Think Like the CEO of Your Career: Recognise What Is Happening
Natasha Williams 
Learn how Black professionals can spot patterns in progression, pressure and recognition before those patterns shape their career choices.
Many professionals assess their career by asking whether they are doing their job well, but the CEO of a career needs to ask a much wider set of questions.
You need to understand what is happening around your performance, because excellent work does not take place in isolation from organisational culture, relationships, access to opportunity and the way competence gets interpreted.
This distinction matters for Black professionals because the Cost of Black Excellence research shows how much additional work is taking place alongside the role people were employed to perform.
Within the research, 86.4% of Black-heritage respondents said they always or often felt they had to work harder than others to be seen as competent. Almost nine in ten reported experiencing microaggressions, bias or discrimination either occasionally or frequently.
One respondent described the experience as having to “over-prepare for every meeting just to be seen as competent, not exceptional — competent.”
Her description captures an important distinction between doing the job and managing everything around it.
The preparation itself was only one part of her workload. She also described monitoring her tone, body language and facial expressions because she understood that passion might be interpreted as aggression, while restraint might be interpreted as a lack of leadership.
This is work, even when the organisation does not recognise it as work.
Learn to recognise the second job
There is the job you were employed to perform, and there is sometimes a second job involved in managing race while performing it.
The second job might involve preparing more extensively because you feel less able to make a mistake. It might involve deciding whether to challenge a comment, calculating how your response will be perceived or changing the way you speak in different professional settings.
The research found that 87.5% of Black-heritage respondents had felt the need to tone down aspects of their identity, including their voice, hair, emotions or cultural expression, to succeed professionally.
When this behaviour happens repeatedly, people often stop noticing how much energy it takes because it has become part of their normal working routine.
Thinking like the CEO of your career requires you to notice it again.
Look for patterns rather than individual incidents
One difficult meeting does not define an entire career, and one unsuccessful promotion does not provide enough information to judge an organisation.
Patterns provide more useful information.
Perhaps you repeatedly receive excellent feedback but remain overlooked when opportunities arise. Perhaps your workload grows faster than your authority. Perhaps managers encourage you to complete another leadership programme, qualification or mentoring scheme while colleagues with similar experience receive opportunities to lead.
Perhaps you find yourself checking and rechecking work that you know is good because you believe the consequences of a mistake will be greater for you than for other colleagues.
Several respondents described these patterns in the research. One professional spoke about taking longer routes to progression than colleagues, while another described continually investing in professional development and still finding that her expertise was checked externally before leadership trusted her advice.
These examples do not tell every Black professional's story, but they show why individual incidents become more meaningful when examined as part of a repeated pattern.
Conduct your own career review
Most organisations assess employees through appraisals and performance reviews, but those processes answer questions that primarily matter to the employer.
Your own career review should answer questions that matter to you.
You might ask whether your responsibilities have increased during the past year, whether your salary and authority have grown with them, whether you have gained skills that strengthen your external market position, and whether people with influence understand where you want your career to go.
You should also examine your relationships and ask who gives you advice, who gives you opportunities, who advocates for you when you are absent and who has enough organisational influence to affect your progression.
The final part of the review should address cost. You need to know what your current level of success requires from you physically, emotionally and psychologically.
Recognition gives you information
Recognising workplace pressure does not mean assuming every setback is racialised or deciding that leaving is the correct response.
Recognition gives you enough information to investigate properly.
A CEO would not ignore repeated operational problems because each event appeared manageable in isolation. They would look for trends, examine the evidence and ask what those trends meant for the future of the organisation.
Your career deserves the same scrutiny.
Start recording what happens, because memory becomes unreliable when difficult experiences accumulate. Keep evidence of your achievements, progression discussions, additional responsibilities, positive feedback and important commitments made by managers.
You are looking for the relationship between what you contribute, what you receive and what maintaining that position is costing you.
Once you understand what is happening, the next responsibility is deciding what needs protecting.
Categories: : Career & Work