In this article, I will work to bring forth how important, useful and worthwhile it is to your career or role to “be” Proactive. To help bring forth the value I will make some claims and I invite you to not accept them without rigorous thought and perhaps conversations with people you characterize as successful.
Claim #1: To “be” Proactive means you lead rather than follow. Leadership has more worth than following, if the leadership is superior to already existing thought and action being offered to the listeners.
Claim #2: To “be” Proactive means one must have personal practices or ethics to accumulate knowledge to enable them to notice, observe and assess changes in competitive practices, technology, demographics, economics and politics that alter the capacity to outperform the competition.
Competitors in careers often view the competition from a company to company perspective. This is a real and necessary perspective to have but it’s one of two perspectives in business. The second competitive perspective is as an employee. This is not to imply people should view their colleagues as vicious or enemies. Colleagues are like fellow members of a sports team. We must compete to earn a spot on the team and prove we are holding our role on the team by coordinating and cooperating with our team members to win the game. I hold that a competitor is someone or an entity that is indifferent to its competitors but is in conflict with them because you both seek the same objective that only one is able to achieve.
To be competitive we must produce superior interpretations of situations and produce superior action plans to achieve our objectives. As a career this means we are compelled to learn every day if we want to have a successful career. This claim is clear to me because there is an endless supply of people seeking to “be” the best their biology will allow.
I am always looking for business professionals I can think and act with to enhance our careers and the offers my company makes to the marketplace. If you would like to learn how I go about this give me a call… “be” proactive.