Accelerate Your Career From Job-Doer to Problem Solver
CHICAGO — Meaningful career growth requires more than just hard work and confidence. While those qualities are important, it's imperative to take ownership of your career advancement with the right mindset and strategic goals to position yourself as a must-promote employee.
Convenience Store News' latest Future Leaders Learning Lab webinar, "Develop Your Game Plan for Career Advancement,” explored practical techniques individuals can use to shift from being a job-doer to an in-demand problem solver, and offered tips on how to build a personal brand with a cultivated tribe of champions who will market you on your behalf. The webinar series aims to give participants techniques and tools they can use to take their careers to the next level.
[Nominations Open for Convenience Store News' 2025 Future Leaders in Convenience Awards]
According to Kolby Goodman, founder and leader career strategist at The Job Huntr, focusing solely on task completion is not sustainable and leads to burnout, missed opportunities and misalignment with our professional goals.
"We get hyper-focused and tend to put our heads down, and we charge forward. We isolate ourselves. We build barriers around us and we don't incorporate and engage others in the work that we do," he said. "We're not building up that kind of influence or support around us, and that will absolutely hinder your ability to go farther faster because there's nobody on your side to champion you moving forward."
Instead, stepping beyond your role and positioning yourself as a leader and strategic partner who proactively solves problems and drives organizational success can secure promotions, pay raises and leadership roles faster, he said.
To have this kind of career trajectory, Goodman laid out the following framework:
Develop the mindset of a future leader by seeing yourself not just as a contributor, but as a key driver of solutions and success.
The mindset most prevalent in our early careers is asking ourselves, How can we do the job more, or how can we work the hardest? But, as we evolve in our careers, so do our priorities and therefore how the job gets done.
"So, instead of working harder and grinding to complete the next task, I want you to evolve into thinking about how to be the most impactful problem solver because people appreciate when a job is done, but we also internalize how people made us feel and the pain they relieved for us," Goodman explained. "If we become proactive problem solvers who are clearly thinking about the issues that we're facing every day, you become a go-to resource for your employer for the most exciting, for the most interesting and for the most profitable problems that your company is going to face."
Taking accountability as a solutions provider can be scary, Goodman acknowledged, but when we do so, we give ourselves more ownership to solve problems, relieve the pain points of leadership, and be acknowledged first when opportunities arise.
"We tend to pay more attention and make more investment in the things that take away our pain. And you want to be doing that for your leadership," he said. "[Leadership] is going to be indebted to you. And not only knowing that you've done the job, but they're also going to feel in their bones the value and the impact that you're making, and that emotional tie you can have to people in charge through the problems you're solving and the pain you're relieving is going to shoot you to the top of the preferred promotions list so that you get more opportunities more often."
Set strategic and achievable short- and long-term goals.
When shifting the mindset from job-doer to problem solver, emerging leaders want to make sure they're setting intentions and making action plans for the short- and long-term.
"As cliché as it is and as much as we hate hearing the question, 'Where do you want to be in the next five or 10 years?' in any interview or annual review, it's important to sit down and ask yourself these questions," Goodman emphasized.
Whether journaling, speaking out loud, putting it in a voice memo or throwing it into ChatGPT, he suggests young leaders ask themselves three key questions:
- What specific actions can I take in the next six months to position myself for a new role or a new promotion?
- What skills can I learn or improve today that will help me advance in my career over the next one to three years?
- How can I consistently measure and track to know that I'm making progress toward the career that I want over the next year?
In addition to visiting goals quarterly to make sure they're still aligned with ambitions, Goodman recommends young professionals recognize that there are caveats to goal setting. For example, they often set out for long-term goals that they are not 100% in control of, like being promoting in the next six months. Instead, he stressed the importance of achievable, measurable milestones to stay on the right path.
"You don't make the decision if you get that promotion. Instead say, 'I want to complete three projects that help increase margins 10% in of our stores.' Get as specific as possible in the things that you have total control over so that hopefully in the end, the things you don't have control over take care of themselves," he explained.
Build a strong personal brand and foster relationships with mentors and champions to boost your reputation and drive long-term career growth.
According to Goodman, personal branding is the ever-present buzzword of the day. While emerging leaders should be advocating for themselves internally, it's just as important they're doing it externally, too.
Working in hyper-focused mode and focusing on the urgency of everyday tasks, young professionals struggle to grow their own careers not because of a lack of experience, but because of a lack of examples of great work.
Goodman encouraged attendees to spend five minutes a week writing down five wins for the week and five lessons learned, as this will accelerate their ability to advocate for themselves in interviews or reviews by simply recording what they've done and communicating that to decision-makers within the organization.
Then, optimizing your resume and LinkedIn profile at all times with the aforementioned wins quantifies and qualifies the impact you have, he added.
Lastly, now that your marketing is together, emerging leaders can use the power of the people around them to be advocates and marketers on their behalf. This means ensuring that you're buddying up with key influencers internally and externally.
"You want to make sure that people making decisions know about you. So, making sure that you are advocating for yourself to these individuals and that you're giving regular updates, that you're giving postmortems to the projects, whether they're good or bad," Goodman noted. "Keeping them informed and communicating with them on a regular basis is going to make sure that you stay top of mind. Don't assume somebody's going to see the fruit of your labor and give you credit."
The Future Leaders Learning Lab is an element of CSNews' Future Leaders in Convenience (FLIC) program. Now in its eighth year, FLIC is designed to help celebrate and develop the next generation of c-store industry leaders. It provides a forum for talented young business people to hone their leadership skills and also recognizes the achievements of a select few rising stars already making significant contributions to the industry.
The next 30-minute Future Leaders Learning Lab session, "Receive & Give Feedback More Effectively," will be held Sept. 9 at 2 p.m. ET. Click here to register.
An on-demand replay of the "Develop Your Game Plan for Career Advancement" webinar is available here.
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