Change What You Do Without Changing Your Title

Welcome to the Navigating Your Career podcast. This is the place for you to figure out your next career move. Learn how to speak up and show up as the real you and discover the path that brings out the best in you. If you want to stop feeling stop, start feeling better and take ownership of your career and your life. This is the place for you. I’m your host, Melissa Lawrence. Let’s get started.

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Hello, everybody, welcome to this week’s episode of the podcast.

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So today we are going to talk about something that you may have never heard about before, and that is conducting a role audit. This had come up in a coaching session recently with one of my clients, and this concept really blew her away and helped her a lot. And it’s something that I teach my clients to essentially proactively manage their career so they can avoid that feeling of being stuck or that they’ve kind of outgrown their career and only looking for promotions.

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So that is what we’re going to talk about today. And first, I just wanted to give a little bit of a shout out to my clients, because this past week, I swear, every one of my clients had some sort of big breakthrough or big win on their journey towards their ideal career and life. And these wins happen every single week. But this past week, it just was such a big growth week for so many of my clients.

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So I want to share some of those wins. So one of my clients got a promotion, which is really exciting. She had been working on it for a while and it was something that was really stressful for her. And she felt she was never going to get it and she needed to leave her company. And we worked through that and essentially applied a strategy that I taught her. And within four weeks she earned that promotion. So that is really incredible.

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I also had some clients that negotiated higher salaries for new roles and a new sign on bonus, something that they had never done before. They weren’t really comfortable in the past going and negotiating for themselves and maybe going through a couple of rounds of that negotiation. And they ended up getting themselves the best offer that they’ve ever gotten. And that was also really exciting. And then there’s also the kind of life winds that my clients have had. I had a client that was talking about how she’s no longer stressed and she finally has the work life balance that she wants, which is amazing.

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That’s a lot of what life is about, right? Is having that balance and living your day to day in a way that makes you feel really good. And it’s not something that’s kind of out of control for you or outside of the realm of possibility that she’s actually living what she’s always wanted, what she envisioned as kind of an ideal work life balance, which is amazing. And then another one, she had this big break through healing of some past trauma that she had in her life.

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And she, after practicing it over several months, really is finding that she no longer has stress in some of these situations, that she had stress before. She’s not being triggered in the same ways, if at all, that she feels very in control of her emotions of these relationships. And she feels so much lighter and happier. And it brings up a lot of emotion when you have that sort of breakthrough. And that is amazing. And so this past week has just been so fun to see all of these big things kind of come to fruition day after day this last week.

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So that was really exciting. So let’s get back in to the topic of roll audits. So what a role audit is. It’s really a proactive review of your current position against your skills, experience and interests. So it’s a different approach of career development because typically, if you work in an organization, you have kind of set times that you focus on career development and those that times might be your annual review cycle, your mid-year review, if you get nominated to be part of some sort of conference or career development or presentation, that might be something that then you kind of focus on your role a little bit more.

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But generally, day to day, we don’t tend to stay really focused on our careers. And what happens then is you, as time goes on, gain more experience, more skills. You might go back to school, have more education, your interests may change, but your role may not end. So then what happens? And you kind of find yourself in the situation where the role that you’re in isn’t aligned to who you are today. Right.

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When you got hired into that role or when you started in that role, you had a different level of skill and experience than you do now. It’s kind of like a relationship, right? If you get into a relationship with someone, you don’t want to just stay stagnant. Right. The goal is that you have this person in your life. Are there some that you can grow with over time and as each of you grow individually, you also grow together?

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Right. And ideally we would want our careers to look like this, too. But the way career development is, it’s it’s kind of more of a check the box activity and a lot of situations. And so then what ends up happening as your manager or your company may be complacent, not really invested in your development, you may be focused just on those milestones, and then you kind of wake up one day and it’s kind of like if you were if you did this with a marriage and you looked over and you were like, who is this person?

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And maybe I outgrew them. And I don’t know, like, is this relationship going to work? And then you kind of go back and try to fix it. Right. And that’s a lot of how we approach our careers. So with this role audit, it essentially takes that out of it. It stops you from being complacent and just focusing on those milestones and instead gets you to kind of proactively look at your role as you grow so that you can grow with it.

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OK. So this is going to look different for different people and sometimes the role, the next level, the next iteration of you in this career, in this role or with this company isn’t a promotion, right? It might be something that’s lateral. Maybe it’s learning another department or shadowing another group or someone within your function, but they do a different position than it could look very different. And so you want to do them? I would say probably annually would be a good a good marker.

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You could also do that more often, depending on your personal and professional development speed. Some people are really into their own personal professional development. And so they’re constantly up leveling their skills, constantly reading, taking courses, all of these things. Right. So your curve, if that sounds like you may be a little bit different than someone that, say, doesn’t have the time for all of that and doesn’t have time to focus on their development as much so their interests and their skills and their experience isn’t changing so rapidly.

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So you could do this, I would say mid-year or aligning it with your performance review cycle, or you could do it end of year or you could do it both. Right. And so you really want this to align with your development plan. And so the concept of this and how you do this is you want to review your current skills, your strengths and your interests against your job description and not just the written job description, but actually how you spend your time day in and day out.

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Right. Because we all have those other duties as assigned. Right. There’s much more that you do outside of that written job description. So you want to kind of start with that job description, but then also fill in all the gaps, like what are the things that you’re actually doing day in and day out that are part of your normal tasks and responsibilities? And then you also want to then look at where are your current skills and strengths and interests in comparison to your current role?

