What Does it Take to Reach the Next Level?

Reaching the next level in your career or business requires taking different actions than the ones needed to maintain your current level. The actions required will depend on your goals and your processes for producing results. Maybe you need to increase the volume of the actions that you are already doing or maybe you need new processes to produce new results. These are the two categories that the new actions will fall into.

If the next level is business growth then you need:

If the next level is your development as a business owner then it’s about what’s needed to move up. Are you going from self-employed to having a team that you manage? Are you going from managing the daily operations to leading at the executive level? Are you going from an owner/operator to an owner whose business runs on its own? For all of these, you will need to look at the structures, processes, communication flow, and people needed to reach and sustain that next level. You will also have to develop yourself because your responsibility and accountability increase as you move up inside your business. Your mindset shifts and you take on different ways of thinking.

If the next level is career advancement then you need to look at the experience, skills, knowledge, and any other requirements for that next position.

New actions and processes are required and you will need to take on different perspectives and thinking in order to plan and execute. Your current life is set up for your current level. This includes your schedule, daily routines, budget, and time allocation. You will need to make adjustments in order to take the actions required to reach the next level. You may need to delegate some of your current tasks or find ways to be more efficient or effective.

A pitfall some people make is that they neglect their current level while striving for the next level. For example, a business stops marketing their entry-level product while focussing on selling their new, advanced product. The problem is that the entry-level product is producing stable revenue for the company and neglecting it results in a drop in revenue. Now the company has to go back to make their entry-level product successful again in order to survive. To avoid this, the plan to reach the next level has to include maintaining the current level while adding the new actions to reach the next level. The current level provides a stable financial foundation for reaching the next level. The same goes for a career professional. One can’t neglect the current job while working at meeting the requirements for the next job.

These are the growing pains of reaching the next level. With planning, you can reduce the chaos and disruption to your life, however, there will always be changes. It’s part of the journey onward and upward.