Why I want someone else to own my career

"You own your own career"
"You should own your own career"
"You can own your own career"

These three sentences are subtly different in words but hugely in the impact for you as an employee of a company.

Every noticed how successful sports people have two managers? (e.g. footballers).

Their first manager is the one they work for. They do what they are told by this manager. This manager hires, fires decides pay rises etc. You probably have one of these if you are a company employee. This manager works for the football club, cricket team, formula one team or whatever.

Think Jose Mourinho (Man Utd), Toto Wolff (Mercedes F1) or Christian Horner (Red Bull F1) if you like.

The second one is their manager that works for the sports person. This person finds them work, negotiates their contracts and pay rises, manages their image rights, gets them product endorsements e.g. shoes, clothes etc. Sometimes this person is referred to as their agent - for example in acting. They may have more than one of these.

The key thing here is that the sports person concentrates on the sport. They score goals. They win races. They train to score more goals or to drive faster. They concentrate on what their company is paying them for. They work on delivering business value.

They might be the best in the world at what they do - or are trying to be. Conversely, they might be terrible at managing their career. This doesn't matter - they have someone else who is very, very good at it to do it for them.

"Ah" I hear you cry: "You should have a career mentor!".

Nope - that's not the same thing at all. Does my career mentor apply for jobs for me? Do they write my CV? Do the join me in performance appraisals? Do they negotiate salary rises and promotions? No - they give advice as to how I can do that myself.

I admit I'm terrible at that sort of thing - and although I'd like to be better at it (because being better at it might mean I'd be further up the career ladder), I have absolutely no interest in becoming the kind of person who is better at it.

I want to be better at architecting, designing and implementing solutions for my customers. Faster at delivery with higher quality and better responsiveness. Better at mentoring and coaching my team. Better at driving business value. Better at making my customers happier.

So, I'm going to concentrate on that - and I'm also going to go and find someone to manage my career for me. If it's good enough for Lewis Hamilton . . .