Career Advancement 4P: Figure Out Why You Haven't Get it and How to Get It Right

Struggling in your career with years of work experience and still don't get a clear clue for a brighter next? Here's a universal advice.

Keep in mind the Career Advancement 4P I summarized from my own experience, they're:
1. Personal
2. Professional
3. Politics
4. Performance

Why these 4P can help your career advancement, here's why and how you can adopt in no time.

1. Personal

Everything starts from a personal level, because things are done through a cooperation, collaboration by a group of people who work toward the same objective. Here're the Do's and Don'ts.

1) Dos:

- Personal Care
Pay attention to the background, condition, situation, concern and expectation on each individual, and try to take proper care of it at your best. You're investing in those invisible gains from such effort when your personal brand starts to be created by people about caring others like no others.

- Personal Touch
Try to build your own personal touch with every style, level, group of people, and truly make it a personal touch, instead of a tone or process which makes people feel like dealing with a machine, robot, the latter one does hurt.

2) Don'ts

- Personal Approach
People tend to work by their own experience, habit, or even by simply their inertia without putting into consideration about the most of the tasks at work, frankly speaking, this is risky.

Even the similar, same task, when it's on different assignments, either by instruction or just at a different time, they're "different". Rely on personal approach will always vary with the mood and condition by the person in charge, then the procedure and thus the accuracy will both be varied without a good manner of control.

Personal = Being a person and treating others as persons, too.

So, how to deal with this intuitive response by personal approach, here comes the advancement onto Professional.

2. Professional

After a few years of work, you shall start building the basic set of expertise against your area of professional function, in which, there shall be some specific set of techniques you can handle like a professional.

For example, 
1) Arranging a cross-functional meeting with the well-informed notice and its attachment, where every participant could easily meet and discuss for effective meetings.

2) Taking the meeting minutes with a proper writing format which could help people to check and follow up quickly.

3) Preparing a proposal in a compelling logic that could convince a targeted group of stakeholders to consider, discuss and take necessary action as proposed.

Professional = Universal Practice by Systematic Approach

At the professional level, the key is to adopt a universal practice that could easily communicate, demonstrate, and then empower through the workplace via cooperation and collaboration.

Try to think like this, what makes a perfect professional performance?
A typical answer is, the machine.

A machine, even though, can handle only those pre-designed, pre-programmed processes, however, a machine can, almost, process a stuff with much higher accuracy, the reliability we also called, in every time of its job. The surprise hides nowhere, thus less exception caused.

This is, at most of the cases at work, the key to drive a stuff across people who have different agendas and expectation. Minimize the risk through a controllable process which is open and transparent to all those stakeholders.

3. Politics

How much do you like politics, at work or on public issue? If you don't, give it a chance, because I'm gonna change your mind to turn it into a positive power that you can easily take advantage of it, at no cost.

Politics = Keep People in Harmony (via cooperation and collaboration)

Remember, not everyone who wants the same thing, and pretty much, all are different.

So, when thinking about politics, the priority is to figure out what's the mutual goal, and each one's personal goal/agenda/interest. Next, on how to achieve it throughout a carefully prepared processes and most importantly, its associated communications.

Take out the mindset of competition, even among the stakeholders who seems to compete with each other. If all can work through a NEW proposal to extend the landscape of what all can join together, instead of just eying on the original pie and fight with each other.

This is always a better way to work within a group of people where everyone enjoy a better gain and would be more than happy to contribute, rather than compete with.

For me, this is the definition of politics at work.
Trust me, it's difficult at the beginning, especially the very beginning, almost every single time. However, it's the best way, to my experience, to truly work with a group of people that their afterwards, the performance, can ultimately drive and shine.

4. Performance

Did you ever consider that you're underestimated where no one truly understand and recognize your performance and also your potential?

I did, and always did.

Let's make a quick cut here.
1) If you didn't create a unique personal level of skill set, your performance will be capped at 20%.
2) If you didn't build a sound professional level of skill set, your performance will be capped at 40%.
3) If you didn't manage a reliable political level of skill set, your performance will be capped at 60%.
4) Those who didn't perform well above 60% (qualified) are who didn't master the fundamental three Ps.

And the last, and most important piece of the whole practice, the 4th P of Perofrmance.

So, how to drive all the work effort into a sound performance that could shine and sustain?
1) Learn to master the above three Ps at the major facets of work.
2) On top of the mastery of the three P at work, try to set a clear personal goal that associates with the organizational goal.
3) Review and advance of the lessons learned throughout the processes of practicing the first three Ps.
4) Keep these 4P as your day to day routine, you'll eventually advance your career in some day.

If you feel these 4Ps for your career advancement not simple enough, you don't know how complicated the career advancement is to everyone's life at work.
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Any comment or further suggestion? I'm keen to learn from your input to advance