11 Lessons for Accelerating Your Career

With March being Women’s History Month, I decided to continue with the theme of “professional sisterhood” that I started on International Women’s Day. In earlier posts this month, I shared what members of Citi’s Connect group would tell their younger self about career and money, as well as what advice several colleagues from Citi would share.

To wrap up this series, I invited participants in Citi’s Women in Risk program, which provides accelerated development for women working in the company’s risk function, to share what they would tell to someone looking to accelerate her – or his – career. Provided below is my curated list of 11 lessons distilled from interviews with Rachel Doyle, Bengi Gulalp, Diana Lozano, Elena Sartor, Lu Shi, Barbara Sobala, Maggie Xie, and Ki-sook Yoo, among others.

1. Find the type of networking that fit your style and interests to make the time and effort invested valuable and fun. Keep good connections not only with your immediate team but also outside your team. And, while meeting people is important, cultivating long-term relationships is more important.
2. Take charge of shaping your career. No one else is going to make things happen for you unless you put it on the table. Create a career development plan with well-defined goals and tactical steps for what skills you need to acquire, etc. Communicate it to your managers, mentors and sponsor(s). Review it each year, at least. If you don’t meet a goal, have an open discussion with your manager about what you can work on for next year.
3. Do your job well. People will support you if they think you are capable and have potential. Appreciate every lesson learned especially those that were the most challenging.
4. Go long on industry knowledge and really, really understanding both the big picture issues and the skills to dive deep and understand technical concepts. Real skills – fundamental and industry skills – remain invaluable for sustainable career success and open doors long-term. While there are many benefits that a project or consultative role brings, you also should have the experience of running the show, so look for opportunities with direct end-to-end responsibilities.
5. Chase opportunities and take risk. If you want something speak up, get out and get it. Don’t wait until you think you are fully ready, as it might be too late. You may not deliver extraordinary outcome if you are too careful about staying in an ordinary course.
6. Take advantage of any and all professional and leadership development programs that your company offers – even if participation represents additional work.
7. Spend at least 10-15% of your time working on projects outside the scope of your job title or immediate team, which provide a great opportunity to see the business from a different perspective as well as help you build your visibility and network. These may not come to you, but if you put out the offer, you’ll be surprised how many people are happy to take you up on the offer, but then you must follow through.
8. Identify one or more internal mentors and sponsors in whom you believe and trust. Creating such relationships not only provide you with the opportunity to share your experiences, perspectives and aspirations but also to benefit from their experiences, perspectives and connections. This can also help you get more comfortable interacting with senior-level executives and help you build your fan base.
9. Be ambitious but humble: Make sponsors, mentors and senior managers aware of your long-term ambition. Use the meetings and coffee dates to elaborate your goals and slowly build up your fan base. At the same time, be humble about your ability and the developments that you need. The key is to develop a right balance between being ambitious and humble.
10. Identify successful leaders whom you admire and model their behavior: understand how they operate and what capabilities they have. Project yourself as the one you want to become. As importantly, know whose behavior you don’t want to emulate and keep yourself in check if you have those tendencies.
11. The path to success is like climbing up the ladder – step by step. You need to have short-term and long-term career goals. It is much harder for your manager, a mentor or your sponsor to help promote your career if you have no idea of what or where you want to be.

What advice would you share with someone looking to follow in your footsteps?

Photo courtesy of Citi