The more career-oriented you are, the more driven you are to succeed — the more important it is for you to continually stop, assess where you are, take personal inventory, and replenish yourself before moving on.In The Paradox of Success, John R. O’Neil says that “introspection is a hard commodity to come by in the rush toward success. It doesn’t appear on most lists of typical leadership qualities, yet it is indispensable to sustaining success over a lifetime. To practice introspection and self-observation without distraction, you need to retreat in some manner from your workday life.”

You see, to have a career that works, you have to approach it with balance. O’Neil says “many people with restless personalities seek new experiences as distractions from the real business of life, substituting external change for deep learning.” He further says “though one gains wisdom at last, hitting bottom is a rather hard way to let go.”

An Easy Litmus Test

One way of evaluating whether you’re maintaining balance on the job is to notice how you interact with others: co-workers and particularly your staff, if you manage one. If you treat your staff well, chances are you’re approaching your career with a relatively balanced perspective. How about establishing some easy goals of a continuing nature to maintain effective relationships at work? For example:

• Leave a nice note for each staff person at least once a week. Perhaps you’ll use a post-it pad and attach the note to his or her chair. Perhaps you’ll put it on a desk, in a mailbox, or send it via e-mail.
• Follow the time-honored tradition of praising people in public. If you have to criticize

someone’s performance, always do so in private.

Management guru Tom Peters says to mind your manners. It his 1994 book, The Pursuit of Wow!, Peters recounts his days at the McKinsey and Company management consulting firm. A partner told him, “you’ll be pushing some ideas beyond what people around here want to confront. Make sure you’re irreproachable on the little stuff–show up for meetings on time, dress conservatively and so on.”

Peter observes that too many people diminish their effectiveness by “relentlessly parading their brains and especially by publicly embarrassing people.” He advises, “Don’t be a smart aleck.” Learn to hold your tongue and “don’t ever embarrass folks in public.”

Making Their Goals Your Goals

One of my long term observations is that the happiest, most well-adjusted career achievers developed the habit of making the goals of their organization, department, or division their own goals. In other words, they internalize the goals that essentially have been laid out before them and make them their own.

A goal imposed upon you from an external factor can become your own if you so choose. Hence, a sales manager can set sales quotas for his staff, and each and every staff person can choose to make that quota their goal as if they had set it themselves.

How Can I (We) serve You?

To the degree you can adopt the goals of your organization, or your boss in particular, you can place yourself in a relatively fortunate position. This concept has been embraced, for example, by entire divisions of corporations in pursuit of serving and working more effectively with other divisions within the same corporation.

At Domino’s Pizza Distribution Company, a system developed in the mid 1980’s by then President, Don Vlcek, regarded the division’s customers, or publics as they termed it, as being five fold: the parent company, the pizza store owners, pizza buyers, suppliers to the company, and the surrounding community. All goals created at the division level filtering down to the personal level were geared toward meeting the needs of these five publics. Employees eagerly internalized the goals bestowed upon them because the bonuses and advancement were tied to them, and the organizational atmosphere was one of friendly competition between one team and another.

At Federal Express, the Human Resources Division surveyed members of the Manufacturing Department of the company to find out they expected and needed of Human Resources. The survey showed that manufacturing wanted:

• Immediate updates on employee relations issues.
• A two-hour or less response time to emergency calls.
• A twenty-four-hour or less response time to email and phone messages.
• A twenty-four-hour or less turnaround time for feedback on essential requests.
• Other timely responses for varying needs.

Armed with this information, the top managers in the Human Resource Division converted the needs into goals for the HR division. The division quickly got to work so that all emergency calls, for example, could be responded to within two hours or less.

Making Externally Imposed Goals Your Own

In your own career, wherever you’re working and at whatever level, as you begin to assess the wants and needs of your boss and the department in general, take it upon yourself to make those part of your career-related goals. Besides directly asking people what they want, there are a variety of other ways you can quickly and easily gather such information.

It’s All in Black and White

Read your organization’s, department’s, division’s, or branch’s annual reports, quarterly reports, executive reports, executive summaries, executive memos and so on. These are often available in your organization’s library, or as part of intranet bulletin boards.

You may even choose to buy a share of stock in your organization, so that you’ll automatically receive what shareholders do:

• quarterly reports
• annual reports,
• 10Ks,
• 10Qs, and
• new stock offerings.

Often, the chairman, president, or other top officer has a message at the beginning of such reports. These messages carry carefully crafted gems about the nature and direction of operations.

In Plain Sight

Likewise, look at the memos, reports and notes from your own boss and co-workers within your division and so on. The clues are all there. Obviously, any customer surveys, polls, feedback cards, or feedback data of any kind is worth it’s weight in gold to you and your career.

You can take what customers are saying they want, make the delivery of that service a personal goal, and end up shining in your department in a way few others ever will.

Positioning Yourself for Success

Besides internalizing goals that initially came to you via external resources, there is almost an unlimited number of ways to keep your career merrily humming along.

You have much to gain from affiliating yourself with others, like-minded people who want to help you achieve your goals. Who can you draw upon? Peers, coworkers, and friends; people you meet at support groups, and perhaps a mentor or two.

There are also more advanced strategies for reaching your goals, such as devising your own advisory board, attracting empowered people, or retaining a career coach or life coach.

Positioning Yourself to Succeed

Jeffrey Gitomer, author of The Sales Bible, says that if you’re serious about carving out a position for yourself and your organization, there are many steps you can take, either daily, weekly, or within a time frame of your choice to propel you along. For example:

• Learn to develop your speaking skills so that you feel comfortable in front of a small group, either inside or outside of your organization.
• Submit letters, articles, or even column ideas to trade journals in your field or local newspapers. Visibility helps.
• Join or attend the meetings of the associations and groups that prospective clients attend.
• Expose your talents to others in the organization who may request that you be a part of their team. Volunteer to help a group, stay late, and pitch such help wasn’t requested of you.
• Make it easy for people to get a hold of you. If necessary, print your own business cards that include office phone, home phone, cell phone, and voice mail.

Gitomer contends that if you act on these principles until they become a way of life, soon enough you’ll find that you’re securely positioned in the minds of those who can help you along in your career or, if you’re entrepreneurial, give a boost to your business.