Be the Chief People Officer of Your Own Career

Waiting for your organization to tell you what to do next with your career is one of the longest waits in professional life. Plenty of people are doing it anyway, in a quiet state of denial. They sense that their role is changing and that the next reorganization could affect them, and still they wait.

Organizations are too busy managing their own disruption to manage each person's career with the care it deserves. Someone has to take that responsibility, and it should be you.

I encourage people to think of themselves as the Chief People Officer of their own career. Your job is to understand your unique value, develop it and put it to work every day. Four non-traditional practices make that possible.

1. Know Yourself Extremely Well

Self-awareness is the foundation of every other career decision. You need to understand what distinguishes your talents from everyone else's, not in general terms, but specifically.

Try this: describe what makes you uniquely valuable in three words or less. It is harder than it sounds. People tend to reach for generic descriptions like "hard worker" or "team player." Keep going until you find words that only describe you. Those words become your compass for which opportunities to pursue and which to decline.

As AI takes over more of the tasks inside a role, the distinctly human combination of your experience, judgment and perspective is what sets you apart. You can't leverage what you can't name. And if you can't name it, no one else will be able to name it for you when opportunities are being decided in rooms you are not in.

2. Live Your Values and Love What You Do

Early in my career, I learned an important lesson: power is not leadership. I learned it the hard way at my first corporate employer, a wine and spirits company in Los Angeles. I had to be at a regional vice president's meeting for the introduction of a new product at 6:00 AM. Los Angeles traffic intervened, and I arrived 15 minutes late. It didn't matter that I was one of their top performers. I was brought in to meet with the regional vice president, who gladly gave me a dressing down. I soon realized it was never about me. It was about control.

Power lets you make decisions and control outcomes. It does not automatically make you a better leader, and it certainly does not make you more fulfilled.

Plenty of people chase positions of power expecting satisfaction to follow. When it doesn't, they assume they need to become someone else. Rather than trying to transform who you are, focus on improving how you perform as yourself. Excellence that lasts comes from alignment between your values and your work.

3. Unleash What You're Most Passionate About Every Day

There is often a gap between the job people do and the work they care about most. They execute their assigned responsibilities well but leave their real passion at home.

Close that gap deliberately. Look for ways to bring what energizes you into your current role. Volunteer for projects that connect to it. Propose new ways of working that use it. Your strengths and the way you perform best are usually connected. Pay attention to the moments when time seems to disappear because you are fully absorbed. Those moments are clues. When you work in line with both, your performance improves and your energy returns.

4. Let Your Culture Contribute to Your Success

Your cultural heritage, upbringing and life experience are part of your competitive advantage. Yet plenty of organizations still lack the cultural competence to help people draw on the identity that comes from where they come from.

Don't wait for them. Recognize how your background shapes the way you see problems, build relationships and find opportunity. Bring that perspective into your work intentionally. This is the essence of individuality at work: using everything that makes you who you are, not just the parts that fit a template.

I believe we are moving from a knowledge economy toward a wisdom economy, where the integration of what you know with who you are becomes the source of value. Wisdom cannot be downloaded. It comes from knowing yourself and your story.

Run Your First Career Review

A Chief People Officer does not wait for an annual cycle, so start now. Write your three words and test them with two people who know your work well. List your non-negotiable values, and note where your current role honors them and where it doesn't. Find one way to bring what energizes you into your work this month. Write down how your background gives you a perspective others may not have. Then put a quarterly review on your calendar, and treat your career like a portfolio that deserves regular attention.

Lead Your Own Career

No title, manager or organization will ever know your potential as well as you can. Security does not carry people through uncertainty. A clear understanding of who they are and what they bring does.

Build that understanding, and your career stops being something that happens to you. It becomes a body of work you are proud to own. To go deeper, explore my methodology for leading with identity and individuality.

Want to explore these ideas further? Learn more about my work on leadership, identity and conviction at www.theglennllopis.com.