10 STRATEGIES TO TAKE YOUR CAREER FROM
ACCIDENTAL TO INTENTIONAL

Know Your Professional Values

The most intentional and successful careers share a single commonality, and that is the identification of both personal and professional values, which illuminate potential areas of alignment and/or conflict.

How would you possibly know which career path to pursue if it’s not grounded in clarity on what you value?

Decide if You’re a Specialist or a Generalist

One is not better than the other, and yes, you may be both. However, to avoid being sucked into the Comparison Conundrum in a world of increasing generalists, it’s vital to determine your primary path.

How will you identify which path best describes your career and what steps you will take to ensure your multipassionate interests work for you, (and your employer) and not against you?

Study Yourself

In a world dominated by an endless array of books, podcasts, blogs, conferences, videos, etc., it’s easy to find yourself studying other people rather than developing the discipline to study yourself. Intentional careers develop when you build the discipline to enhance your self-awareness and gain invaluable insights about what it’s like to work with and/for you.

How much intentional thought and time have you invested in understanding what it’s like to be in
a personal or professional relationship with you?

Illustrate and Recalibrate Your Long-Term Plan

Most professionals think of their careers in terms of what’s next–immediately next. Intentional careers are built through designing a strategic multidecade plan while still allowing for a healthy level of serendipity and unexpected opportunities.

Have you ever thought about what’s next, or more importantly, what’s after what’s next?

Define and Build Your Brand

How you view your brand is rarely congruent with how others see it or experience it. Your brand happens either accidentally or intentionally; both are strategies, whether you realize it or not.

Is the brand others experience with you what you want and truly need it to be?

Be Willing to Disrupt Yourself

“You’re never in the room when your career is decided for you.”
Horrifying? Yes!
Piercingly accurate? Yes!

Your career will inevitably be disrupted multiple times. Will it be by you or someone else?

Take the Lead With Your Leader

The single most important relationship in your career is the one with your leader. Like it or not, your current leader has a disproportionate impact on the likelihood of you being promoted or considered for new opportunities– both inside and outside your employing organization.

How closely do you know their goals, fears, needs, pressures, and own career-track aspirations? Do you even care enough to find out?

Do the Job You Were Hired for, Plus the One You Want

Too many careers are self-sabotaged by blatant opportunism. The most intentional careers balance a fierce focus of delivering results with a deliberate desire to offer more in their current areas of responsibility. The absolute best way to earn a promotion is to overdeliver on your current responsibility.

Ask yourself, “Does my leader see my results accurately and the same way I do, and will they champion my ambition for growth? Have I provided them with clear evidence that is not in dispute?”

Keep Your Ear to the Ground

Gossip is the most pervasive cultural cancer in every organization. Stay far from it. However, intentional careers carefully seek and leverage “need-to-know information” to ensure adaptability and ”sur-thrive ability”.

How adept are you at staying far from the gossip while still being “in the know?”

Dig Your Well Before You’re Thirsty

The vast majority of open positions are filled through an internal referral or by a familiar network. It’s not just what you know but who you know.

Ask yourself, “Does my leader see my results accurately and the same way I do, and will they champion my ambition for growth? Have I provided them with clear evidence that is not in dispute?”