Your career is in full swing. You may have already established your values, career purpose, and personal development in your current work context.
Maybe you make good money to satisfy your lifestyle or immediate goals. You may feel confident there is no reason to change anything. Your leadership likes you, you enjoy the people you work with, and you have work considered important or relevant in the marketplace.
Yet you are curious and motivated to understand what is genuinely possible to maximize your impact. You wonder what else is out there and want to see how much you can accomplish. You want to stretch and see what you’re made of.
Your curiosity about what is possible will drive your plan. No matter your current state, you have a development plan for building mastery, freedom, and legacy for today and the future. You should have a mindset of innovation and a process for your career innovation since it is the business of your life. Your career innovation process should be efficient and effective and increase your performance and potential outcomes no matter the upcoming life change.
As you look for something that will stretch your abilities, look at your Career Plan and innovation strategy. Career plans are more linear, with the option to change and update your plan. Innovation strategies are not linear and not focused on one facet, skill development, or a single outcome.
Maximize your professional inventory by interacting and gaining insights from your current organization. You should already be in the process of sharing and receiving feedback. But you should also understand how you can impact the markets beyond the walls of your organization by gaining inputs from your current value chain – which includes customers, competitors, suppliers, distributors, or private equity AND current support systems in your value chain – such as investors, recruiters, coaches, lawyers, bankers.
You’ll have a pipeline of ideas and concepts to consider and test when you always watch the market regarding your innovation process. The process, not just the result, is meaningful for today and the future. You may find that your next challenge doesn’t come from inside your company but outside.
CareerTruth wants to help you understand what type of innovation you should consider while looking for a stretch assignment in your current company or an opportunity outside. That way, when you observe the potential next move, you can decide whether this innovation is good for you.
You must start by knowing yourself well and having a solid handle on your values and purpose. You must have an up-to-date professional inventory as a baseline for what transferable and scalable skills you must have to innovate upon. You must also have up-to-date personal inventories and personal prioritized goals that allow you to innovate boldly or sustainably, depending on your season of life and obligations.
The best part of any excellent career innovation strategy is openly networking and gaining feedback to improve your ideas. Your innovation and ideas are your currency as you research what is possible for you and get feedback on those ideas. You will learn how to tell your story well and secure meetings with relevant people to inform your ideas and help you understand the value and potential of your ideas – in essence, you.
Many times, we help people bring their innovation back into their situation at their current organization. If you have a thorough idea vetted by the market, you are much more likely to gain adoption. Your innovation process is not about getting another job but your continuous growth.
Your career innovation can show up in many ways – you may have an idea to launch a product that doesn’t exist. You may have a new process to solve an existing problem at your current company. You may want to create a division that does not exist in your current company that makes sense to launch. We call these big ideas.
Treat these big ideas as real cases to solve since they are the core of your innovation. Take your ideas seriously and test them with feedback from others. You are always in an innovation process that directly impacts your performance and outcomes for the future.
The key is to be continually curious so that you are always prepared and doing well with many great options for your innovation. You may never launch or ultimately concretely pursue any of these ideas, but you will expand your thinking, ideas, and network of stakeholders dramatically. The practice of sharing your ideas might be your next challenge that will prompt that stretch growth you seek, or it could lead to a new opportunity altogether. Either way, CareerTruth can help you as you curiously look at what’s next.