Recently, I was speaking with a career mum on the complexities of furthering her career and juggling family responsibilities.

We came up with a game plan on the work front on how to re-think her role and how to work more efficiently - with the focus being on quality not quantity.

Step 1:
Change the way you think about your role. Treat your role like your own business. You need to manage the workload, your stakeholders / customers, and your brand (in this case, how others perceive you and your role in the organisation).


Step 2:
Think about the following ideas to inject clarity into your role:

- Compare your job description to your current tasks. Write down everything you do over a 2 week period to help you identify typical tasks and how long it takes you.
- Do you need to re-define your role?
- Are you performing work that someone else should be doing?
- What are your business objectives for the next 6 months / 12 months? Do you have a business plan? What are the key deliverables?
- Compare your current tasks to your key deliverables. Are they aligned?
- Do you have access to learning and development opportunities? Incorporate this into your business plan.
- Tie your key deliverables in with your performance measurement criteria to ensure your have a productive and informative performance review.

The key is to make your objectives (e.g. 3-5 objectives) and associated deliverables (for each objective) manageable and meaningful. It is more important to under-promise and over-deliver.


Step 3:
Ideas to promote yourself:

- Define what you do in simple terms on paper. Always think that you are talking to someone outside of your business so it is imperative to keep it simple and meaningful.
- Investigate if you have an internal communications team. Do they produce a staff newsletter? What about the intranet? Start contributing to these communication forums.
- Start collaborating with your counterparts in your organisation. Instigate a monthly meeting (phone hook-up) and a face-to-face workshop every 6-12 months to share ideas and streamline processes and procedures.
- Manage up; manage yourself; manage down.