The mindset of a successful career developer, what is the type of mindset? What are the principles that you need to have programmed in your brain to be successful in your career? First of all, you will have to do more than other people. If you want to progress faster in your career than your colleagues, you will have to put more efforts into your career. And be very careful. I didn't say that you will have to work more or do more of the same.

Absolutely not. In order to have a successful career. You need to put more efforts and you need to know where to put those efforts so that it does fulfill and encourage your successful career development. So what are those principles? And how can you go about putting the right efforts in into accelerating your career. First of all, always look to do more.

Always look to go the extra mile. In anything you do, you need to always be asking yourself, not only how can I do a great job in what I do, but also how can I go beyond? What more could I do? So, in a more pragmatic way, I think that the best question for you to ask yourself when you work on some specific activity or project is, how can it be improved? How could we do it better smarter? How can this be easier for anyone else doing it after me in the future, so anytime of process improvement activity that you can initiate any proposal you can make on how things can be easier, smarter or less difficult, are going to be greatly valued and appreciated by your leadership.

So Always look, not just to do the work, but also to ask yourself how it can be improved. This is essential. Yes. So look at ways to work smarter, look at ways to improve what is being done, look at ways to positively and constructively challenge the way things are done in your environment and make proposals on how you could make it better and take initiatives. Can you develop a new spreadsheet so that people won't have to write this long email again? Can you put in place manuals and guidelines for the future so that nobody has to go through the same pain as you did when you first had to deliver this task?

It's all these type of little value add activities that are going to make a tremendous difference, because you're progressively building up a signature of being the guy or the woman who delivers more Who surprises? Who looks beyond and being autonomous, and proactive? Are skills of winners in the corporate world. So make the life of people easier, and be proactive in improving the way the company works. One of the most empowering question I often ask myself is, if this was my company, would I do the same? Or what would I do differently?

Just act as if this company is yours, because some way it is. It's where you spend your time and efforts to make it better. And always look not just to deliver what you've been asked to deliver, but always look to improve the way things are done. I was once working on the project. At the time, I was not yet the project manager. I was one member of the project working on one specific area.

And we were in the phase where we were testing a new project. And the testing phase was quite broad. And we had several divisions involved, and about 50 to 100 people who had to be coordinated so that this testing could be successfully completed. We didn't have a strong thorough process on how to coordinate those people. And I noticed that very often, people couldn't progress on their part of the testing, because they were depending on others to finish their work before. So I noticed this for a few days.

And then I went to see the project manager and I said, I think we could improve the way we test and accelerate the pace, if we were to better coordinate the dependencies between one team in Iran and another. And I suggested that we put simple sheets on the wall where we had all the tests listed, and show the sequence of who was testing what and I said to the project manager that I could do that and I could Just make sure that it progresses at suppose as it's supposed to guess what happened. Not even a month later, I was promoted as the testing coordinator. And this is actually one of the projects, who got me promoted later on as a manager. And as a project manager, a typical example of a situation where I saw a problem and I asked myself, how can we improve this?

How could we do better? So Own your projects, and look beyond what your normal job is? So that you always have this mindset of a career winner, which is the mindset of someone who is proactive and autonomously looks for ways to be smarter to work better and to deliver better results. And this type of initiatives will be highly appreciated and valued in a corporate environment. We will talk later about how corporate companies assess the readiness of someone to be prepared. And one of the things is, how have you contributed beyond your role?

Yes. So let me just finish with a few examples of activities I've done in the past, which has proved to be not only very valuable for myself, because I learned a lot and I connected with new people, but also that significantly accelerated my success and my career. Things like participating to corporate events. Think about the division, think about your team, or the site where you're located. What are the big events that are being prepared and planned for the year? Could you take a role there?

I once became the networking lead in one of our events, and I was responsible for finding an external speaker who could come and talk to us. I even called directly the arsenal football club and ask for us and vangor he couldn't come to join us. This didn't work. It's just to give ideas of how you can make this fun and actually quite exciting for you. Other things could be looking at engagement activities, where where you work. Do you have a group that focuses on the engagement of employees?

What role could you play there? What type of activities could you initiate or support? Where can you contribute? Basically, that is the right question. Where can you contribute? Where can you add value in activities that go beyond your role?

You don't have time for this. I've heard this one many, many times before. If you want to win in the corporate world, find the time because like I said, it's not about doing more of your current job. It's about looking beyond and having a broader impact than simply on delivering results where you supposed to. So find the time allocate this time, even if it means that you have to manage a bit the expectations of your manager in other areas. They will accept it because you're working for the overall benefit of the company.

It will work to find the time we talked about corporate events, engagement activities, any other project that connects people together, it will increase your network. It will enhance your visibility, and it will make sure that you're ready for the next step. Let's talk about the corporate world more in detail now.