Navigating a Career Pivot
Career pivots spawn both from internal and external forces. They tend to start with a growing sense that the work you've been doing no longer fits the person you've become, or an environment that you’ve finally grown apart from. By the time most people commit to the pivot, they've already been questioning the status quo for a while.
What I've noticed with professionals in a career transition is that feeling stuck usually comes from trying to identify their new destination before doing the groundwork to figure out their position, then orientation. Where am I going? is almost always the wrong first question. The more useful questions are: who am I now and what value am I actually bringing with me?
Leading Without a Title
Some of the most effective leaders I've worked with in my career have been individual contributors. Not because they had informal authority in some abstract sense, but because they understood something specific: leadership is behavior before it is position. You do not need a title to shape a room, move an idea forward, or change how a team approaches a problem.
If you're an individual contributor (IC) who wants to grow into leadership, or who simply wants more impact where you already sit, the question isn't “how do I get promoted?” The better question is: “what would I start doing differently tomorrow?”