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Have you ever been on a major highway or freeway during the peak of morning traffic?

If so, you know it’s a place where speed limits are just cruel reminders of what’s possible, where a wave of the hand from a fellow driver can make your day, and a finger can ruin it.

Even if you’re now enjoying a work-from-anywhere lifestyle, you may remember one of the saving graces of the crowded commute is the carpool lane. Having spent hundreds of hours during the past 10 years in the thick of the morning commute on the I-5 North freeway here in the Seattle area, I have observed some oddly relatable things between the carpool lane and work life.

1) It takes seizing opportunities to get where you want to be. The traffic will not magically open a chute so you can glide over from the on-ramp to the leftmost lane. You have to go, carefully, signaling your intent, and one lane at a time.

At work, it’s easy to go heads down, hoping someone notices your hard work and invites you into your next position. Instead, we need to look for those opportunities like:

• A leader that needs help on a project
• A recent vacancy that might be a good fit for you
• A new initiative that is taking shape and will need a great team

Then, you’ve got to make your move!

2) You have to be willing to go slow, before you can go fast. To move across multiple lanes of traffic, you have to let a few people get ahead of you before making your move to the lane where you fly by everyone with your carpool buddy in tow.

Creating a better work week for yourself may not instantly propel you where you want to go with your career, it can even feel slow at first as you dial in your schedule, your e-mail habits, and work flow. Yet practicing excellence at work, focusing on the essential activities, while maintaining healthy boundaries, will allow you to perform at a sustainable pace long after colleagues have burned out.

3) You don’t know everyone’s situation. It’s easy to give a quick glance at a fellow driver zooming down the carpool lane with what looks like an empty passenger seat. It can cause your blood to boil with an insatiable need report this person only to catch a glimpse of their kids in the backseat a few moments later.

It’s tempting at work to look around and see others getting ahead without seeing the effort, the reason for the role change, or the struggles they may be dealing with outside of work. Feelings of envy have never improved my life, but appreciation and gratitude often do. My time and energy and precious resources, and I’d rather spend it celebrating the wins of others while working on achieving wins of my own.

Next steps – Let’s take these lessons for a spin this week

1. Look for an opportunity you’d like to pursue, and set up time to talk to your leader about it.
2. Acknowledge where you feel like you’re going slower than you want, and ask yourself if it’s preparing you for where you want to go, or if you’re just stuck?
3. Practice giving a “good for them” affirmation instead of brewing in the negativity of “why did they get that?” at least once this week.

Don’t believe the lie that career growth has to be put on hold because you want to live a full life. Many of us are investing the time to work better, so we can experience living better. Just like the carpool lane, some things are better when our friends and family are along for the ride.

I’m a few months into a new role at my day job that I love, and I found myself wondering…

This is great, but how did I get here?

After looking back on my career, talking with other professionals, and reading about career climbers, I saw two major themes about the way we work propelling us forward into a position for future opportunities – you can outwork or outperform. 

Outworking is straight forward.  This is where you start early, stay late, and get more done in a day than your peers.  This is hustle culture.  It’s doing whatever it takes to prove you’re ready for what’s next.  I used to use this method exclusively early in my career.  Being a young manager, I was hungry to grow and to be taken seriously.  It was easy to get noticed when you volunteer for extra assignments, when you can drop everything and jump on a plane, or you can give up your weekend to prep a presentation for the big boss.

Then there’s outperforming.  This takes strategy.  The work results have to be better, the insights smarter, and the plan more compelling.  Outperforming doesn’t care how long you worked.  In fact, we all know top performers are super smart about how they spend their time.  You don’t find them at meetings where they aren’t adding value.  They aren’t glued to their laptop at all hours.  They take time to think, to plan, and to seek input along the way.

As Marshall Goldsmith famously said, “what got you here, won’t get you there.”  Outworking used to be my default, and it seemed to be working as the promotions rolled in.  Yet, as I progressed in my career, I also progressed in my personal life.  I got married, we had children, and now my evening and weekend time took on a level of importance and value that a job just couldn’t compete with no matter how much I enjoyed the work.

I had to find a new way.

When you start to live a full life, it forces you to get serious about how to work better.  If we all have the same amount of hours in the day, then we need a way of working that produced the kind of RESULTS that get noticed, and not rely on my car being first in the parking lot or my status dot staying green into the evening.

Let’s get tactical.

Ideas for how you can position yourself to get ahead by outperforming

1. Deliver really excellent work for high priority items – not perfect, but excellent. This takes time and focus; time you don’t have if you don’t block it out during peak creation hours. You can’t bounce from video call to video call all day and then pull a fantastic presentation together using your 5 o’clock brain.
2. Get input. Good work solicits feedback. But great work? That requires research, talking with stakeholders, pushing on their ideas and getting curious about assumptions, asking questions, and taking a step back to really think about the audience whether it’s a spreadsheet, a presentation deck, a document, or timeline and incorporating all of this into a work product that delivers at the next level.
3. Be visible. If you work in a hybrid environment, it means showing up to your office when it counts, making the space in your schedule for hallway conversations, grabbing tea in the breakroom, and connecting with others. When you’re remote, it means going on camera when you’re speaking, or engaging in a discussion. Your non-verbals are important! It also means voicing questions and ideas, and supporting the ideas of others all in service of achieving a better result.

Outperforming may not be talked about as much as hustle, but I have found it is the most sustainable way for professionals to move forward in their career.

While my days on relying solely on outworking to get ahead have passed, there’s still value in leaning into an all out sprint while prepping for the big presentation, supporting a product launch, or when things go wrong. I know when I’m in this mode, it’s temporary, and rest is coming when the moment is over.

Are you ready to outperform?