CAREER MASTERY : Become Unstoppable In Your Career.

When it comes to your career success and growth, performance may not be everything – Your attitude, your skills, your ability to work well with others, taking up initiatives, all of them do count, but count only after performance.   Without performance, no matter what you do, it is hard to get to the next level. It doesn’t cut even if have a positive attitude or you go out of the way and take up initiatives while you are still struggling to perform well on your basic job responsibilities. 

Without putting performance in the front, you cannot get ahead unless your stars are aligned.

Unfortunately, in today’s dynamic work environment, delivering results is not a straight line. Not everybody can deliver results. In this lesson, you will learn how to channel your hard work in a way that you are achieving what is expected out of you and how to handle the challenges along the way.

In this lesson, you will learn what exactly is over-delivering and why it is important to over-deliver at least occasionally in order to be a cut above the others. 

True success at your job and growth in your career cannot happen, if you just remain who have always been.  For instance, promotion is not a reward for your hard work or your performance. And you cannot keep your fingers crossed and hope for a promotion. You have to make it your goal and do what it takes to land it.

In this lesson, you will learn how to set your career goals while keeping them simple and practical versus the more popular criteria like SMART Goals. 

One of the other major reasons why people struggle to grow in their careers is - they fail to learn and develop the behaviors that are critical for success in their jobs.  And more importantly, they fail to unlearn the behaviors that could be holding them back from moving up.  In this lesson, you will understand how crucial constructive feedback is, while sadly many of us are not really open to hearing anything unpleasant about us even from our managers.   

Your true reputation is not always what you think it is, or what others say it is. But it is what your boss actually has in his mind, but is hesitating to tell you. So, face the reality and then, be decisive. In this lesson, you will learn how to have a constructive conversation about seeking an honest and candid feedback from your boss. 

Everyone around you knows something you don’t. Most of us underestimate the importance of mentors in our careers. A mentor can be a bundle of invaluable experience that you can learn from. They can hold the mirror for you about your future. In this lesson, you will know how crucial mentors are for your success and how you can find the right mentors for you. 

Negativity might be a natural reaction to frustration, but that doesn't mean it's the right one.  Pessimistic people waste a lot of energy being unhappy. They're unpopular with their colleagues because they suck the life out of everyone around them, and their corporate personas suffer because they are perceived as immature.  Unless you want your career to end prematurely, your strategy must be - to kill negativity, before it kills you.

In this lesson, you will learn how to stay positive at your workplace.  But it all boils down to - how you choose to respond to a given situation. We shall some scenarios where you will learn how to choose your response to them positively. Unless you have a positive outlook towards people, they will never come forward to support you. 

If want to advance your career, you have to come out of your comfort zone and take up reasonable challenges. Your managers need to recognize you as someone who can manage discomfort.  Else, you will miss on the opportunities to get on the radar of your senior management.  You have to learn to get comfortable with the uncomfortable. Growth happens only in discomfort. Not in comfort.

In this lesson, you will learn the big picture that the Senior Management has in their mind - the big picture you have to understand in order to connect with them and stay relevant in your conversations with them. 

In this lesson, you will learn how to build in your mind, the big picture that the senior management has and how you need to view your job. Once you build the big picture, everything becomes real, everything starts making more sense.

In this lesson, you will learn how to build the mindset that helps not only be successful at your job, but also attracts the attention of the Senior Management.

To build the big picture, to develop a success mindset and draw the attention of the senior management, you have to first become a WHY person. Whatever your job is, you need to understand WHY you are doing what you are doing.  How is your work going to ultimately help your company or your customers? You have to cultivate that habit of connecting the dots between what you are doing and WHY you are doing it.  

As you keep moving up your career ladder, you have to stay current and keep pace with your industry and your function / domain. Else, it’s a sure-fire way to lose your seat at the table where important strategic issues – like product design or product strategy, technology strategy are being discussed. It's going to boost your self confidence tremendously and can be a game changer for your career growth. People will look up when you talk. And soon, when it comes to your career, they’ll starting think “up” for you too.

In this lesson, you will learn the general types of bosses and the type you should be really concerned about.

Before you judge that your boss is bad, you need to first face into your attitude towards your authority, because it is possible that, the source of your problem with your boss is that - at our core, a lot of us are Boss haters. You will learn if you happen to be a Boss hater and what to do if you happen to be one.  

In this lesson, you will learn why Bosses sometimes act like a jerk and what to do if your Boss is acting like one.  You will learn how to uncover something your boss has not been able to explicitly tell you for whatever reason and if it is really worth trying and resolving the conflict with your boss. 

