Page 202 - Roy W. Rice - CEO Material How to Be a Leader in Any Organization-McGraw-Hill (2009)

You Manage Your Career and Don’t Let Others Do It • 183

Choose a route with many twists and turns.
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Go in to your boss and tell him what you want to do in your career.
Don’t ask where he thinks you should go. Say, “I take responsibility
for my career. I want to eventually run the place. I have mentors who
give me advice. I constantly study and learn about my specialty, my
industry, and business in general. I’m volunteering for any grunt
work you want done. I’ll clean up the urinal if it needs it. I’ll do any-
thing everyone else doesn’t want to do, and I’ll do it over and over.”
. . . In my 21 years of running the show, no one has ever done this
with me. If they did, they’d be halfway to their goal.

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When the ability to acquire new knowledge starts to flatten out,
change positions.
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Don’t leave until you’ve gotten all you can out of it. In other words, if
you think you’ve learned all you can learn and it’s now a dead end,
then leave. But don’t leave before you’ve got the benefit of the
experience. Some people jump around just because of the money and
don’t get the learning of how to really progress. So don’t leave too soon.

Don’t allow yourself to be moved around solely for the company’s
benefit but do what’s right for you too. Information you know only if
you’ve thought about it along with the benefit of getting other’s thinking.
Don’t wait for the company to give you increased duty. You have to
create your own breakthrough role. Find yourself a new assignment; do
a gap analysis of what it takes and what you have; do something about the
gap; and on your own initiative, persuasively go after the job goal. Oppor-
tunities you go to in your career are the most rewarding ones; responsi-
bility handed to you isn’t as rewarding and frankly often has something
the matter with it.
I had to learn how to run a business entirely on my own, no mentor,
no support. I was with an organization that wanted to start a Denver