Next Move, Best Move

Transitioning Into a Career You'll Love

Kimberly Brown

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781119736233
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Comunicación empresarial

An expert guide for professionals seeking to understand how to navigate the world of work.

Kimberly Brown, author of Next Move, Best Move: Transitioning into a Career You'll Love, leaves no stone unturned with this thorough, expert guide for professionals seeking to understand how to navigate the world of work, from beginning to end, starting with uncovering personal and professional values in an effort to align their expertise and skills to roles and companies that will finally change the trajectory of their career and set them up to be leaders in the workforce. As a former career development adviser in some of the nation's top universities and a diversity + inclusion professional in a Fortune 100 company, Brown has recognized that people work for the sake of working without understanding how to leverage their unique gifts and position themselves for success. As a result, Next Move, Best Move: Transitioning into a Career You'll Love shares transformational lessons to ensure success and puts the ball back in your court. In Brown's highly acclaimed book, a specific, effective framework is unveiled to ensure each reader channels and utilizes their highest potential as they regain control and steer professional opportunities in their favor, gaining key information as to:

• Taking stock of their experiences to ensure strategic career moves
• Discovering how to cultivate and maintain fruitful relationships that support career growth
• Uncovering how to build a two-year career strategy to move you into future leadership positions
• Gaining a deeper look into personal and professional branding to ensure alignment with leadership capabilities and career goals
• Learning how to use their voice in the workplace to advocate for themselves

Part One

You must get clear on where you are coming from before you decide where you are going.

Chapter 1
Serving as a People Leader Is a Privilege, Not a Rite of Passage

Career Affirmation: I will lead my team in the way I would like to be led.

When I started writing this book, I envisioned writing my next book solely about managing people. However, it is especially important to include information in this book about becoming a people leader or currently serving as a people leader because your management experience can be an overlay to your entire career. Sadly, in most professionals' careers, management opportunities have become a rite of passage instead of an intentional move. When you do great work, you get more responsibilities. To manage more responsibilities, frequently you must manage people to get all the work done. In many organizations, upward mobility may be dependent upon managing people, but one of the biggest pieces of feedback I hear from clients seeking more senior‐level roles that involve managing people is that they do not have management experience. It's a vicious catch‐22. The only thing that makes this worse is that managers who have never had a great manager model positive behavior can become terrible managers.

Throughout my career, I've taken the most pride in being a people leader. No matter the individual tasks I have been charged with, executing them with precision has never been a concern for me. Despite managing priorities, tight deadlines, and sometimes conflicting information, I know that I can deliver impactful work. However, nothing has given me more joy than developing talent.

Doing your job is what you have been hired to do; leading people is a form of art in the workplace. As a manager, it is my duty to ensure that the professionals who report to me execute their assignments at a high level and that I prepare them for their next role inside or outside the company. It is mismanagement to ignore that there is a next step for everyone on your team after their current role. Whether that person desires to be in their manager's role or another role at the company, it's important to prioritize his or her development and the day‐to‐day assignments he or she must complete.

When I spoke with my husband about adding this content to the book, he asked me if I have ever had a great manager. If I am brutally honest, the answer would be that I have only had one. I have had several bad managers, one or two good managers, but only one I would consider great. At that time, great meant that I felt protected in the workplace. The whole notion of needing protection in the workplace is an indication of a toxic work environment, but at the time, this particular manager advocated for fair practices for our team, stood up to senior leadership that constantly devalued the work of employees, brainstormed solutions to complex problems, and fostered an environment in which the team would be able to disagree openly but respecting other team members during tough conversations was always top of mind. My ideas of what a great manager is have continuously evolved since that role early in my career, but I define a great manager by the following behaviors:

• Creating dedicated time on a weekly or biweekly basis to discuss my work, receive feedback, and remove roadblocks preventing me from executing at the highest level.
• Advocating for me and my work when I am not in the room.
• Regularly engaging in career development conversations (outside of weekly/biweekly check‐ins).
• Providing consistent feedback on my work performance with specific examples to highlight where better decisions or a higher quality of work could have been produced.
• Providing detailed, written feedback in mid‐year and end‐of‐year performance reviews.
• Creating an environment that fosters collaboration and healthy competition among all team members.
• Fostering a working relationship that allows for co‐creation of ideas, strategies, and joint execution, when possible.
• Providing radical transparency, when possible.
• Allowing me to shine brightly without reservations about my work potentially outshining theirs.

Some will look at this list and say that it is too much weight to put on a manager, but that is why I believe management is a privilege. People leaders need to be held to a higher standard due to the increased responsibility of managing a team. This alone has encouraged me to learn as much as possible about becoming a great manager to anyone who reports to me in the workplace and my company.

