Having a young family can mean settling for the best paid job you can get that lets you work as flexibly as you need to. Chris Zefferys shares two simple steps to get to the top.

My life at work was out of control. Straight out of university, I’d landed a job at one of the best advertising agencies in San Francisco, US, expecting glitz and glamour. Instead, I was working extremely long hours, doing a ton of photocopying, facing demanding clients and even getting kicked out of the car by my boss on the way to a client meeting. I was overworked, undervalued and under-challenged.

Work sucked!

My “work sucks” situation consumed so much of my life, I’d even call in sick, just to avoid my job for a day. Finally, I decided I couldn’t continue this way anymore. I set out to study the steps that successful and satisfied employees live by. I applied them –and it worked. I want to share two simple steps that can help you, too, create a more satisfying life at work.

Step 1: Put yourself in charge. We expect our company to give us satisfaction by automatically giving us the promotion we know we deserve, the challenge, the acknowledgement, the reward and so forth. When we don’t get what we expect from our hard work, we feel betrayed and begin to disengage from our job. We let others control the terms: We work on the projects given to us; we take the raise given to us. When we give ownership of our life at work to our company, managers and colleagues, we leave to chance whether or not we’ll like our job.

But you can take responsibility for a successful and satisfying life at work. How? By going into your job with a plan. Rather than just showing up and hoping it works out, use these three stages of job growth to guide you through your work life.

he first stage is learning your job. In this brief stage, you focus on your core job duties, what’s expected of you and the company culture. Get a clear understanding from your boss what he or she needs you to do to be successful. Take the time to assess the company culture. Note what people wear and when they typically come into work. Introduce yourself to as many people as possible. From the executive assistant to the man, give yourself a face, because building these relationships will help you throughout your life at work.

The second stage is proving your worth by doing your job well. Identify the best ways to measure your performance and do your best to avoid distraction. This will always be part of the job, and it’s easy to think that’s all you need to do. Most of us get stuck here. But there’s more to your job development, and it’s the third stage that offers greater satisfaction.

Once you have the confidence of fulfilling your responsibilities successfully, take it to the next level: Add value to your company. Identify what makes your company happy, your boss happy and yourself happy. Your answers to these three questions will allow you to build an environment where you’re making the decisions about your work experience – ones that benefit not only your company, but you. This provides you a platform for offering even greater contributions. It puts you in charge.

I decided that what made me happy was giving my customers great service. I looked for ways to go above and beyond my job description to provide my clients satisfaction. One day I took a stack of monthly reports that had been piling up in the corner of my office and did a comprehensive review for the client, charting trends and analyzing the competition. My boss and I shared what I had developed with our client’s brand managers, and our client ended up using it to plan their advertising strategy for the year. My boss was impressed and the company was happy because we were strengthening our relationship with customers. And I felt great. Knowing what made me, my boss and my company happy helped me direct the outcome for each group.

Step 2: Promote yourself.

Does your boss know what you do? Does he truly know what you contribute, or does he just know you’re getting the job done? Here’s the reality: Your boss is too busy to take notice of what you’re doing. She just wants to know that it’s getting done and she won’t have to deal with mistakes. It’s up to you to help her see your value.

So, show your boss. When you finish projects or presentations, lead a successful meeting, or make a customer extremely happy, get into your boss’s office and show what you’ve done. Invite him out for coffee if you have to – do what it takes to make him aware. When you have his ear, walk through your contributions and what they mean to your boss, company and customers.

I found that it felt good to share my accomplishments with my boss. Through these brief weekly meetings, I built a strong relationship with my manager, gained her trust and respect, and received higher-profile projects to work on. I began to get what I wanted out of my life at work.

Hoping for a promotion? Your managers will rarely ask you where you want to go or what else you’d like to do in your company. It’s up to you to share your intentions with your boss. I experienced this firsthand when I was passed over for a promotion at my job in advertising. I had a great work ethic, invested a lot of my time in exceeding the expectations of my clients and did my job well. I felt I deserved it. But the promotion was handed to a colleague who had started several months after I had. I couldn’t believe it.

Later, I found out this colleague had spoken about up his desire to get a promotion – and I hadn’t. My managers thought I was complacent and uninterested in taking on greater responsibility. They were wrong, but I learned a valuable lesson. What if your boss says you’re not ready? Find out what you need to work on and in what time frame. The next time you speak up, you’ll have what is needed to get to the next level.

These are just two steps to help you build job satisfaction and guide the way you manage yourself within your job. The truth is, we can make work suck and we can do a pretty good job at it. The good news is that we have an even greater ability to make work a success. We just need to decide what we want, and then make decisions at work that reflect it.

Chris Zefferys is the founder of Jetfessional (www.jetfessional.com) a training organization for graduating college students. He is the author of “Young, Successful & Calling In Sick.” He lives in Seattle, Washington.

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