If you're convinced that you aren't the problem, if it is strikingly obvious that your boss is in fact a pain for most people, then what do you do? Do you simply quit the company to avoid the pain? How do you make the right decision if you should stay or leave?  In this lesson, you will find answers to similar questions that pop into your mind.   

The first building block to lay a good foundation to the relationship with your boss is - Accepting his position unconditionally, unless he is a complete jerk.  Accepting your boss's position and authority can be tricky. But you can do it. In this lesson, you will learn how.

Many people simply get this ownership thing completely wrong.  Ownership is not about working hard and giving your best. Ownership is about taking complete responsibility and doing, not just what you can, but what it takes - overcoming the hurdles, solving the problems along the way, and bringing whatever your boss assigns you to closure, without having the need for your boss to follow up with you.

The quicker you earn your boss’s trust that you are reliable because you own what you are given and you would never put him in a spot, the sooner he'll have less to worry about and hence more free time to focus his attention on other pressing matters, and the sooner you become one of his favorites.

Taking ownership does not mean that you are going to do everything on your own and solve all the problems along the way on your own.  You will have to get the help of your boss when needed.  But that doesn't  mean that you can indefinitely seek your boss’s help.  You need to know how to seek help from your boss, while your boss still believes that you are independent and self-reliant.  Nobody has the time to spoon-feed you these days. Neither will they tell you clearly how you can achieve your goals. In this lesson, you will learn how to balance between taking complete ownership and seeking your boss help.  

Everyone can turn their problems into their boss's problems. But great employees, solve problems.  You will learn in this lesson, how you should work with your boss when you cannot independently solve a problem that you might encounter in your job, while using your boss's time sparingly.   

Being independent does not mean that you stop communicating with your boss altogether about the problems you are facing.  You have to keep him informed of the things he needs to know. But you should never let your boss be blindsided.  A blindside creates frustration and chaos that usually ends up in a major time-wasting fire drill. 

Accepting your boss, taking ownership, solving problems independently, beating the deadlines, having an open communication with him - All of them are a must, if you want to build a strong relationship with your boss and become his favorite, in order to step on the gas for upward mobility.

But, if you want to skyrocket your career success to the levels you have never thought you would, you have to become a trusted partner of your boss.  In this lesson, we shall take a look at how you can do that.

In this lesson, I will be sharing you one tip that works to not only impress your boss, but also helps significantly to improve your productivity at your work place.

In this lesson, you will learn the right perspective when you are asked to provide the timelines, and how you can make that opportunity to the best use. 

In this lesson, we shall take a look at the scenario, where you are not asked to provide the timelines, but the timelines/deadline is fixed for you, and how you have to respond to such a situation to avoid the common mistakes most people make. 

In this lesson, we shall take a look at another scenario - Deadline too tight - a more common scenario these days.  You will learn how to deal with the situation without impacting the trust and relationship with your stakeholders. 

When you are a manager, it can be easy to be a bit rough around the edges and short on patience with your subordinates. In fact, your relationship with your subordinates can easily fall into traps that really damage your career. In this section, you will learn what those damaging traps are and how to avoid them. You will also learn how leadership can help managers be successful in their roles.  

The manager vs Leader comparison is very effective in helping us understand what a leader really means and how leadership practically matters for the success of managers at their workplace and in their careers in general.

A continuation of the previous lecture, the comparison is to make it easier to understand leadership from the perspective of a manager, the type of a manager who does not possess any leadership traits. In this lesson, we shall look at what a leader truly should be, from the perspective of such a manager and understand why you have to be a Leader and how does it change the game for you when it comes to succeeding and growing in your career as a manager.

Most people think Leadership is all about leading ‘others and management is all about managing ‘others.  But they miss the most important part – which is managing themselves and leading themselves. This is so vital for your success as a people manager or a leader.

Not every subordinate of yours would know how to build a rapport with you.  In fact, it’s not a part of the job description, whereas, as a manager, it’s a part of yours.  So, you got to make time and get to know about every individual on the team regardless of their performance levels. In this lesson, you will learn how to maintain good relationships with your subordinates and with other colleagues that will encourage them to go bat for you when it matters the most.

You as a manager first need to be clear about the big picture and you need to communicate that with your team.  You have to explain and articulate clearly to your team the context and the purpose of why they are doing what they are doing as part of their job. That is when they work not just for company’s success, but they see their personal success stemming from it. And vice versa too – they see how their personal success in their roles, rolls up into company’s success