Welcome to the #culturedrop. Every Tuesday, Galen Emanuele emails tools to advance leadership skills, team culture, and personal growth. No spam, just great content. Sign up now to get it in your inbox.

When it comes to professional career development and advancement, a very simple concept that I am in love with is the idea of building an invisible resume.

Every single thing that you do when you show up at work; in your behaviors, how you treat other people, impact people around you, and perform your role, you are building an invisible resume about yourself. Good or bad, all of your actions contribute to what people understand as the characteristics, traits, and qualities of you as a coworker and employee.

Do people love to bring up and share ideas with you?

Are you easy to work and get along with?

Are you a great communicator, helpful, resourceful?

Do you gossip or badmouth other people?

Who do you align yourself with?

Are you a leader or a follower?

Are you competent in your role, do you produce quality work?

Your career depends on it.

Throughout your career, there will always be conversations that take place about you, above you, in the organization around measuring your value and quality as an employee. Those conversations have a huge impact on your career.

You will never, ever truly know what opportunities and advancement will be made available to you by how you show up, or withheld from you by how you show up.

Everything that you do has a consequence and adds to what other people know and perceive about who you are and what you’re capable of. We also all constantly build invisible resumes about other people in our heads.

If you are the kind of person who's supportive and helpful, looks for ways to say yes, or are receptive to and take feedback well, and can navigate conflict productively, people will interact and respond to you much differently than if you align yourself with negative, toxic people or are reluctant to change, and cause drama, or don’t carry your weight on the team, etc.

You are always, always contributing information and data to that invisible resume about you in other people’s heads.

This applies to every single person in an organization, regardless of your role.

Whether you're an individual contributor or in a leadership position, this applies to every single person in an organization when it comes to the experience of how your co-workers, colleagues, and leaders feel about you. In service of your own career and possibility for growth and advancement, it is critical to be extremely intentional about your contribution to the organization and the team.

That being said, it doesn’t mean we don’t all have bad days and make mistakes and missteps as we grow as humans and navigate the complicated dynamics of interacting with a variety of different communication, working, and personality styles in the workplace. But how you navigate those mistakes and your growth along the way will go far in determining where you end up.

Don't think of resumes as just something you build to apply for a job. You are building an invisible resume with the people around you every single day, with everything that you do. Be intentional about your choices and your impact on other people. When something gets added about you, make sure it’s something you’re proud to have on there.

Want more?

This article was created by Galen Emanuele for the #culturedrop. Free leadership and team culture content in less than 5 minutes a week. Check out the rest of this month's content and subscribe to the Culture Drop at https://bit.ly/culturedrop 

MORE