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You may be more qualified now than you were when you went into this role, right? But the answer doesn’t have to be change jobs or get promoted. It can be what are the things that you’re really interested in now? What are the strengths that you have now? What are your current skills that you like applying and how can you apply them in the role that you have without making that change? And so you may be hearing this and thinking, oh my gosh, like, my boss is not just going to let me change my job.

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Right. But what I’m trying to get you to do here is to really look at your role from a different perspective. It’s not so black and white. I want you to proactively get in the habit of assessing yourself against the role that you’re in and where you see opportunities for change, that you then take some action to make those a reality. So what that could look like is reviewing when you do that review, that you would incorporate anything that is a gap, anything that you currently have, interests, skill or experience in the.

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It’s not part of your role that you would incorporate that into your development plan so you could talk to your manager, get some buy in on some different opportunities that you could do. So maybe stretch goals or maybe opportunities to do some things in some other departments to really leverage that interest and skill and strength that you have now that you didn’t have before. And when you get your managers buy in or you add this to your development plan, it gives you an opportunity to demonstrate how you’ve grown beyond the role that you were initially hired to do.

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Right. Because you’re a manager at the end of the day, may only see you the way that you were. Not every manager is really going to see you as who you are today. So you have to show them how you’ve outgrown the role by demonstrating these additional strengths and interests and skills that you have and the benefit that that has to the company. So if you’re proactively going in, you’re saying, OK, every six months or a year, I’m going to look at where am I now?

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What have I learned, what are my skills, experience and interests where they lie today and what is the job that I have today? And then you kind of do a gap assessment to see where the things that I want to do that I’m not doing. What are the things that maybe I don’t need to do anymore that someone less skilled could do because it doesn’t require my expertize anymore. And then once you have that list, then you talk to your manager about it and look at opportunities that may exist where you are and get their Buy-In so that in your development plan or separate from your development plan, you’re able to maybe renegotiate your job description.

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I’ve seen this working very well with some of my clients. They’re able to go in and have this conversation with their manager, demonstrate the value, and their manager allows them to kind of ala-carte their job description a little bit as long as some of those core responsibilities are being met with in your role. There’s usually some flex in there for you to kind of add and remove some things that are no longer a fit. And what this does is it gives you the opportunity to grow within your role in advance to you getting frustrated and feeling stuck.

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Because that is what I hear from so many of my clients, is that they’ve outgrown their role. Their boss doesn’t see their current skill set or maybe the role that they were hired into didn’t require the actual level of experience and expertise that they had. And so they find themselves bored after a short period of time. And so this prevent that from happening because you’re proactively looking at yourself and your role and then actively looking for ways to fill those gaps before it becomes a problem.

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It’s like what I talked about with a relationship or a marriage. Right. You want to actively be present and engaged and notice things about your partner when things have changed, notice things about yourself, new needs that you have, and then you want to communicate that. And work toward the future together, and that is what this role audit does for you is it allows you to grow with your role as opposed to kind of going through the status quo and then waking up one day and being surprised or realizing you’re unhappy in something that used to be OK.

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And then you feel stuck and then you feel dread and you’re not sure what to do. So hopefully you have a manager that will really get on board with this. And this is something  you can also talk to them about ahead of time and say, you know, look, manager, I insert name here, I’m going to go through this process. And what do you think about it? I want to review my role against my growth every six months or every year and give them a heads up that this is something that you want to do.

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They may love it. They may want the rest of their team to do it. You could start a whole ripple effect of people proactively looking at their roles and preventing themselves from getting burnt out and stuck and unhappy. So really, look at is this an opportunity for you to take ownership of your career and how can you do this where you are? Because these role audits can really make or break how you feel about your role six months a year, two years from now.

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And I guarantee as a side benefit, as a ripple effect of this, that you are going to be more likely to earn those promotions and those bigger roles because you did this because think about it, you’re then not waiting for a company policy to tell you what to do. You’re not waiting for your manager to tell you what to do. You’re not waiting until you’re at a point that you’re so frustrated that maybe the way that you’re delivering what you want or asking for a promotion isn’t really coming off in a way that is influential.

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From a positive standpoint, you’re proactively looking for opportunities, looking for ways to grow, to stretch yourself. You’re constantly looking at how you can add value to the company and to the team based on your growth. And that’s going to be very attractive to your company. It’s going to be very attractive to those around you. And like I said, it could very well cause a ripple effect to the rest of your team and the rest of your colleagues and friends at work.

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So it really allows you to own your development to be in the driver’s seat. To always be growing and to look for new ways to develop so that you don’t get stuck in a role that doesn’t align with you anymore. So I really encourage you today, if you have never done this before today, when you are done listening to this episode, take a look at your role, make a list of all of the ways that you have grown at all of your current skills, experience, interests, strengths, and see how they match up and see where there’s opportunity for you to get in the driver’s seat and look at your development a little bit differently so that you can feel better right away, so you can get happy at work.

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All right, that is all for this week’s episode, I can’t wait to hear what you do with this and what your role audits end up looking like. So you can always contact me through social media on LinkedIn and let me know how this went for you. And if this is something that you need help with, just reach out and apply for coaching and I will work with you one on one and help guarantee that you achieve your goals. To do that, just head over to my website is www.melissamlawrence.com

Put in your application. All right, I will talk to you soon. Have an amazing week.