The "Fourth Way" to Get Ahead in Your Career

Posted on Linked In by: Don Peppers

In commenting on my recent post “Lean Back: 6 Post-Macho Management Principles,” LinkedIn member Roy Fraser suggests there are only three ways to get ahead in this world: “be first, be smarter, or cheat.” And while I do agree that these are three time-tested ways to get ahead, I disagree that they are the only pathways to a successful business career.

At the outset, let’s be crystal clear about what success really means. This may sound a bit hard-nosed, but career success is a relative term. The world is a competitive place, not just for businesses, but for the managers and executives who staff them as well. The very expression “getting ahead” is a description of competitive success. You are literally “getting ahead” of somebody else – someone who hasn’t competed as successfully as you have.

So yes, being first and being smarter will always be career assets, enabling you to get noticed more than others, to secure others' cooperation and support, or to achieve your goal. To that end, you should always strive to be well informed, knowledgeable, and open-minded. Never stop learning about new technologies, new ways of interacting with others, and new business models being tested by others. This is especially important in our ever more rapidly innovating economic system. And I'll continue to talk about how you can improve in this area in future posts.

But for now let's talk about Roy's suggested third way for getting ahead, cheating. Like the parasites found on any living organism, cheaters will always be with us, no matter how trustworthy our society is, in general. In fact, the more trustworthy a society, the more lucrative the opportunity is for cheaters. And it's definitely possible to get ahead in business by stealing others' ideas, or taking credit where credit isn't due, or foisting the blame for errors on someone else. We've all seen this kind of thing happen, haven't we? Many of us have been victimized by it personally.

But cheaters lead mean and unsatisfying personal lives. You can accumulate wealth by cheating, but the only satisfaction you are likely to have is the wealth itself, because there will be little sense of accomplishment or mastery. Moreover, in today’s hyper-connected, highly transparent world, the risk of getting caught and the penalty for being exposed are both much more severe than before.

Transparency raises both the cost and the risk of keeping a secret, so extreme transparency demands extreme trust. Even without being publicly exposed, if you regularly resort to cheating it will be virtually impossible to hide your less-than-honest approach from your closer friends and loved ones, who will soon come to suspect your motives and “count their change” in all their dealings with you.
But I'd like you to consider a fourth way to get ahead, competitively, which is the exact opposite of cheating: Being trustable.

Martha Rogers and I have written an entire book on the advantages that a business in the e-social era can generate simply by being proactively trustworthy (which we call "trustable") with its customers. These advantages include such things as higher customer loyalty and referrals, resilience in the face of rapidly evolving business models, and increased shareholder value.

But being trustable can also benefit your own personal competitive struggle for success in your business career, also. Suppose you were to develop a reputation for always acting in your coworker's interest, never taking advantage of a colleague's mistake, oversight, or lack of knowledge, and even proactively helping colleagues to achieve their own successes.

If this is the way you come to be seen by others, then you’ll soon find that other people (including even some of your own rivals) will want you to succeed. Partly this will be because your success now furthers their own self-interest. But I think the stronger, less appreciated reason for this is that it’s a natural human instinct to return good will with good will. This social instinct is so strong that it is virtually irresistible for all but the psychopaths among us.

Whatever the reason, however, the fact is that the more others see their interests to be aligned with yours, the more support you’ll receive from them, and the more competitively successful you will be in your own career.

Being trustable should be regarded as a competitive strategy for career success. It is the "fourth way" to get ahead. And unlike cheating, it will pay dividends not just in terms of your professional advancement, but your personal happiness as well.