“Taking Advantage” isn’t always a bad thing…
Let me preface this post by simply stating that there are times where it’s absolutely not okay to take advantage of a situation. Don’t put other people down. Don’t do bad shit. There’s simply no wiggle room on that.
However, taking advantage of an opportunity that’s presented is the best way to get ahead at work and in life. Let me jump right in with an example from my professional life:
I’m about 9 months into a job when my manager decides that he’s not interested in running the team anymore. Based on my own philosophy (It takes 12 months to get good at a job), I’m still just starting to get good at my job and on paper I would not be ready to lead the team onto which I’m a relatively recent addition. However, I see this manager job as a 3-5 year job, so I would potentially be put in a holding pattern for several more years and the timing of the next opening is outside of my control in that situation.
At this point, I have two choices:
Do nothing. This is the easiest choice. I can put my head down and keep growing in my current job, become the best I can at the job and ultimately make my move into the opening in a few years when it hopefully presents itself again. Or, more likely, find an excuse to find a new job on a different team or in a different company before this happens.
Take advantage of the opportunity to fast forward into a new job ahead of schedule. Put my name in for consideration and fight for the right to prove myself in the new role. The opportunity is there for the taking, and the worst thing that happens is that I might not get the job this time. It’s not permanent. It’s not a statement that I’ll never be ready. I just might not be ready this time.
If this isn’t your first time reading my blog, you’ll know I went for the latter option and ultimately succeeded. In my book, Earning What You Deserve: The Guide for Building Long-term Success Starting From Graduation Day (Amazon), I dive deeper into this situation - but the short story is that I put my name in and got the role running the team I had only joined 9 months earlier despite being the underdog on paper.
When I look back at this decision, it’s one of the three most important decisions I’ve made in my professional career. It allowed me to shift gears from being an individual contributor to running a team of high-performing individual contributors. It allowed me to push myself into a formal leadership position. The result has challenged me more than any other work decision I’ve made, and it makes the work I do feel that much more rewarding.
Part of getting ahead at work is taking advantage of the situations that are laid out in front of you, and for me taking advantage of this scenario is what’s pushed my career further than any other individual opportunity. Complacency is the enemy of progress, and passing up on a chance to push my career forward would have been miles away from my professional brand - even if I wasn’t fully confident that I would be successful.
To make this a little bit more actionable, the idea here is that part of getting ahead, or even continuing to progress in a meaningful way, is keeping an eye out for opportunities to change the status quo of your normal working situation. You might find your own ways to do this, or you might find out about a new challenge that’s a reach - be it a job opening, a project, or some other way to push your skills. Sometimes you need to get a little bit uncomfortable to be able to get ahead. The people that get the furthest ahead are the ones that push themselves in these situations, not the ones who doubt their ability to achieve against a challenge.
If you are they type of person that can spot problems and articulate how to solve them, you can more directly influence your path - as you can directly create your own future this way. Creating your own situations to take advantage of at work is even more powerful than waiting for an opportunity to present and then taking advantage of it when it does.
When something is broken and you’re able to do something about it, you’re much more likely to be able to create your own situation to take advantage of. This can be in the vein of something like: “I have these skills that people don’t know about, and if I have a targeted way to apply them, I can move the needle.” You can also approach a stretch situation a little bit differently: “This is broken, and I’m passionate about fixing it.”
Both of these things can result in real change, but it’s important to remember as you’re proposing change that many others might subscribe to the mindset that the easiest thing to do is nothing. Not everyone is passionate about improving the way things are done, and it often results in a lot of extra work which not everyone is interested or willing to take on. These people are standing in the way of your progress, and it’s important to know how to work with (or around) them.
When you can’t create the opportunities, for whatever reason, you can focus on the opportunities that will undoubtedly present themselves over time. You have to be courageous. You have to have confidence in yourself. You have to put yourself out there.
Scenarios may present themselves where you don’t succeed. Learning from these will better help you succeed when the next opportunity presents itself to you. In my book, we discuss showing up with confidence and learning from failure. Each of these things play an important role in the future success you might be pursuing.
You may not get a shot at every chance, but when you do get them, you have to remember that “taking advantage” isn’t such a bad thing if you’re trying not to fall behind those who are willing to put themselves out there.
