The choices that change a career often look like extra work at the time. Executive coach Angela Justice examines why the projects, questions, relationships and conversations people almost dismiss can become the ones they later recognize as turning points.
Ask most senior leaders about the moment that changed their career trajectory, and they rarely name the obvious one. It is not the job they accepted, the company they left or the promotion they pursued. It is usually something smaller. Something they almost said no to.
Consider a research director who was nominated for a culture committee. She had a data package due, experiments to oversee and a team already stretched thin. The committee sounded like it would involve planning offsites, reviewing survey comments and arguing about catering, tasks that didn’t seem worth her time. She said yes mostly because saying no felt difficult.
The research director was not entirely wrong. Some of the work was exactly what she had expected: logistics, planning and tasks that felt far removed from the real work on her plate.
But over the next several months, she sat beside colleagues whose functions she rarely encountered. She heard how other parts of the business thought about shared problems. She became interested in questions she had never had reason to consider. And people who had known her mostly as “one of the scientists” began to see how the research director asked questions, handled tradeoffs and thought beyond her own discipline.
When a cross-functional initiative needed a research lead—someone who could work across the organization, not just within research and development—her name came up. She took the role. That culture committee assignment had led somewhere she had not planned and turned out to be much closer to the work she’d wanted next.
The research director had not known any of that when she almost said no. She had thought she would simply be taking on extra work.
Careers are easier to understand backward
We tend to talk about careers as if they are shaped by obvious decisions: taking a new role, leaving a company, getting promoted, relocating or going back to school. Those decisions matter. But by the time they happen, much of the path has already been shaped by smaller choices that did not look important at the time.
- Saying yes to a project
- Asking the question no one else wants to ask
- Building a relationship before it’s needed
- Choosing the stretch assignment over the safer one
- Having the conversation that would be easier to avoid
These moments rarely announce themselves as career defining. They look like extra work, awkward obligations, inconvenient invitations or small risks that do not fit neatly into the plan. That is what makes them easy to dismiss.
Most senior leaders can look back and trace a line through their careers. They can point to the project that changed how they thought, the relationship that opened a door, the assignment that taught them the business or the conversation that shifted how someone understood them. But they could not see that line while they were saying yes to the project, asking the question or having the conversation that later made the path visible.
That is the uncomfortable part. You may be making some of the most important career decisions of your life while thinking you are just deciding whether to attend another meeting.
The plan is incomplete
Every career plan is built from what you already know: your interests, strengths, function, company and the kind of work you believe you want next. That is useful. It is also limited.
You cannot know whether you want broader leadership if you have not been close to broader problems. You cannot know whether you are drawn to strategy if you have only seen the finished version, not the tradeoffs behind it. You cannot know whether a certain kind of work suits you if you have only imagined it from a distance.
That is why the small choices matter. They put you closer to information your plan does not yet have.
A project no one fully owns may show you how decisions get made when authority is unclear. A question in the right meeting may show you whether you are willing to slow the group down when something important is being missed. A relationship outside your usual circle may help you understand pressures your own role does not show you. A hard conversation may teach you whether you can stay useful when the discussion gets uncomfortable.
None of that is theoretical career planning. It’s practical information about the business, the work and yourself that you could not have gotten from a plan alone. The frustrating part is that you usually get that insight from choices that look inefficient at first. They ask something of you before they offer anything back.
People need evidence before they can imagine you differently
The research director did not join the culture committee to change how people perceived her. She joined because she was asked. But the choice changed what people had the chance to see.
In her regular role, colleagues knew her through her scientific work. They knew she was rigorous, serious and capable. That was accurate, but incomplete.
On the committee, people saw something else. They heard the questions she asked when the issue was not purely scientific. They watched her weigh competing priorities. They saw her stay grounded in the data while also considering employees, resources and business tradeoffs beyond her formal responsibilities.
That mattered later not because she had campaigned for a broader role or because one meeting had changed everything. It mattered because when a broader opportunity emerged, there were people who had already seen her operate in a broader way.
That may feel unfair, but it is often true. It is not enough to be capable of doing more. Other people need a chance to see that capability, and smaller, less obvious opportunities can give them the evidence they need.
Those smaller choices do two things at once: They teach you something about yourself and give others a more complete picture of what you can do.
The door opens after the choice
The formal opportunity is often the last visible step, not the first. By the time a role opens, a sponsor makes a recommendation or a leader asks you to take on something bigger, people have drawn on evidence they have collected. Their conclusions could stem from the project you joined even though it sat outside your formal role, the question you asked that changed the discussion, the relationship you kept alive without needing anything from it or the assignment you accepted because it would teach you something.
Some of the choices you make will not matter. Some projects will be tedious. Some conversations will be uncomfortable without being transformative. Some relationships will remain pleasant and never become pivotal. But dismissing everything that does not look immediately useful is the wrong approach. It’s better to ask yourself, “What might saying yes to this request expose me to? Will it teach me something I do not already know about the business, the work or myself? Will it put me in contact with people who do not already know how I think? Will it give others a more complete picture of what I can handle?”
The biggest career decisions do not feel like career decisions. That is what makes them so easy to miss.
The line will be easier to see later. Your job is not to predict the whole path now. Your job is to stop treating every small choice as small just because you cannot see its impact yet.
