Re-perceiving Yourself at Mid-Career: Be Independent

The bottom-line about independent professionals is that they always have the capacity to add value to an organization. Performance review with an independent professional is a sequence of stories about how they have made money, saved money or solved problems for the company. It is not about whether they are punctual, loyal, or play well with others.   It is about delivering value. 

This is easy to say, but not so easy to do. Independence, like creativity, requires courage. Recently in a session of mid-career professionals in transition, I asked them by a show of hands how many had advanced an idea that was out-of-the-box in their work. Hands went up all over the room. Then I asked how many did this even though they knew it was counter to mainstream thinking? Far fewer hands went up.

Independence requires self-discovery to know who you are, what you can do and what you are driven to do. The search is for your uniqueness, what you do best and better than your competition. This opens the door for you to find the best fit between your skills and the challenges available in your organization or the larger job marketplace. Your task then is to constantly seek higher challenges for your growing skill. If you do not seek greater challenge you will become bored. If you do not constantly expand your skills you will become frustrated as the challenges move beyond your ability. The quest is for dynamic balance between your motivated skills and the challenges of the job. 

The increased challenges take the form of questions. It requires the skill to ask the right questions or to make sure you are being asked the right question. What are the right questions? They are the ones that open the door to adding value. Independent people are masters of asking why. Solving the wrong problem or finding the solution to the wrong question does not add value to the organization,

no matter how elegant the solution may be.

It is in this process that the independent professional must take some risk. It is your responsibility to ask difficult questions, to choose the right problems to solve. Independent professionals have the ability to identify and articulate the essence of a problem, to share that essence with co-workers and lead them to perceive that essence and then act together, to collaborate, in expanding that perception toward a new understanding, a unique solution.

But there is more to being independent….like being Visible.