Crucial Work Skills #3: Career Management - How to Align and Apply Your Interests, Strengths, and Style in Your Career

We interview people for jobs on behalf of our clients on almost a weekly basis and offer up for free a host of career insights for professionals all along the spectrum of their working lives.

If you have anyone in your life who is graduating or is recently out of school, this article is for them, we hope it is helpful.

Think like a Start Up

Start up companies are looking for "product market fit" and so are you. However, you are the product, and the company culture is the market you are looking to fit.

While you need to understand the culture of where you are working and this involves being curious and using your tactical empathy skills, in this section we are going to focus on how you can best understand and position your skills to stand out in a sea of sameness.
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This diagram highlights the maximum impact zone which comes after you have a solid understanding of your strengths, your team player style and where those combined skills overlap with an employer’s needs. The greater your contribution the more likely you will achieve personal product market fit.

Individual Strengths
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It is important to tease out the subtle differences between something you are interested in and something you have a strength in. You can be interested in playing the drums and bang away in your garage or sing out in the shower to your heart’s content. Having a strength in something means you are valued in that area relative to others.

When you combine an interest with a strength you have the beginnings of building out your personal product. Interest will help you push through the time and sweat it will take to get your relative ability to others to stand out.

Good questions to ask yourself are:

1.      Where do you lose track of time?
2.      If you had two areas to spend your day, what would they be?

Team Player Style

Dr. Glenn Parker coined this phrase and has a simple diagnostic tool that provides some key insights for people that is often overlooked. The vast majority of us work with others in teams and all of us have built in dominant traits when it comes to working with others.

Having a lack of Team Chemistry is one of the biggest roadblocks in the workplace and many will say that they don’t know how to create it but they know it when they see it.

As an individual why would you leave this to chance?

Understanding how all 4 traits work together will give you the best opportunity to join the right team for you but also adapt as people on the team change. Parker’s four traits are:

1.      The Contributor
2.      The Communicator
3.      The Collaborator
4.      The Challenger

You can find the short survey here: Parker Team Player Survey

Style

The way you get your work done will also have a major impact on how many different places you can have success. Are you brittle and grumpy if things aren’t perfect, or are you affable and can still get your work done in a storm?

In a world where it is hard to distinguish between one person with a great college degree and the next, being flexible and having an easy-going manner can make all the difference.

It will be difficult for you to state this in an interview, but your references should be able to articulate it. Questions that will tease this out are:

1.      What does it feel like to work with you?
2.      What does it feel like to be directed by you?

These are not easy questions but as you do your own inner work it will help you understand others, and this improves your chances of landing the right job at the right company with the right people.

What does the Market Need Now?

Once you have your Interests Strengths and Style defined and added your Team Player Style traits you are ready to overlap those on the current market realities for employment. LinkedIn is the right place to showcase your skills and is also where you will want to start to build out your list of key influencers.

You will want to meet with these influencers to find the best job openings and then seek to earn their sponsorship for the position which is much preferred to mailing in your resume through a job board.

We outlined how to build out a network on LinkedIn in our Crucial Work Skills #1 post which can be found here: LinkedIn Networks

In a future post we will articulate how to use LinkedIn to create a short list of personal coaches who can 10x your ability to get in front of the right people to find the best job opportunities.

Thank you for your readership and friendship!
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Drew & Sara

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