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Obviously, many factors will contribute to your professional success. Here are 3 of the big ones which are so important that they could be considered fundamental:
Required Skills
Understanding the Business
Behavior
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Required Skills
Your ability to deliver on the requirements of your role is vital. If you can’t do the job, why are you there?
Understanding of the Business
Required skills in and of themselves won’t cut it. You’ll also need to demonstrate how your mastery of those skills translates into enabling the business. This demonstration can be accomplished via execution (doing it and doing it well) and/or innovation (doing it better).
NOTE: specific to Information Technology, the main reason why IT exists is not only to do it, but to consistently looking for a way to do it better. No matter what "it" is.
In some environments, consistent demonstration of your mastery of required skills may demonstrate an aptitude for higher level skills which lead to better enabling (improving) the business, resulting in a promotion.
Keep in mind, as you rise within the org chart, required skills veer away from technical abilities and towards more strategic, business-oriented skills and responsibilities.
Behavior
Required skills represent the WHAT.
Understanding the Business represents the WHY.
HOW these things are done – or HOW a person performs in their professional role - is representative of a person’s behavior.
Without getting deep into the psychological aspects of behavior, simply keep in mind that the perception that people have of you will enable or disable opportunity.
A positive perception = enable.
A negative perception = disable.
That is the reality; fair or not.
However, understanding and accepting this reality will be helpful in your professional progression.
EXAMPLE: Jane was hired as a help desk rep and eventually became the CIO. As such, while she is now responsible for the help desk (among many other things), the need for her to be able to perform help desk tasks is no longer a priority or necessity.
In fact, the less time she spends dealing with the details of the help desk, the better she will perform for the business.
In short: the higher in the org chart she traveled, Jane evolved from a technologist to a business person.
Her focus is now on WHY the help desk needs to do what it does, more so than on WHAT the help desk actually does (that’s left to Directors, supervisors and managers).
Leveraging that example, Jane’s demonstration of her ability to grow her acumen of required skills as well as her ability to leverage those skills to enable the business helped her progress within the organization.
What truly provided Jane the opportunities for advancement were not just the results of what she was able to do, but how she was able to generate those results.
When discussing HOW, we’re really discussing #3, Behavior
OVERLY-SIMPLIFIED
3 FUNDAMENTAL DRIVERS OF YOUR PROFESSIONAL SUCCESS
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