It’s Not All About Me! Seven Key Strategies for Thriving in the Corporate World

By Allyson Lewis

The world is an upside down place. The 1980’s and 1990’s began to encourage the illusion that self-growth and self-acknowledgement would bring people happiness and allow corporate executives a free pass straight to the top of their career goals.

It is not what you do for yourself that will make the greatest impact on your career future; rather it is how you focus on helping those around you recognize their truest potential. With this one small shift, you will unleash enormous hidden potential for internal and lasting growth in both business and in life.

1. You Need More Than a Vision - You Must Create a Strategy and a Story: Two things separate you from your competition: a very specific strategy for your business and a story that tells the community you live in—or even the world—why you are different. Your strategy needs to be specific, compelling and easily communicated. Every manager, employee, and client should understand it. Whether you are a financial advisor, an accountant, a plumber or a doctor, you need a clear and powerful strategy and a compelling story to differentiate you from your competition and attract new clients. If you are a leader or a team member, it is up to you to help create the strategy and the story to inspire others to follow your leadership or implement your ideas.

2. Be the Person that Rekindles Dreams: Dreams are amazing gifts. Dreaming helps you to conceptualize your goals, in order to implement daily steps that draw you closer to realizing them. With the same power, however, your negative illusions can limit your life and throw obstacles in your path toward growth and change. The pictures you vividly place in front of your mind on a continuous basis often become self-fulfilling action plans. Your dreams are one of the strongest positive tools you have working in your favor—if you can dream it, you can become it. By taking just a short time to acknowledge the positive dreams you hold for your future, you strengthen your ability to achieve those dreams. Choose to be the person that rekindles dreams in those around you.

3. Allow Yourself and Those Around You to Align Their Work with Their Purpose in Life: Purpose is what we do for others. Are you a leader, encourager, team member, listener, comforter, team member, visionary? What is your purpose? And how can sharing your purpose with your company make an impact on your company’s future?

Executives need to know and understand the purpose of those around them. A person’s purpose is their heartbeat. Their purpose drives them and when you allow them to align their purpose with their daily activities at work, their potential grows exponentially. Their contributions to your success will grow exponentially as well.

Employees often wait for a supervisor to ask what their driving purpose in life is. But this might never happen. Instead, employees need to take the iniative to hold this crucial conversation and allow their boss the right to utilize the key gifts and talents that revolve around their purpose. Purpose is the driving force in everyone’s life. Discover your purpose and then allow your goals and your time to revolve around fulfilling that purpose.

4. Acknowledge Your Goals: Your purpose tells you what to do with your life and how to serve others. Your goals closely link to your purpose in life because they describe what you want to accomplish in the pursuit of that purpose. When you have a clear vision of your goals in life, you are one step closer to fully understanding and fulfilling your purpose.   Goals can be personal or professional, tiny or grand, achieved tomorrow or aimed at achievements extending past your span on earth. Encourage those around you to create positive written goals. Encourage them to vividly describe where they want to be five years from now.

5. Build Better Customer Service with Four Simple Ideas: When it comes to customer service, it is definitely not about “me!”  It should never be about what will make it easier for you or for your employees. Your customer service strategy should remain focused solely on how to create loyal customers who will not only buy your products and services, but who will become your advocates and spokespeople in a crowded business world.

Exceeding your customers’ expectations can be a challenge. Your customers will not come to you with a specific, written list of instructions on how to do it. You have to provide them with services and benefits they might not even realize they want or need. Most effective customer service ideas are not extravagant, expensive, or complicated.  There are four important concepts that form the basis of any successful total customer experience:

• Competence

• Process

• Details

• Strategy

Put these four concepts to work in forming your own total customer experience.

6. Unleash the Power of Your Mind: What kinds of images, thoughts and ideas are you feeding your brain? These images reflect in everything you do: the way you look, your attitudes, your beliefs and your accomplishments. Your mind is busy creating your reality, so what kinds of tools and building materials are you supplying it?

If you wake up every morning saying “I can be more today than I was yesterday,” paying attention to the good things in our lives, and expecting that today is going to be better than yesterday, then the stage is set for those expectations to come true. The key is to draw out the very best in those around you. Providing them with training that will allow them to be more productive. Reward success and create momentum. Buy books and audio series as gifts to stimulate a fresh flow of ideas.

7. Believe that Change Happens in an Instant^TM: For years people have believed that moving ahead in their career required them to focus on the ME portion of their efforts. True leaders and visionaries have learned that it has always been about focusing all of their attention on helping those around them grow and become the people they were meant to become. When you give people the freedom and encouragement to share their best ideas with you, you will unleash more potential, power and performance in your organization than you even knew existed.

Real change happens in an instant. It happens the moment you decide to change. If you truly want to be different tomorrow than you are today, then focus your attention on helping those around you grow and become the people they were meant to become.

Read other articles and learn more about Allyson Lewis.