Being a creative marketing professional who actually gets to create is harder than you think, especially when it comes to moving your career forward. Not all of us want to be managers or executives, but we all want to thrive in our chosen field. Throughout this series, “Career Advancement Lessons from Star Trek: Lower Decks,” I want to help writers, designers, developers, and other practitioners learn how to speak up for themselves and their craft. Our goal? To do remarkable work worthy of respect and recognition in the workplace.

The Character:

“I hand-edited all six billion sequences. It was really fun!” (“Much Ado About Boimler” – Lower Decks Season 1, Episode 7)

What a dreamer. An irrepressible idealist. Ensign D’Vana Tendi looks for the good in everyone and everything at every opportunity. The fact that she’s Orion – typically a race in Star Trek comprised of profiteering pirates who live outside of galactic laws – adds to her charm. Instead of ruthlessly exploiting people for monetary gain like her family, she focuses her boundless energy into the pursuit of knowledge. As a science officer, she is supremely fascinated by the world around her, from subatomic particles to super-massive anomalies that stretch the boundaries of accepted knowledge. The galaxy is an amazing place, and she longs to explore it all.

Like a good scientist, she also gives each situation and character the benefit of the doubt. Tendi accepts any scenario before her with an open yet analytical mind. She will examine what’s in front of her, collect the data, make an informed decision, and head off in that direction with enthusiasm. She’s also a good friend, so people like working with her because she’s a bit of an overachiever who’s pleasant to work with.

If you’re a Tendi, then I want you on my team, but you also need to learn how to make some tough decisions. That starts with realizing that not everyone likes you or has your best interests at heart. Sure, not every workplace is packed with cutthroat competitors or political players, but it would behoove your career to pay attention to how your work is perceived. Which means you need to put your marketing skills to work for you.

The Challenge:

Ensign Tendi loves the thrill of the search. Since she’s a science officer, her days are filled with experiments, exploring the unknown, and making sense of what’s happening in the world. She’s a rare combination of idealistic and objective. Unfortunately, her wide-eyed wonder can get her into trouble because she assumes everyone plays by the same rules she does.

Since she’s not normally competitive with others, this doesn’t bother her most of the time. But since Tendi is a highly driven achiever, she competes against herself often, so when she doesn’t succeed, she doesn’t understand why others did. It’s because she doesn’t play the game very well.

Young marketers fall into this trap early and often. They love their craft and prefer to avoid the office drama at all costs. They’d rather be doing good work and being a good friend. But what they don’t realize is that being aware of office politics is an important part of the job. It’s where you learn about the big picture details of the work, especially how the bosses understand the clients, the tasks, and the projects at a macro level. You must learn how to put down the tools of marketing and pick up the tools of networking.

The Choice:

Senior leadership approached Ensign Tendi with the opportunity to enter a leadership track in the Science Division. But while she was excited about the offer, she was also nervous about what it meant for the science. Like many smart young professionals, she quickly realized that advancement often meant meetings instead of doing day-to-day work. Her thinking was, “I’m a scientist! I need to do science, not sit in conference rooms.”

To a certain extent, she’s right. The best people should be doing their best work at all times. But that also means the best people should be involved in leading others to do their best work. It also means different levels of working together. As a good friend and team player, Tendi enjoyed working on projects with like-minded scientists – and people liked working with her. But stepping into this leadership opportunity meant choosing to be responsible for others, to lead them, mentor them, and sometimes not be their friend. It meant making hard decisions, and not everyone wants to do that.

Do you want to get that promotion? That opportunity? You must make sure that you first talk to the right people and then take stock of what you really want for your career. Most of us want raises and recognition, but many of us aren’t willing to put ourselves out there when and how it matters. Doing good work is important but so is talking yourself up in the right environment. Where Boimler would ingratiate himself to senior leadership and Mariner liked to piss them off, Tendi preferred to smile big, work hard, and assume that people would notice her. But it doesn’t always work that way.

The Chance:

Over the course of the five seasons of Lower Decks, Ensign Tendi had to grow up in a variety of ways. While she was never immature, she did let her idealism take charge of how she approached a task. She was a wonderful friend who always wanted to help people, but she didn’t know how to be a leader. True to her Orion heritage, she thought being in charge meant being mean and ruthless. She also loved science, but that love was often a distraction or a shield she could put up to hide from the harsher realities of the world.

So, between coming to grips with her Orion upbringing and realizing that sometimes you had to play politics as part of being a good scientist, Ensign Tendi eventually realized that she wanted to be a leader. However, she did so by carving out a path that made sense to her: By applying her Orion energy to science and leadership, she could be the fierce friend, advocate, and researcher necessary to get the job done. And she stopped being afraid of standing up for herself and what she needed.

What does that mean for you, young marketer? It means that you might have to set aside your idealism to embrace a bit of reality. No one is asking you to be jaded or cynical. In fact, your optimism will set you apart from your peers, both in terms of how you work with others and how you approach the work.

But you also must recognize that life will never take place in a vacuum. You must learn to combine your penchant for doing amazing work with your positive energy but then temper it with the realization that strong leadership takes effort. Most importantly, you must realize that none of it will happen magically because it’s the “right” thing to do. It requires a hearty amount of your dedication and an equal measure of buy-in from senior leadership.

Ensign D’Vana Tendi image courtesy of Star Trek.com.