The Return on Generosity

Most career advice tells you to focus on your own progress.

The driven professional optimises relentlessly. Skills, visibility, performance. Every decision filtered through one question: does this move me forward? It looks like the right approach - but there are other things to consider.

Last week I wrote about why your career is not a solo project, and why the people who advocate for you matter more than most career advice acknowledges. My inbox tells me it made sense, but it left a new question.

If advocacy cannot be manufactured, how do you actually earn it?

The answer is not better networking. It is not a more polished personal brand. It is something most competitive professionals have quietly written off as a distraction.

It is investing in other people.

Focus Has a Ceiling

The driven professional optimises relentlessly for their own progress. Skills, visibility, performance. All pointed inwards and upwards.

That approach has real advantages early on. It builds momentum. It signals ambition. It gets you noticed, but it has a limit.

The ceiling arrives earlier than you expect.

At some point, career progression stops being about what you can do and starts being about what you can see in others. What you can develop and what you can build that is bigger than your own output.

The missing variable is almost never skill. It is almost always surface area.

What is my Surface Area Matt?

Surface area is not your network in the LinkedIn sense. It is the number of people who think about you positively when you are not in the room.

Every person you have genuinely helped becomes a node. Someone who mentions your name unprompted. Someone who thinks of you when an opportunity appears. Someone who speaks well of you not because they have to, but because you gave them a reason to.

The focused competitor has a small surface area. Their world is efficient and self-contained. They do excellent work and wait for it to be recognised.

The problem is that recognition does not travel through merit alone. It travels through people.

The Cost of Treating Mentorship as Optional

Many professionals see mentoring or supporting others as a cost. Time spent on someone else's progress is time not spent on their own. That logic is understandable AND wrong.

When you invest in someone else's development, you do not just help them. You become visible in a new context. You show judgment, generosity, and the kind of leadership that people notice and reward.

The person you helped talks about you. Their network becomes attached to yours and your reputation moves into circles you may have never entered.

None of this requires you to be calculating about it. You do not need to mentor people strategically, measuring the return on each relationship. You just need to stop treating it as a distraction from the real work.

I mentor 1 or 2 people every year at work. I take as much as I give, learning about new areas of the business and sharpening my coaching skills. In return, I've had great feedback to support my performance reviews and gained a reputation as being someone willing to give time to help others and build community. All of this for a maximum of 1 hour per week.

Here is the uncomfortable bit...

Pure focus on your role requires a particular kind of self-belief. You are the main character. Your progress is the priority. Other people's development is at best adjacent, at worst a drain.

You can reverse the energy you give to supporting others, it just requires you to build some humility.

Humility is a quality that keeps your world expanding rather than contracting. It lets you learn from people around you. It makes you genuinely curious about others, which makes you more interesting to be around.

It creates the conditions where people want to help you, not because you asked, but because you showed up for others first.

The professionals who compound fastest over time are often not the most individually talented people. They are the ones who made other people better, consistently, over time.

That is what builds the kind of support that no performance review can manufacture.

My good friend and previous colleague Thomas Power referred to this skill as being Open, Random and Supportive.

A Practical Shift

This is not an argument for abandoning focus.

Drive and ambition are not the problem. The problem is focus applied narrowly can exclude the relationships that 10x the effort.

One shift worth making: treat one mentoring or sponsorship relationship as part of your actual work, not an optional extra on top of it. A genuine investment in someone whose progress you care about.

Notice what happens over time. The conversation that stretches your thinking. The gratitude that turns into loyalty. The unexpected introduction. The person who mentions your name in a room you did not know existed.

That is surface area compounding. It does not show up on a performance review. It shows up in the career you build over a decade.

If you want people in your corner, the most reliable path is to get in someone else's corner first. Not transactionally but genuinely.

Who are you currently investing in, and what is that investment building for both of you?