Be the Change

Adriana Beal has spent the last 15 years helping Fortune 100 companies, innovation companies and startups build better software that solves the right problem and aligns with business strategy. Her current focus of work is customer development and product strategy for tech startups.

  Career Development   New Practitioners   ProjectsAtWork  

Are you being slighted by project team members and stakeholders? Are your ideas ignored or credited to others? Don’t waste any more time and energy complaining — take these three steps to turn the situation around, elevate your role, and become an influencer in your workplace.

Having held a successful mentoring relationship with younger IT professionals for the past few years, and being the recipient of many emails asking for help with their careers, I’ve noticed a pattern in the complaints they express to me. There’s always an external source for their troubles:

“My team doesn’t pay attention to what I say, even when I’m proven right at a later stage of a project.”

“My stakeholders refuse to spend time clarifying their needs, making it impossible for me to create quality requirements for my projects.”

Sometimes, the situation is taken to the next level, with a specific individual or group being accused of deliberately getting in the way of career advancement:

“A colleague is friends with our manager, and ends up getting all the best projects.”

“My coworkers are trying to sabotage my work by hiding information or keeping me out of important meetings.”

“My  colleague (or manager) steals the credit for my winning ideas and is being promoted while I am left behind without any recognition.”

The people writing these comments are missing an important …

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