Career Comparison: What I Can Learn From Someone Else

I tend to pay attention to people working in a similar direction to me. It makes the question quite practical: what is this person doing particularly well?

There may be something I can learn without needing to have their job or follow their exact career. I am interested in bringing that lesson into my own work.

I am not naturally a jealous person, but I have plenty of ambition. Seeing somebody do well can make me want to develop further myself. It gives me inspiration, and I enjoy that.

For me, a useful comparison ends with a question I can act on. What would I like to get better at? Is there something I could ask this person? What have I noticed that I want to understand more deeply?

I try to give my fellow female managers a platform. I want their work to be seen, and I enjoy seeing them reach their goals.

I do not believe you build a better career at someone else's expense. There is room to be ambitious about your own future and enthusiastic about another woman's success at the same time.

That matters to me as a colleague and a manager. If I see someone doing something well, I want to be able to appreciate it. There is more to gain from paying attention and learning than from resenting their progress.

The question I keep returning to in my own career is whether I can continue to develop.

Am I learning something? Am I doing work that asks something new of me? Do I have the opportunity to get better?

When something feels difficult, I try to understand why. Sometimes I am dealing with something I have not done before. In that situation, the questions become useful: where am I struggling, what am I encountering, what went well straight away and where do I need help?

I do not want to mistake every difficult moment for a sign that I am in the wrong place. Equally, I pay attention to what the pressure is doing to me. My own experience of burnout is part of why I take that seriously. I want to understand the demands and get appropriate support, rather than simply keep pushing.

Asking a peer for help is part of learning. You cannot know everything, and I do not think you should pretend that you can.

I regularly check with my own manager about how they see my work. Are they happy with what I am delivering? How would they define doing it well?

I am interested in having that definition. It gives me something relevant to work towards and a way of checking my progress against the expectations of my actual role.

Someone else's title or LinkedIn update cannot give me that information. A conversation with my manager can.

This is part of the thinking behind my approach to performance reviews. I value conversations during the year, so that development and expectations are things we discuss while there is time to act on them.

I also ask my team how I am doing as a manager. Are they happy with the support they receive? Is there something they are missing?

And I ask my peers, including the other members of our management team, how they experience working with me. What do they think I could work on? What would make the collaboration better?

Those conversations help me understand how my work is landing with other people. I want to hear what is happening around me as well as notice what is happening inside me.

For that to be useful, I need something I can understand and act on. The CIPD's review of performance feedback is a useful reference here: the quality of feedback matters. Collecting more opinions is not, by itself, a measure of progress.

I want to learn from what people tell me and use it to improve how I work with them.

The clearest example from my own life is not a promotion or a salary comparison.

It was the period when I had been single for a long time and people around me were getting married, moving in together and taking those next steps. For a while, I did experience that feeling of being behind.

So I understand how convincing that sense of everyone else moving forward can be. I also believe that everyone has their own path.

In my career, I try to bring my attention back to what I can do next. There are questions I can ask, feedback I can seek and opportunities I can explore.

I feel quite strongly about this. If you have concluded that your employer does not value you or offer the opportunities you need, be prepared to look elsewhere.

At some point, you may need to give yourself a kick up the backside and start those conversations. Staying unhappy and waiting for somebody to discover what you want is unlikely to tell you much about the alternatives.

Do not be afraid to speak with another employer. Having a conversation does not commit you to taking the job. It can help you understand the opportunity and how other people see what you have to offer.

Ask for feedback after the conversation as well. There may be something useful to take from it, whether you end up working there or not.

I believe in taking an active part in your own career. That can begin with a conversation, an honest request for feedback or a decision to investigate a different role.

Underneath all of this is a fairly simple question: do I enjoy what I do?

Development matters. Salary matters. Feedback matters. But I want to have pleasure in my work, too. I pay attention when the enjoyment starts to disappear, because going to work with reluctance is not how I want to spend my days.

When I look at other people, I want to come away with inspiration. When I look at my own career, I want to see learning, useful feedback and work I am glad to be doing.

And when another woman achieves something she has worked for, I want to be there cheering her on.