Have Fun, Do Extra

TL;DR

Pursue roles that take advantage of your skills, that you enjoy and that are in high-demand (or limited supply). In addition to delivering base expectation of identifed role, find opportunities to deliver “craftmanship” that you are proud of to prevent burn-out and continue to distinguish yourself from others.

In Pursuit of Promotions

I have found that people that enjoy their work tend to perform better than those that don’t. This should be somewhat obvious as no one is likely to excel doing something they don’t actually enjoy. By corollary though, doing what you enjoy also leads to faster career development (assuming performance correlates to advancement). There are many examples where I have had career conversations that have started with the question “What role should I take next to be promoted?” and this feels like the wrong approach. Instead focusing on roles that you enjoy, and thus are a high performer, is the best route to promotion.

Maxmize Your Value

The watch-out to this though is that if you just pursue roles that are enjoyable you may not be taking advantage of your innate talents and skills. You need to add consideration on “how you can create the most value” which typically is at the intersection of something where you are highly skilled and where there is high-demand. In particular make sure to eliminate roles from consideration that either require skills you are poor at or involve tasks that you don’t enjoy!

Deliver “Extra”

Once you have found a role that looks to maximize the above enjoyment, skills and uniqueness you should attempt to deliver “extra” beyond just completing base expectation. I think of this as delivering work that you are proud of - which can help offset feelings of burn-out as well as lead to increased recognition. This can take the form of something as simple as amazingly polished word documents, refined Powerpoint, refactored code or awesomely intuitive UIs. But the focus is on using some of your time to deliver a “wow” that makes you proud of your delivery on top of meeting role base expectations.

Without giving yourself the permission to do “extra” I think you end up missing many of the advantages of having found work that is enjoyable and that you are good at - i.e. there is a tendency to spread ourselves so thin in the pursuit of completing work that we deprive ourselves of the joy of a job well done. This can then lead to mediocrity and burn-out which then can ultimately work counter to our career advancement (and happiness) objectives.

Note: This does not mean ignoring work/life balance. The “extra” should be within established work time. Additionally the “extra” should not prevent delivery of base expectations of the role. The hard part is getting all of this to balance and may require restructuring work as well as scope conversations with manager, etc. to bring to life.