Businesswoman addressing team meeting, elevated view
If you’ve already reached the pinnacle of your professional aspirations, congratulations - you are in rare company.
If you are like the rest of us, then you are continually trying to grow and develop.
Professional success rarely happens by accident. This rings even more true during turbulent economic times. The cost of entry for success starts with discipline, proactiveness, self-awareness, stakeholder management, networking, and much more.
There are an endless number of books written about the best practices of career development within large corporations, some with decent advice and some with outdated guidance.
However, a newly-published book by Curtiss Jacobs does an impressive job of outlining the strategies and tactics required to effectively navigate corporate environments to develop your career.
Demystifying Corporate America provides a prescriptive set of steps to take to identify paths of development, avoid pitfalls stemming from bad managers or colleagues, and advocate for yourself in a manner that will get you the visibility and credit you deserve. It starts with key things to look out for in the interview process and develops into a best practice guide for experienced leaders who want to grow within their organization.
The author, Curtiss Jacobs, is a successful business leader who has overcome significant professional challenges and came out the other side stronger, elevated, and with advice to share.
He serves as Head of Product Risk Governance at Citibank, the consumer division of financial services multinational Citigroup, and spent over 25 years working in the financial services sector at companies like AIG, Bank of America, and other companies.
Among the countless lessons outlined in the book, a few takeaways stood out as a helpful synopsis of how wide-ranging Demystifying Corporate America is as a guide for professional success.
Here are just a few of the key lessons that I took away from the book that make it a worthwhile read:
- To have a chance at success within a company, you absolutely must understand how success is truly measured in the short-term and long-term. To do this, you need to be able to fully wrap your head around how calibration processes work, what are reasonable promotional timelines and requirements, and what level of senior advocacy is needed. Leaning on a checklist of questions that you can pose to management could be extremely valuable.
- What do you do in situations where you find yourself working alongside colleagues who are vindictive or incompetent? How do you maintain a trajectory of success without losing your cool and ruining critical opportunities or relationships? Demystifying Corporate America does a great job of providing real tactics for navigating these issues. For example, the book outlines things like how to effectively keep your distance from certain personas and how to understand the potential cost of oversharing details about your personal life.
- Being extremely intentional and deliberate about your internal brand and identity can make the difference between being just another hard worker at the company and someone who management perceives as a potential future leader. Don’t assume that just because you do good work means you’ll be recognized or credited for the good work.
- If you are truly aspiring for senior-level success within your company, have an honest, internal conversation with yourself about what the balance between your work life and personal life looks like. Jacobs does a great job of framing it plainly, in that there are certain things that matter to most people, and how you prioritize things, over time, will ebb and flow and should be viewed as continually evolving. The section where he describes his use of the Japanese concept ‘ikigai’ to help him find structure warrants a read of the book, by itself.
- As a final example of why Demystifying Corporate America is helpful for professionals, I think understanding the importance of sponsorship, and how it differs from mentorship, is one theme that makes the book a worthwhile read on its own. It’s a subject that isn’t covered enough. It’s often critical to separate the people who give you guidance and advice (mentors), who have full awareness of the challenges you are facing, from the people who can truly advocate for your success and who are in rooms with other leaders that make decisions that impact your career (sponsors).
When asked about why he wrote the book, Jacobs responded by saying “Through extensive mentoring and coaching it became evident that my fellow corporate Americans were struggling with confusion, anguish, distress. Not because the lacked talent, skills, credentials, and heart to build their careers on—they simply hadn’t figured out the rules of the game they were playing. Some didn’t even realize they were playing a game.”
His observation might seem obvious to some but I agree with his point that not enough people realize that talent and credentials aren’t always enough to get you to where you want to be.
If you end up diving into the book, I would love your feedback on whether or not you found it valuable.
