#574 How to Adapt Your Skills for Career Growth

**Helen** (0:00)
Hi, I'm Helen from the Squiggly Careers Podcast, and you are listening to another one of our Squiggly Shortcuts. These weekly episodes are designed to be really easy to fit into your week because we make them super short. And today, I want to talk to you about What Got You Here Won't Get You There. Now, this is a brilliant book that you've probably already heard about, but I wanted to take that statement, which I've always found really, really sticky, and think about what has that meant for my career? What are some of the things that I have learned that might help you with your career too? So What Got You Here Won't Get You There? I've got three things that definitely got me somewhere in my career, but then I had to do something quite different to help me get to the next stage of my Squiggly Career. So let's talk about number one. The first thing is giving answers versus asking questions. So early on in my career, I definitely thought that being the person that had all the answers was what gave me lots of credibility. And to be honest, it did really help. It made me a bit of a go-to person. I had a wide breadth of knowledge, and so lots of people would come to me when they needed the answer to something. But then as my jobs became a bit more senior, some of the work that I was doing became a bit more complex. I realized that I just didn't have all of the answers, and that was going to create quite a lot of stress for me, if that was the expectation I was creating for myself. And so I made a really big shift that instead of being the person that had all of the answers, I would be the person that asked the really good questions. And so I would go into the meetings where maybe I didn't know all the details, I definitely didn't have all the knowledge that maybe some other people had. And instead of worrying about that or feeling less confident, what I did instead was I asked some really good questions. I would ask clarity creating questions like, what are we trying to get out of the meeting today? What has worked well before? Who has done this that we could learn from? And I would always try to ask two or three questions in every meeting. And it meant that I added value. It meant that I could have an impact in that meeting, but it came from a place of competence and confidence, whereas I couldn't do that with the giving people the answers anymore. So that's the first one.
The second thing about what got you here won't get you there, from my experience, was shifting from a getting-things-done mentality to a doing-the-right-things approach. So getting things done, I mean, that is so popular that books have been written on the GTD method.
And I definitely thought, like, you know, doing a lot of things, getting to the end of a day or the end of the week and having ticked everything off my list, like, that was, that was success. That meant I was doing a good job. And again, I got to a sort of a pivotal point where I realised I just wasn't getting everything done. And the idea of, well, just work longer or work harder, just work more so that you can get more done, didn't feel very sustainable. And so instead I started to think about, well, how can I get the right things done? And it might not be as catchy, and I don't think it's a book yet, but it has definitely helped me to succeed more in my squiggly career.
One way that we practically do this within our company is we have a now versus a not-for-now list. So you take all the things that you want to get done, and then you review it and say, well, what is important to do now? What's kind of the right thing for right now? And then what goes on the not-for-now list? And it's a really useful way of prioritizing. I think prioritizing feels really practical. You don't need another framework. It's just a simple set of lists. And then when you start spending your time on the not-for-now list, something else has to come off the now list. It's quite a useful tool that you can have in your team. So now the third thing, the third thing that helped me make sure that I wasn't kind of taking the thing that got me to a certain place and expecting that to get me where I wanted to get to, was shifting from nice as an approach, which meant that I would often say yes to everything. Yes, of course I can do that. No problem, I can help. So shifting from niceness, which again did work quite well for me for a really long time. And I enjoyed saying yes to things too.