During my time in higher education, I always had a small but mighty team to execute various initiatives in the office. My teams consisted of work‐study students, graduate students, workforces for specific projects, part‐time employees, and full‐time employees. When working in an industry with notoriously small budgets, I quickly learned to do the most with the least, including managing small teams to get the work completed.

In one of my interview processes for a full‐time candidate, I vividly remember the day she walked into my office to have her one‐on‐one interview with me. I am known for having whiteboards in my office to map out upcoming projects or systems, and my whiteboard was covered in notes and a mockup of how I wanted my team to run. I was in an inaugural role, so it was crucial that I created a roadmap for my team so we had something to anchor ourselves toward. After interviewing several candidates, I had gotten used to people being immediately intimidated by my whiteboard. While my handwriting was neat, it was filled with ideas, processes, goals, and potential key performance indicators. It was a lot of information, but I knew I needed to get it out of my head to create a plan that was ready to execute once I had a team.

This candidate walked into my office, and she understood the method to my madness that I had mapped out on my whiteboard. After we went through a few of the traditional interview questions, I walked her through my vision on the whiteboard, and she jumped right into the conversation with excitement. Most importantly, I saw that she was excited about working on a team where we would co‐create new solutions to existing problems that had never been solved. She enjoyed working in a white space where the role had a lot of room to grow and evolve versus being contained to a job description that was a bit ambiguous in the first place because the work had never been done. After several rounds of interviews, she joined my team.

Looking back, I was never concerned in our professional relationship about her ability to do her job and execute on a high level. She took on every task thrown her way and improved upon it well past my expectations. We got to the point where she would solve problems without me having to ask. Since I was never concerned about the work, I turned my attention to her overall development as a professional in the workplace.

In speaking with her references toward the end of her interview process, they all confirmed that she was known for making herself indispensable to whatever team she worked on. You could tell that she took pride in not only the work her name was attached to but that she wanted to drive results in a meaningful way. Again, her performing well in her role was never an issue; in fact, I learned that I needed to proactively manage her workload to ensure that she did not take on too much work outside of the assignments she got directly from me or created for herself. I know that any manager reading this would agree that she was the dream employee.

However, what I did uncover is that I had an opportunity to work on her personal development as it related to her unique skill set in the workplace. When someone is known for driving execution in any arena, he or she can quickly become a generalist versus a specialist. Unless you are a project manager or chief of staff, this may not be a great trait to possess. A generalist can do just about anything, which can make it hard to brand yourself in the workplace for more senior‐level roles. As you grow in your career, it is important to have “a thing,” something you are known for doing well outside of task execution. Again, task execution is your job – it is the reason you get a paycheck each month! Becoming a specialist means there is a reason to hire you over another professional when there are two candidates for a role because you have an edge. You have something unique, a refined approach, a special experience that makes you uniquely qualified; you are not just another “hardworking employee” applying for a job.

During our weekly one‐on‐one sessions, I started asking more in‐depth career‐related questions to better understand where she wanted to go in her career. I asked questions like:

• Are you interested in growing your career in higher education?
• Is career services the only office you would like to work in?
• Would you like to prepare for a role like mine?
• What other industries are you curious about?
• When are you generally ready to move on after being in a role for a certain amount of time?
• When you think about your day‐to‐day work, what are you the most uncomfortable with?
• What types of tasks and projects are you great at, but would prefer not to be responsible for?
• What types of tasks and projects do you enjoy most (regardless of your level of proficiency)?
• What skills do you feel like you need to build?
• How do you envision I could assist you in getting to the next level in your career?
• Is there anyone I can introduce you to in my network to assist with your career exploration or development?

As a manager, my goal was to create a safe environment for her to explore where she would like to go in the workplace while working on high‐visibility projects and leaning into the tasks and projects she enjoyed most. This is not to say I never assigned projects that she was not excited about; it is much more about awareness. When you know your direct reports, you can create an environment where they can thrive. In the same way married couples joke and say, “happy wife, happy life,” happy employees are more productive and loyal and they have higher rates of overall work satisfaction. Even the highest‐performing employees will leave a company when they do not have a positive rapport with their direct manager.

Over time, we tackled the questions I listed above and moved toward working on more developmental goals like public speaking, building strategic plans for our areas of focus, leading a technology buildout, and ultimately positioning her to move into my role once I moved on from the institution. We created an unofficial career development plan with milestones, key tasks, and long‐term goals. Sure, we had a mid‐year and end‐of‐year document that was more formal from the institution, but with high performers, there is only so much you can incorporate into that document when the focus is task execution like most performance reviews.

The plan developed through our conversations because we developed a rapport and outlined the end goal for her career. Now, if ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Foreword
• Definition of Career Transition
• Introduction
• Part One
• Part Two
• Part Three
• Part Four
• Acknowledgments
• Index
• End User License Agreement