6-Step Plan to Drive Your Own Career Growth When You are Managing Up
So many of us have had managers or career advisors who simply don’t take an interest in our personal career growth or don’t have time to. It’s a real struggle. But it shouldn’t be a blocker to you being successful in your career if you can manage to become a driver of your own career growth and start managing up. So how exactly do you accomplish that? And how do you know it’s the right time to start?
Signs you need to take control of your own career growth
You’re getting feedback from backward channels and not directly from your manager.
You’re getting no constructive feedback at all. “You’re doing great” is not feedback you can act on and improve upon.
It’s unclear how you can get a promotion or obtain a new title.
It’s unclear what goals you should be working towards in a 30 – 60 – 90 day or bi-annual review cycle.
Steps to driving your own career growth plan
Set anywhere from 1 – 3 three career goals for yourself.
They don’t have to be unnecessarily complicated. It can be as simple as, “get that promotion next year as manager” or “develop the skill necessary to become a senior contributor.”
Set up in-person monthly 1:1 meetings with all those who can help you achieve your goal.
Who: This may be colleagues you work closely with or managers you report to.
Why: The purpose of these 1:1s is to drive progress toward your career goals together and review your progress and collect feedback on a consistent basis.
In your first 1:1, collaborate to set milestones for your goals.
Start with explaining what your goals are and ask for the other participant’s advice:
What does success look like?
How would they recommend you go about achieving your goal?
What are milestones they would recommend you set to achieve your goal?
Use this time as a collaborative brainstorming session to discover what your milestones are that you can work towards each week.
In subsequent 1:1 in-person meetings, review progress towards your milestones, any blockers you may have, and collect any relevant feedback.
It’s a good idea to begin the conversation with an assessment of your own work so far and ask for feedback. This opens the conversation so you can get an honest opinion. Timing and order of your goal progress may or may not be important, but what is most important is that you’ve made some progress toward your goals, even if you came up short. This also starts the process of continuous feedback.
**This is also a good time to re-calibrate any goals or milestones you may have previously set.
Be clear in the 1:1 meetings that you’re willing to reciprocate in giving your manager feedback.
If your colleague or manager is so willing to help you achieve your goals, be clear that you are willing to reciprocate, whether it be goal setting or giving continuous feedback.
This is for both you and your manager/colleague. If you two want to work better together, then this is what needs to be done.
Document it all at the moment so that when it comes time for your performance review, you can prepare your own assessment in support of your career advancement.
At the end of the day, you and you alone are most interested in your career. Everyone at work, especially your manager, has a lot going on and they often forget the details of your project or the progress you’ve made.
You’ve set your own goals, you have documented your progress, and you have collected all the continuous feedback you need for an effective performance calibration review. When you bring this all to a performance review, nothing should be a surprise anymore to you or your manager.