How taking small steps in advance can prepare you for big leaps
In our recent conversation with Bruna Gil about leaps in her career, she highlighted the importance of setting goals (but being flexible about them), building skills through smaller 'leaps', and evaluating those leaps and decisions along the way - course-correcting as needed.
Earlier this week we spoke to Bruna Gil, who leads the Channel Sales business in EMEA for LinkedIn and is a strong advocate for LGBTQ+ rights in the workplace, holding multiple leadership roles at Out@In (LinkedIn’s LGBTQ+ Network). Bruna has made massive leaps in her career, such as moving to a new country and continent having never been there and working on products and in roles that no one else has done before. While not everyone shares her same risk appetite, her journey has highlighted three key steps of taking a leap that can apply regardless of the situation as we frame our own journeys. Those elements are:
1. Set your general goal
2. Build your skills, resilience, and capacity through challenges
3. Set decision gates along the way to evaluate your progress
Set your general goal
Bruna identified two broad goals for herself in university – she wanted to work in tech and she wanted to be able to be comfortable being out in the workplace. Those goals steered her towards her leap transferring from her Brazilian university to one in Portugal, and continued to guide her career journey within Europe, ultimately leading her to London. She had her goal of what she wanted personally and professionally, and then was flexible in the route that might take – the countries and jobs that she lived and worked in along the way. It can sometimes be tempting to think of goals as all or nothing – either everything needs to be spelled out perfectly, such as “by 40 I want to be a founder and CEO of a $XM company in Y industry” rather than something a bit broader and more flexible such as “I want to better understand the challenges and opportunities within the technology industry. By setting a general direction, Bruna was able to identify opportunities along the way and take other leaps which helped prepare her for her career in tech and her comfort being an out LGBTQ+ advocate at work.
Build your skills
One point Bruna made when she talked about her big professional leaps of working on a new product or in a new role was to reframe, “What if this doesn’t work?” to “What if it does?” While leaps or risks have a downside, they also have an upside, and remembering and considering that can help balance the decision-making process. Bruna also highlighted that her focus is always on what she can learn from an experience, how can she continue to grow her skills and knowledge so that even if a leap, risk, product launch, or role doesn’t go exactly as planned, it’s better prepared her for a bigger leap in the future. Underpinning her pursuit of new skills is her view of her own identity as distinct from her work. Because she doesn’t view these leaps or opportunities as an extension of her identity, if they don’t go well, she can easily view them as a learning opportunity, pick up, and move on to the next. When our identity is tied up into our work, a failure at work can lead to the sense of personal failure, which is why many people don’t end up taking risks. By externalizing the leap, or risk, we are able to see it for what it is – a learning opportunity, rather than a gamble on our identity or self-worth.
Set decision gates
One of the final takeaways from our conversation with Bruna was the idea of setting decision gates after taking a big leap. It can be easy to rethink big decisions after we make them, question ourselves and wonder ‘what if’ we had stayed, hadn’t taken the leap (or vice versa). What helped Bruna was setting specific decision gates and evaluation points along the way – when she moved to Portugal she said she’d give it 6 months before deciding whether to continue and stay or move back to Brazil, and she’s continue to set similar time-based decision periods after other big leaps in her career. Of course, in some cases a decision might be to stay and continue, like she did when she moved to Europe, but in other cases it might be realizing that a job or a role wasn’t what she imagined it to be and that she might need to course correct through a different opportunity. Just because she took a risk doesn’t mean she had to stick to it and persevere if it was no longer serving her, which is something that we all can learn from as well. It can be tempting to feel like we need to ‘prove ourselves’ in a role or after taking a risk, when really one of the greatest acts of courage can be knowing when to walk away, and decision gates create natural points to reflect and make that choice.
Photo by Awwad Baradan on Pexels
