Sales people often ask about career progression thinking that somehow it is separate from progression in the rest of their lives and that it exists outside of themselves. In other words progression is a feature of a company more than a personal characteristic.
In the background they are probably asking about money and status which is to be expected and indeed welcomed. But they don’t necessarily understand that career progression and development is closely related to personal progression and development.
At this point we mention again the word that comes up most often in relationships of all kinds – trust.
In this diagram you can see where people fit on the trust scale. The degree to which you can be trusted correlates very highly with the amount of status and probably money that you will have confered on you.
Early on as a baby you are not trusted with anything. And then as a child you might hopefully be trusted to tie your own shoe laces and get a snack from the fridge. As a teenager you might be trusted with pocket money but not the family finances. As you leave home – perhaps become a student or get a job for the first time – you are trusted with your own finances. Later, people might trust you with their emotions and you might get a partner and that partner might trust you to become a parent and look after children. Maybe at work you might be entrusted with a couple of employees to look after and train, or a large group of valuable customers. As life progresses you are given more and more valuable resources to look after until ultimately you might become someone looking after thousands of people and billions of pounds.
It’s all about trust and what can be entrusted to you. No one is going to entrust valuable company resources to you if you can’t even look after yourself. Ask yourself, if someone gives me something to look after, and they go away for a while, when they come back, is that something in better shape than before they gave it to me? What is my reputation for being able to look after people, cash, resources? How can I improve that reputation?
It’s a fact that the people who get promoted are the ones that prove themselves able to take on ever increasing amounts of responsibility and look after an ever increasing range and value of resources.
Summary; Career progression is something you make happen by becoming able to look after ever greater amounts of resources, people, customers, suppliers, revenue, cash, budgets etc. It isn’t a feature of your employers organisation.
Action; Ask yourself – what is in my care? Anything? Can I learn to look after the things around me? Will people see that I can be trusted to look after things, people, resources? Because if they do, then I will progress. My relationships will progress at home and at work.
Note for employers; A great question to ask in an interview. What are you responsible for? What are you trusted to look after?
