Planning for Progression: maximise your business case
Once you have worked out the best pathway for your career and benchmarked it against the published guidelines you then need to think about what else you can do to maximise your case for a promotion. There are lots of factors/variables that are out of your control but you need to accept that these variables are out of your control and focus on the ones that you can control: your own personal business case for promotion.
This might include things such as:
- Technical knowledge and Expertise;
- Financial Performance
- Winning Work Potential
- Client Service
- Personal Business Plan
Technical Knowledge and Expertise
To do your job – you should already be meeting the minimum requirements. However, genuine technical knowledge and expertise and the ability to be a leader in your field: You either have this or you don’t. Going above and beyond in this area means developing a deep specialism and becoming a genuine thought leader in your chosen field. This can be done by volunteering to do things that align with your technical expertise.
This might be writing articles and speaking at events. This might be contributing to consultations, joining a working committee, getting involved in internal and external educational initiatives. All of this should be geared towards the goal of being the “go to” person and being viewed as the “go to” person for this specialism/expertise both internally and externally.
Financial Performance
You are there to make money. So it is important to measure your financial performance, improve your financial performance and have good financial hygiene.
If you can share the fees with other departments and see be seen as encouraging cross-team collaboration – this will also work in your favour. However, if there is no formal record of this make sure you keen an informal record so that you can raise it at the appropriate time.
winning work potential
Put simply the question is – will you make the partnership richer? Part of this is demonstrating your potential to win work. This can be hard to show when you are working hard on the day job. Often associates will not have a track record – so it can be hard to demonstrate. However, if all you can do is execute work – you have a very weak case for a promotion.
So how do you do it?
- Be interested and active in business development. Understand what BD initiatives there are, be aware of the ongoing initiatives and sector plans and get involved where you can.
- Volunteer to draft things (most people will be happy to get it off their desk).
- Get Pitch experience. Get experience in preparing the paperwork and presentations. You need to be good, so get training and develop those skills so you are ready to do the job. Ask for the help. Ask for the experience. This is something that you need to push for (and keep pushing for until you get it).
- Keep up with your networking. Many of your peers will end up in business/in-house. By keeping up with your network you are demonstrating that you understand the importance of it and may have the opportunity to use it in the future.
Client Service
If you work in a client facing business then client service should always be a priority, but if it is something that doesn’t come naturally to you it is something that can be worked on and improve to help boost your promotion prospects.
Being good at servicing your client is largely about having good soft skills and commerciality and communicating well with your clients.
You can improve on this by:
- undertaking soft skills training;
- doing a secondment to a client;
- networking with clients.
To help improve your case for promotion ask colleagues and clients for endorsements for your work with them and keep a record of feedback.
Personal Business plan
- it should align with the firm strategy/business plan.
- it should be ambitious but grounded in realism.
- you should be prepared to change it and be flexible with your plan.
- you should include evidence of opportunities for teamwork and collaboration (including both your own team and cross-departmental collaboration).
- it should reflect current and future trends and show innovative thought.
- it should evidence commercial literacy.
- show understanding of the business/sector needs.
When writing your plan remember you don’t need to be doing everything on your own. Joined up efforts with others and cross-departmental collaboration can improve your standing and increase revenue across the board. All management teams want to see better collaboration, but in practice, it rarely happens so if you can do this properly it will work in your favour.