Editor’s note: This article was first published in November 2014. The word “recently” in the paragraph about the pequeño Nicolás refers to autumn 2014.
Want to succeed in your career? You’ve probably been told that you prove your worth by working harder than everyone else. Want to get promoted? Work even harder than everyone else. Well, it isn’t true.
In fact, when you work for someone else, hard work on its own may only get you burned out, even if you get better results than the company’s other employees.
More than 15 years ago I got a great piece of advice from one of the best mentors I have had in my whole life, the same person who advised me to aim for a resounding success or a resounding failure, but never to stay stuck in the middle.
Everyone likes to think we live in that cherished perfect world, but the reality is that when it comes to business, the most capable person is not always the one who ends up earning the most money and climbing the ladder.
That is why you need to apply the 50-30-20 rule. What does this rule say when it comes to succeeding in your career?
Put simply, it says that 50% of your success will depend on your social skills (contacts and influential friends), 30% will come from building a reputation (let’s call it a personal brand), and only 20% will depend on how hard you work. And whether you agree or not, this rule is completely true and effective. It always has been.
Social skills (50%)
Social skills have proven more powerful than any other quality, whether we’re talking about a career or your own business.
In fact, good jobs are not posted on job boards. They come through a friend, a former colleague or a friend of a friend. The bigger your network, the more chances you’ll have of landing a good job. It’s basic maths.
In the same way, inside a company you can do good work, but if the key person who should recognise it doesn’t know you exist, all those hours on the job may be invisible to the people in charge of promoting someone.
The more influential friends you have around the company, and the more key people in the organisation you know, the better your chances of a successful career.
In fact, we recently had an example of what social skills can achieve: none other than “el pequeño Nicolás” (Francisco Nicolás Gómez Iglesias, a young Spaniard who made headlines in 2014 for presenting himself as a go-between with top politicians and businesspeople). He was well on his way to running the country (note the irony), not because of his work but because of his social skills. He had influential contacts, who in turn gave him access to other key, high-level contacts.
That’s why, if you have a wide network and those social skills, 50% of your success is already in the bag.
(Read: Social and maths skills will help you earn more than average, according to a study)
Your reputation and personal brand (30%)
We all have our own business. It doesn’t matter what you do or what line of work you’re in. You have a business, you are a product, and you are a salesperson. Forget or ignore this, and life will go very badly for you.
Your reputation is everything. People like people who have integrity, who are honest and who are competent at what they do.
This is where your past results say a lot about your personal brand. If a company is looking for a sales professional and your name comes up in the meeting, that’s personal brand.
If your name comes up when they’re looking for a business crisis manager or a social media expert, that’s personal brand.
And 20% hard work
Don’t get this wrong: being lazy won’t help you. But all the effort, hard work and overtime will be worth nothing if nobody values them. In other words, hard work won’t help you if you haven’t built a good reputation and a personal brand, and if you aren’t known to the people in charge of advancing their employees’ careers.
That’s why a company sometimes only recognises someone once it runs into them working for the competition: they never noticed what that person did for the company, but they certainly notice the damage that person’s work does to them from the other side.
(Read: There’s one way to show your boss he was wrong to let you go: sink his company)
Do these percentages change when it comes to starting your own business?
Let’s say that when it’s your own company, rather than changing, these percentages go up. In fact, the rule stops being 50-30-20 and becomes 100-100-100.
Yes, in your business you’re going to have to give 300%.
100% social skills, because every business depends on its customers, and customers are, at the end of the day, a network of contacts. The better your social skills, the more contacts you’ll have, and the more influential and powerful they’ll be.
100% personal brand, because you can have the best product in the world, but if consumers don’t see it as a brand they can trust, it will be hard to sell. And if you have a good restaurant tucked away in some hidden corner of the city and sit around waiting for a stray customer to walk in and discover your good food, that rarely happens.
And as an entrepreneur, you’ll have to put in every ounce of effort at the start, with hard and smart work. But as you try to make your company bigger and more profitable, you’ll also need the skill and ability to delegate to other people, because nobody succeeds working alone.
Further reading
- 40 universal truths for success in your career and business
- How your physical appearance outweighs skills and talent
- How to become an expert in anything
- 7 psychological traps that can hold back your success
- The best advice ever given to college students for career success
Featured image: Brian Johnson, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
