Ways to move up the corporate ladder

Ways to move up the corporate ladder

It’s the number one thing in everyone’s mind, to make the next best move or move towards a higher compensation within your organization. If you are working for a small company or a large multinational organization, everything is process driven. Like how we need to be organized in our lives for things to work, so is the corporate world and they need a lot more organization and structure than we think. While the management is hell bent on getting more sales and improving the bottom line, there is less emphasis on how to motivate employees and train them to be better leaders and feel great about their jobs.

Its not an easy proposition – to squeeze 60-80 hours a week with all the challenges around work life balance, employee fitness, getting the insurance rates lowered, and creating a happy work culture. Happiness is relative, when you meet people at work – what makes one happy doesn’t make another. So a common paradigm to this problem is incentives, compensation and promise for a growth. However the cycle is too long – and the reward structure is often very confusing to so many workers – Lot of my friends have given up such a concept and only focus on what matters the most, which is what makes the day tick or breeze through the week so you could go party hard during the weekend. Little do we realize that we are all dreamers and we on-boarded with exceptional talent and are here to make an impact. Our roles start big and start waning over time and gets trivialized into converting VLOOKUPs and write fancy things in a power-point slides, since that is what gives the ‘Aha ‘ moment for the customers. 

Coming back to the center of the discussion, how to shine and get ahead?  Most of the work we do, is often taken for granted since that is what we are paid for and we need to fulfill the duties presented to us. However we should not get skewed by what our peers have to say or our bosses have in mind, its important to objectively analyze, and research every effort that we do, and offer value to the team. You can contribute in so many ways, like starting a knowledge portal for your team, coming up with optimized processes to save time, inventing a new strategy to get ahead of your users and competition, and also take leadership and offer to take more responsibility – you are not going to be expected to overwork, however you will get an idea of how much is actually involved in meeting the needs of the business and how often there is that 20% of the team investing their 120% to make things work.  Also, think about starting new initiatives, alternative ways of doing the work, and most importantly, learning about the org. culture and fitting well into it.

The market is moving quite fast and often times, by the time we complete a year, we see 10 newly designed smart phones and 1000s of new AI startups and we all have a lot of catching up to do. So never feel shy to get your idea out there and wait for ‘your’ turn to shine, since by the time you would want to present your thoughts, the corporate wheel would have moved forward.

At the end of it all, once you are able to measure up to your goals, see how your individual contribution has helped in the success of your current initiatives, helped acquire new projects or technologies, or expand your team etc. and spending quality time at the time of your appraisal cycle with your manager will help you get to where you truly deserve.