760: How to Find Hidden Opportunities Inside the Organization You Are Already In

[00:00:00] Scott Anthony Barlow: Laura was working in a company that she actually liked, but she got two years into the role, decided she was interested in moving, and she felt stuck.

[00:00:08] Laura Parker: My issue was I know about all the jobs that exist. I don't know what future jobs people might be thinking about creating, so I was struggling.

[00:00:17] Scott Anthony Barlow: So she did what most struggle to accomplish. She thought of a new role, proposed it, and even though it didn't exist yet, got it approved, and then moved into it. Four years later, she came back and did it again. Most people think they need a new company, a new organization, but that wasn't what Laura needed. She needed a new role inside the one that she already had, and the process that she used to get there is something most people never actually pursue.

[00:00:44] Introduction: This is Happen To Your Career. Most people let their career happen to them, falling into jobs by accident, staying longer than they should, and wondering if this is really all there is.

[00:00:53] But a few people decide to stop settling and do something different. This podcast is for you to take control, get intentional, and design your work to fit the life that you want to build. Real stories and real research so that you can stop waiting and start making it happen. I'm Scott Anthony Barlow.

[00:01:09] Scott Anthony Barlow: The posted roles, they're not the universe of available options. They're the jobs that already exist and are actively being backfilled. The real universe of options is much larger than that, and it includes the roles that your organization and the people inside your organization are thinking about creating, the problems that need solving and you don't have an owner, and departments that are growing and haven't yet articulated what kind of help that they need.

[00:01:33] Now, you can't find those by browsing an internal job board, as it turns out. You find them by talking to other people, key people in the organization, usually decision-makers or the people close to the problems. Laura did exactly this. She'd already told leadership that she wanted to change, and by this point in time, we were working with her to help her navigate through this series of conversations, and they told her to figure out what she wanted, and she couldn't find that by just looking at what currently existed. That's the challenging part.

[00:02:06] Laura Parker: I started getting in touch with senior people, not so senior people, people in departments that I thought I might wanna work in. We're not very big in London here. There's only about 40 of us now, so I was contacting people in our San Francisco, Melbourne, New York offices, and they were people who had either shifted roles quite significantly, and I wanted to find out how they'd done that, or they were people, as I say, who were in departments that I thought maybe I'd be interested in working in.

[00:02:32] Scott Anthony Barlow: Okay, so here's what Laura was not doing here, to be really clear. She wasn't networking or building relationships around the organization to ask for a job. Instead, she was building relationships. She was using her actual genuine curiosity. She was investigating. She was exploring to understand what was possible.

[00:02:52] What did work in different departments actually look like? What problems were they actively working on, did they care about, and were trying to solve? How had people navigated internal moves before for the area she was interested in? And where might alignment be with what she had to offer and what she could contribute, and what parts of the organization actually needed that contribution?

[00:03:15] And if we want to think about this a different way, really what you're doing is you're going and collecting the problems while simultaneously trying to uncover what creates that great fit for you, and then therefore you're engineering the situation in which you become the solution to that problem.

[00:03:31] Now, here's what this looked like for Laura, and just a little bit of context. Her company had around 80 of its largest customers, and only four people responsible for delivering the product to all of them.

[00:03:42] Laura Parker: All four of them as kind of treating that role a little bit differently. They're delivering different things in different ways to the customers.

[00:03:48] Scott Anthony Barlow: Okay, this is not a small thing at a fast-growing company. This inconsistent service to the highest value accounts is a pretty big cost, and it's something that all of them cared about. So Laura didn't just ask her manager to help her find her a new job. She proposed a role built around fixing this exact problem.

[00:04:09] Laura Parker: We're trying to bring some standardization to then allow people to flex where they need to, but where we're kind of starting from a bit more of a standard approach

[00:04:18] Scott Anthony Barlow: Laura's internal move succeeded partially because she'd done the diagnostic work. She wasn't asking for a favor. She was proposing a solution to a problem, of course, that the company had, but more importantly, it was a problem that the people that she was asking really cared about fixing.

[00:04:36] They thought it was a big deal to fix it.

[00:04:38] Laura Parker: That allowed me to design... Essentially, I've designed a job for myself here. This is what an intentional career change looks like.

[00:04:45] Scott Anthony Barlow: It's not one big leap. It's a series of deliberate moves. Each one builds on the last. If you're trying to figure out how to build a life that really truly fits you and how work fits within that, then we can help you find your ideal career, whether it's inside your organization or somewhere else externally.

[00:05:01] And I'd say that it usually starts with helping you to build what we call an ideal career profile. And from there, we'd help you figure out whether that's an internal move or a full organizational change. Either way, the end result is getting to work that is an extraordinary fit for you and allows you to build the life that you actually want.

[00:05:20] Here's what I would suggest to do if you want help and support doing that. Just send me an email, scott@happentoyourcareer.com. Put conversation in the subject line, and I'll connect you with the right member of my team. They'll reach out, they'll understand your career goals, and we'll figure out

[00:05:34] the very best way that we can support you to get where you want to go. Until next time, I'm Scott Anthony Barlow. This is Happen To Your Career. See you on the next episode. Adios. I'm out.