019 Kim Meninger: Accelerating Your Career Success

Career Tips & Trends with Tom McDonough & Deborah Burkholder

Internet radio for savvy professionals –
doing work you love, work that matters.

Our guest today is Kim Meninger, of Great Heights Coaching.

What do you do when you are working hard, performing well and yet not making the advancement in your career that you would like?

Our guest, Kim Meninger, focuses on helping professionals accelerate their career success. She joins us to talk about what happens and what can you do to maintain your career momentum.

She is a certified career and life coach and holds a BA in psychology and an MBA with a concentration in organizational leadership.

But I think even more compelling; she learned important lessons from her own successful career. She was successful not as she says because “I was the smartest, or even necessarily the highest performer on the team but because I understood the landscape, built powerful relationships, and knew how to strategically position myself for success.”

Join us as we talk to Kim about how organization’s make decisions about people and specific strategies for helping you succeed.

We’d love to hear from you in terms of your actionable takeaways from this episode.

Leave a comment or send us an email.

Listen to the full interview by clicking player above.

Here are some exurps from todays interview…

From the show

In some cases the job isn’t the right fit for some professionals – it is not a good fit for their personalities or their skill set or it just doesn’t allow them to achieve their specific career goals. Career acceleration would be about finding the right fit so that they can then achieve those career goals in another way. They may need to look more broadly at their career options and might even have to look at changing their career options entirely but others feel happy in their organization, they just feel stuck. They become stagnant or they just aren’t sure how to get ahead. For these professionals, overcoming the obstacles that are holding them back is how they accelerate their careers.

It could definitely be lateral or changing direction. Some people are content and stay at the same level throughout their career. Not everyone wants to be a CEO. What it is really about is achieving your own career goals so that you have a feeling of personal satisfaction, that you are feeling a sense of purpose through the work that you do so that if you are personally feeling stuck, you may not have to take the next level up, you just need to find an opportunity across your organization.

It is really the responsibility of the employee to drive their own career. Some organizations are much better at providing the infrastructure to help people with their career path but for the most part everybody should feel like they are the driver in their own career. They need to be thinking about that very early on, really strategically managing their own career path.

Yes, because people latch on to what is most obvious to them. So the performance piece is what they can measure. It is what gives them feedback. So they assume if they focus on their job and they do it really well that they will be promoted for that. That is generally not what happens. So they get stuck but can’t figure out what they aren’t doing right or what they could be doing differently because they have never been taught. Few people learn this. It’s not something that is taught in the school or even on the job. It is really being strategic in how you manage our own career.

I would say that job performance is a given. It is a baseline expectation. You should, in any job you are doing, be achieving or exceeding your performance expectations. What most people are not doing is managing the other factors that really decide I they are going to get to the next level. So they are generally committed to being successful and they focus very well on the work they are doing but they are lax in other areas because they just don’t know that they need to be working on them or they don’t know how. For example…

Absolutely, I think from the get go whether you are just starting your career or starting with an organization, you want to get the lay of the land. You want to know how things operate. What is the informal power structure? How do decisions really get made? What does the company value? In some companies they are very aggressive. They value that competitive spirit so whatever it takes to do well. In other companies it may be more collaborative. You want to understand the unwritten rules that you are operating with when you are in an organization in order to know how you will be received and how well you fit in that organization. In some cases the reason that you aren’t getting ahead is because it is not the right fit for you. You could do all the right things and it will just never work out because you are not aligned fundamentally with that company’s values. In that case it may benefit you to look elsewhere. In other cases you may need to tweak some things or ore advantageously position yourself, maybe take on some more higher profiled projects so that you can connect with other people and establish a higher level of visibility.

The 5 pillars that I put into place have a way of teaching people that it is not just about your performance. There are other areas that are critical to your success. These form the foundation of the program that I use.

The 5 pillars Kim discussed provide a framework for thinking about where we are and our next steps in managing our careers. The 5 pillars are:

1. Competence – doing your job well before taking on more responsibilities
2. Success mindset
3. Perception – how do influential people view you
4. Visibility – do people know who you are
5. And Acting like a leader regardless of your title

Listen to the full interview by clicking player above.

We’d love to hear from you in terms of your actionable takeaways from this episode.

Leave a comment or send us an email.

Contact Kim Meninger

Email: [e-mail]

Website: GreatHeightsCoaching.com

Twitter: @GrtHtsCoaching

Facebook: facebook.com/GreatHeightsCoaching

RESOURCES

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What do you want?

80% of finding work you love, work that fits you is knowing what you want. If you don’t know or aren’t quite sure – just start with what you think you might want. Take small smart steps and follow your gut. Talk to people who are already doing the work you’re interested in. Connect with them on LinkedIn.

To learn more about the Just Start Program check out our Just Start Page.

Career Coaching, Job Search – Branding – Résumé Strategists

Tom & Deborah help creative engaged professionals turn their dream job into a reality.

We’ll be launching our pilot 12 Week Job Search the Smart Way online training course mid October.

Contact: Deborah Burkholder – Tom McDonough

Continued Learning

We’ve found these books very helpful and recommend them to our coaching clients.

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Listen to the full interview by clicking player above.