Career leverage

If I learnt one thing from Cal Newport’s ‘Be so good they can’t ignore you’ it’s that leverage can greatly benefit your career.

Now there are obvious forms of leveraging your career and more hidden forms.

An obvious form is using your experience at Facebook to get a job at Google.

Or utilising the fact that you graduated top of your class to take your pick of the jobs.

But there are less obvious forms of leverage too.

For example amidst the sadness of a cherished teammate leaving therein lies a hidden leveraging opportunity.

If you can see past the woes of who will lunch with me now, there may be a chance to leverage this job opening to reshuffle job responsibilities in your favour.

Let’s consider the other side of the interaction to continue.

The hiring manager may well be feeling daunted by a potentially lengthy and arduous hiring process that lies before them.

Hiring is not their forte. If it was they would be in the HR department.

So, they might be dreading the task of discerning which stranger is telling the truth, can actually do the job and will get on well with the current team.

You on the other hand are a known entity.

The hiring manager will have a good idea of your skills, attitude, and co-operability, and if you can offer them a headache cure in the face of this migraine, they might just jump on you.

So, how about you reader, is there any way in your work you could leverage corporate pain to your advantage?