Are You Compensated Appropriately For The Value You Add?

How can I get a hosting job like you? Worked like a charm. I knew it, it was the egos and emotional imbalance of the majority that led to their demise. Speaking of imposter syndrome, we played against the Victoria’s Secret Angels! Steve liked to chat with the audience during commercials, and in one of these chats, a woman in the audience said to him, Hey, hosting looks cool! This idea of wanting to do what seems cool is interesting, said Steve. You know what I think would be cool? he went on. I think it would be cool to be a pro golfer. But that’s not going to happen. I love golf so much I’d love to play it every day, and you know what? I just can’t play golf well at all. Instead, Steve told the woman, you have to dig deep inside, test your skills, find out what you’re good at, and differentiate yourself at that. Here’s what I’m good at, Steve said. I excelled at the former. I outperformed not just the analytical sharks, who weren’t really expected to be good at interpersonal networking, but also many of my smarter and better educated fellow relationship builders. When I broke it down, it was clear that while I wasn’t as analytical as the analytical sharks, I knew the places where I could outperform them.

You Don't Control Your Thoughts

And while I also wasn’t as good at the business development and the relationship building as the geniuses at the top of the tree, I knew I had sharper analytical skills than they did. That particular combination was my differentiating skill set. It is unquestionably why I accelerated at such a fast pace. The problem was that within the bank at the time, there simply wasn’t the opportunity to grow that unique skill set as high and wide as I was ready to. There was a ceiling on how high and how well I could continue to exploit my differentiating strengths. So take his words to heart when you begin your assignment to see where you are in terms of skill set. What package of talents and abilities and strengths of character and traits of personality set you apart from everyone around you? Copy and paste it onto your mind. For that is the skill set you want to nourish and develop in order to propel your career forward and upward. Identify carefully and truthfully the unique skill set that makes you you, and you’ll never feel like an imposter. Then decide if and how you can align that skill set to your current job, your current company, or another situation where it can grow your career. Are you being compensated appropriately for the value you add? Do the bonuses or raises you get correlate to the work you do and the value you bring to it? Are your performance reviews rating you fairly, appropriately, and according to a clear and pertinent set of measurements? Nine months later, I arranged to meet with a senior banker from the corporate banking group of my former employer, hoping she might give some referrals for people at the branch to whom I could make my sales pitch. We talked about data services and about banking, and the meeting suddenly changed into her pitching me to come back to the bank.

My Universe

Her pitch won, and I ended up pursuing an interview to go back to the bank. I wasn’t thinking about the marketplace expectations for my age group or for people with similar educational credentials. My strategy was to go right to a group of recruiters looking for bankers in the area. I reached out, told them who I was and where I worked, recited my performance reviews for the year, and asked each for a verbal offer of what compensation I could expect. If compensation is a key determinant for you, then you want to be able to have an impact on ensuring that it is working for you as it should. If that isn’t the case in the job or career you now have, that’s a message you can’t afford to dismiss. First, it’s got to be embarrassing, and second, there’s no mobility! Where can your current job or career path take you? To answer, you need to look clearly at the opportunities available, at your company’s commitment to developing talent, and at the flexibility and expansiveness within your chosen industry. Ask yourself whether the company’s commitment is expressed in reasonable goals and expectations, with systems of accountability in place and adhered to. It is not unknown for companies to set unreasonable standards for mobility, reward only the top 10 percent, and get away with it. You need to know precisely what support for your mobility you can expect from your boss and even from your coworkers. The heart of the matter is, obviously, highly personal. Your company’s commitment to mobility will affect where you go from here and will define the opportunities to rise in the job or career you now have.

Always Forever Now

Logically, without stretching your imagination too far, you want to assess where you can be fifteen years from right now. Is what you see fifteen years ahead a place you want to be? So play a head game with those future possible scenarios and place yourself in each one of the opportunities you’ve identified. See yourself there, fifteen years from now. What does it look like? After ten years, this was it! This was what I had sacrificed my energy and my time and had expended enormous effort to achieve? And when I looked at where I could go from there, all of the promotions still awaiting me looked and felt utterly empty. I realized there was simply nowhere up ahead where I wanted to go. A career can last a long time, and if you want to keep yours fresh and satisfying, it’s essential to think about exactly where you want it to take you and how you want to get there.