Clients often approach me to tell them my secret sauce to their career advancement and success. The secret: there is no secret. It is diligence in certain areas of your work and knowing how to adjust your learning to make yourself “learning enabled” and a highly branded professional. Adult learning disabilities can be crippling to one’s career and also devastating to their organizations if they hold leadership positions in their company. Organizational learning disabilities can be crippling to its business.

So, what are the top 10 career accelerators that anyone can focus on as individuals to help them achieve rapid career and personal growth? Here is my list:

1. Technical Domain Mastery: During the first phase of your career at any stage of your life (people often change careers throughout their life; I’ve changed four so far and am mastering my fifth) become the top performer in your field of endeavor. There is no reward for “also-rans;” only for the ones at the top of any field of endeavor. This requires not just hard work, which is the price of entry or sine qua non, but an ability to be highly differentiated in how you ply your trade.

   In keeping up with your technical domain and expertise, having a growth mindset is essential. A fixed mindset will quickly tank your own abilities to keep up with the advancing march of emerging skills critical to keeping you up-to-date in your own area of work.

2. Teamwork: In any organization teamwork is critical. Understand how teams work and how you can play the right part to make a notable contribution. Learn from other team members and contribute generously not just in your technical role but also in how the team socially interacts with the members of its team. Become known as someone enjoys working in a team and is easy to work with.
3. Communication: Learn effective communication: speaking, writing, and listening. Your ability to speak well, especially in important meetings; your skill in strong and compelling written communication, especially for varying audiences; and your strong listening skill will be your biggest differentiators as you grow in your stature. In fact, your stature will grow if you master these skills more than any other single factor in this list.
4. Emotional Intelligence: With so much emphasis on IQ placed throughout our education it is easy to forget that once you graduate with distinction because of your high IQ, it no longer becomes the single most differentiating factor in your adult success, as it did before your graduation, and many never get over that hang-up later in their adult life. In fact, the strong correlation of IQ and your academic success (99%) ceases to help you throughout your professional life as it devolves down to a mere 20%. The remaining contributors are Emotional Intelligence (EQ), Political Intelligence (PQ), Cultural Intelligence (CQ), and Contextual Intelligence (XQ), each one contributing in nearly equal measure to one’s success. Each of these “Qs” are developed skills, unlike the IQ, which is nature, not nurture.
5. Career Points of Inflection: In geometry, inflection refers to the change in the direction of curvature. Metaphorically, this also applies as one evolves in their career, right from the time they graduate and enter to job market. This is the first point of inflection that most struggle with. Going from the student mindset (“IQ”) to job mindset requires mental agility that many lack. This is why nearly 30% of the fresh graduates get disillusion in their new job during the first year, many quitting their jobs for a “better future.”

   The second point of inflection occurs when one transitions from an IC to the first-level manager. Here, most (~80%) fail to realize that a manager is required to manage resources and not their own (and their team’s) hands-on work as they did in their IC role. These two obligations are almost orthogonal, yet very few recognize it.

   The third point of inflection is when managers transition to their executive roles (from director to VP and above). In their new roles they must learn how to widen their perspective from focusing on a functional area to now having a wider perspective on their business, competition, ecosystem, and markets.

6. Building Relationships: In any organization social relationships act as lubricants in propelling one’s career without too much friction. Relationship building comes from understanding others’ agendas and knowing how to help others achieve them with your help, so that they, in turn, can help you achieve yours. Without the support of your peers and encouragement of your superiors it is almost impossible to advance your cause and pursue a higher role with a commensurate title and prestige.
7. Creating Accountabilities: As a part of the management process holding people accountable and learning how to use this tool to achieve results without your having to do all the work yourself is at the heart of how effective managers must function. Delegating authority and holding people accountable for their action is serious management work, which most do not recognize as important enough to understand that process and to put the right effort in it to make it work for them. Creating clear accountabilities requires clarity of purpose on the part of each party and enforcing those accountabilities requires managerial discipline and leadership courage. Many are good managers but poor leaders and others, its counterpart. Very few know how to be a good leader and how to manage well to bolster their leadership.
8. Giving Recognition: One of the easiest things to do when someone under your leadership succeeds in their commitments is to openly acknowledge their success and to give them the spotlight. Apart from taking little of your time and costing next to nothing recognizing someone for a job well done is one of the most underrated management practices in the corporate ethos. Yet, people feel more comfortable privately rewarding star players (bonuses, raises) and giving them special dispensations that are not publicly known. Most employees respond more positively to publicly acknowledged kudos than they do to secret rewards only they know about.
9. Admitting Missteps: When mistakes happen, the normal tendency is to point fingers at others to deflect the blame. Another common practice is to obfuscate the details of why and how certain mishaps took place, thus letting culprits go scot-free, enabling them further to continue their organizational ravages, which diligent employees have to mop after, time and again. This demoralizes employee ranks and creates a permissive atmosphere of pervasive incompetence. A good leader admits their missteps, learns from it, and exposes culprits responsible for the mishaps holding them accountable.
10. Succession Plan: One of the most limiting factors in employees’ career advancement is their inability to make themselves dispensable. This is especially true as you assume greater management responsibilities. Grooming your own successors and making sure that you have a clear succession plan is the single most important factor in being viewed as promotion-worthy, even when you have exceeded your performance in all other areas.

Although more items can be added to this list, the above 10 are my top recommendations for how you need to focus on your priorities to advance your career at a faster pace.

Good luck!