organizations today rely on expert talent sourced from anywhere in the world, in a variety of ways that fall outside the traditional employment model. The globalization of expertise and technology frees up companies to experiment with new ways of filling critical skill gaps while staying lean. You can learn a lot from these experts and become one!

Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish” — Steve Jobs

Jobs was not encouraging Stanford graduates them to go hitchhiking to find serendipity. It was about being a “learn-it-all”, open-minded and adaptive to change. Moreover, perhaps also not letting others define what success should be for you.  In the pursuit of happiness, a sense of security and perspective can make all the difference. A healthy dose of discontent and restlessness can quickly become a dreadful thing due to insecurity.

Career Capital gives you the freedom to shape your path

Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in 10 years”. -  Bill Gates

The more career capital you have, the greater the freedom you have to follow your passions. A common mistake is to expect instant gratification or to underestimate the ingenuity and perseverance required to make big things happen.

Passion built on commitment, mastery, and pride is the key to a satisfying career. In the book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell says that it takes roughly ten thousand hours of practice to achieve mastery in a field. Commitment and mastery take grit.

Angela Duckworth masterfully captures the power of passion and perseverance in her New York Times Best Seller “Grit.” There is no domain of expertise that has been studied where world-class performers have put in fewer than ten years of consistent, deliberate practice to get where they are. Find out how gritty you are with her Grit Scale.

It’s always a seller’s market for outstanding talent

In professional sports, teams recruit the top free agents and reward them handsomely. Their value peaks when their career capital peaks. The surest way for you to become outstanding talent is to increase your career capital. By doing every task as well as you can you will increase skill, learning as much as possible you grow knowledge, wisdom comes for putting things together, making mistakes and making things work, and accomplishments will be accumulated. The final element of career capital is your behavioral traits. You need to leverage your unique strengths and manage the challenges. Failure to manage your behavioral challenges can quickly empty your career capital.

In my experience, average or low performers are the ones spending time on organizational politics. High performers dedicate more capacity and mental bandwidth to delivery and learning on the job and follow a much more intuitive decision-making process. They strive to improve their authentic self rather than trying to look good. Good leaders are not easily fooled. Leaders know that their status and reputation improve by developing high performers and creating new opportunities for them. This is a powerful incentive for them.

It creates an opportunity for you — volunteer and step-up. In an earlier post, I set out that lucky people have an open mind  The more observant you are of your surroundings, the more likely you are to capture a valuable resource or avoid tragedy. Lucky people do not magically attract new opportunities and good fortune. They stroll along with their eyes wide open, fully present in the moment.

The implication should be quite liberating: focus your energy on doing great work, and the rest will take care of itself.

Success does not exist in a vacuum

Get to know your colleagues deeply. Build trust is all about connecting. Trust is the grandest multiplier effect for team productivity (and fun together).

We have long thought about potential as being a set of individual traits: your creativity, your skills your intelligence. However, the dramatic shifts in how we approach work today demand an equally dramatic change in our approach to success. New research shows that if we only chase individual success, we leave vast sources of potential untapped. Our potential is determined by how we complement, contribute to, and benefit from the abilities and achievements of people around us.

The real extent of what we can achieve—requires the help of others. It relies on a virtuous cycle, an upward spiral of potential whereby with each success, you garner more resources, which in turn, allows you to achieve greater and greater successes. The people around you can be your resources. Moreover, you can be their resource, too, continuing the cycle.

When we pursue success in isolation — pushing others away as we push ourselves too hard — we are not just limiting our potential, we are becoming more stressed and disconnected. Our potential is a moving target, not a destination, and it is not something you can reach on your own.

Work the system

Any smart leader understands that people will underpin their business’s success. They give the best people more responsibility. It is my experience that the following are true in every great company.

If you want something done, find a busy person” and

It’s often the busiest person that has the most time to spare.”

If it does not feel that way in your organization today, it’s often self-pressure, distorted expectations and occasional bad luck. Be patient. Learn to love what you do. In most occupations only about a third of the people considered it their calling or an integral part of their life and identity. Make the quality of what you do your primary focus.

This mindset acknowledges that no matter what field you are in, success is always about quality. Once you are focused on the quality of the work you are doing now rather than whether it is right for you, you will not hesitate to do what is necessary to improve it.

Stop comparison praise

Comparison is the thief of joy." — Theodore Roosevelt

If you want to enhance others, do not compare them. Nothing undercuts potential more than comparison praise. However, it is so easy to do inadvertently. Think how often we fall into the comparison trap. When you tell a group of people that only a certain percentage of them can be successful, you are dampening everyone’s drive, ambition, and potential.

The easiest way to stop comparison praise is to eliminate superlatives from our vocabulary — "the best," "the fastest," "the smartest," "the prettiest." All undercut others instead of telling people they are great. Instead, follow what I consider an inviolable law of praise for leaders and parents: Do not compliment at the expense of others.

Comparison in their professional lives torments people. In their book about social comparison, psychologists Adam Galinsky and Maurice Schweitzer suggest that comparison is natural and inevitable, and people should abide by the following rule: “Seek favorable comparisons if you want to feel happier and seek unfavorable comparisons if you want to push yourself harder.”

If your younger self-expected that you would be much happier with everything you have achieved by now, it is likely because you allowed others to define what success should be for you. Take that power back for yourself. Create your own envisioned future.

Never stop learning

The ability to learn things should be your litmus test to determine if it is worth staying where you are or time to take advantage of the freedom to reshape your path. Are you increasing your career capital or not?

As a leader, I have encouraged employees, who were happy and doing a great job to assess if our organization was able to provide them the learning opportunities to be what they wanted to be. I told them that I wanted them to stay. I asked will you still be happy in five to ten years when your ability to grow in the current role is minimized? I acted as a reference for them. Every person I had this conversation with is doing exceeding well in their career and we are still friends!

Most importantly learn about yourself

Oh, would some Power the gift give us, to see ourselves as others see us.” — Robert Burns

My Dad often (likely more often than I want to mention) cited those words to me, when he thought I should do a little self-reflection after not being considerate, having a tantrum on the golf course, or just being stupid.

Robert Burns, the great 18th-century Scottish poet was inspired to write the poem “To a Louse,” after seeing a louse crawling on the bonnet of an upper-class woman dressed to the hilt. The main point of his poem called and those timeless words is how good it would be for us to see ourselves through the eyes of others.

Here is someone walking around like she is the queen of the world, and there is a louse crawling on her bonnet. What a gift it would be, says Burns, to realize how we look to others, how silly pretension is, and how we are all just vulnerable and equal human beings. The next line of the poem shows this clearly; it has been translated as

It would save us from many mistakes and foolish thoughts.”

We are incredibly passionate about Behavioral DNA and the impact this scientific insight can have on you. Using SuccessFinder, we give you the gift to see your traits as others see them. They see your strengths and challenges. You should know too!

High performers in each role share a common subset of behaviors. Our talent analytics compares your behavioral traits and competencies — with high performers in given roles.

Focus on your strengths and manage your challenges is the secret to achieving career satisfaction and success. You complete the assessment online, we then provide you a report and personal feedback via video call. We offer the service worldwide. We’d love to hear from you!