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,” 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’ve never been very good at playing by the rules. That doesn’t mean that serving under your command hasn’t changed me – for the better. At least, this time I broke the rules for a reason, for something I believed in.” (“Thirty Days” – Voyager Season 5, Episode 9)

If you thought Ensign Mariner was a rule-breaking, nose-thumbing, brig-sitting, disobedient Starfleet officer who should have been sent packing to civilian life a long time ago, then let me introduce you to Tom Paris. The guy literally went to prison for collaborating with the Maquis – not because he had any actual political principles, but because he was a nepo baby who wanted to rebel against his father, a Starfleet admiral. Captain Janeway only gave him a short-term reprieve from prison to serve on the U.S.S. Voyager because he was a super-talented pilot who had experience flying in an unstable region of space called The Badlands.

He then spent the next seven years as the vessel’s primary pilot after the ship was thrown from the Alpha Quadrant into the Delta Quadrant, 70,000 light-years away. He started as a friendless loner: The Starfleet crew hated him because he betrayed the Federation to help the Maquis, while the Maquis hated him because he betrayed the Maquis to get a lighter prison sentence. Paris was a glutton for punishment, as he openly talked back to all senior officers, knowing the ship needed him as a pilot more than he needed them and their approval. He liked being a contrarian bad boy because it gave him an identity that was more than “the admiral’s son.”

In reality show parlance, this is the person who proclaims, “I’m just here to win. I don’t want to make friends,” even as they initiate every bit of chaos. In the workplace, this is the person who probably got the job because of nepotism, or because some senior leader owed a favor to an old friend. Even worse, compared to most legacy hires, this person is good at their job, and they know it, which means they don’t feel beholden to the normal chain of command, much less the typical processes and procedures. The rest of the team does not like working with this person, and they don’t care about working with the team.

The Challenge

Tom Paris was a bratty asshole for much of the first few seasons of Voyager. That proved to be a problem for the writers, as the guy didn’t have many redeeming values besides being a good pilot who got into trouble for not following the rules. On a small ship on the other side of the galaxy, you can only be an obnoxious iconoclast for so long before you’ve alienated everyone around you. In such an environment, you would probably become isolated and paranoid – all because you weren’t willing to integrate into the overarching team dynamic. Either you grow up, learn from your past mistakes, and show people you are actively trying to change for the better, or you will spend all your free time sitting alone in your room because no one wants to have anything to do with you.

For Tom Paris, it came down to whether he wanted to buy into the ship’s shared sense of purpose. Everyone – Starfleet and the Maquis – wanted to get back to the Alpha Quadrant. That was home. While the two factions didn’t always agree on tactics, they shared the same overall strategy. Paris wasn’t welcomed by either group, so he had to find ways to stand out on his own merits. He had to determine if he wanted to make himself available for either acceptance or rejection, which meant he had to decide if he wanted to work through his own emotional baggage about his family. By fighting his dad’s expectations, he also fought against Starfleet’s; but that also meant he rejected any hierarchy within the Maquis, which meant he went to prison a broken, defiant, and lonely person.

The challenge facing anyone who’s ever been an obnoxious jerk in the workplace is internal. Because you can’t fix how people perceive you until you fix yourself. And before you accuse this career development post of sounding like an armchair therapist, please understand that I simply speak from experience. I might not have been the pilot of a starship on the other side of space, and I might not have been a nepo hire who owed everything to his parents, but I have been the sort of worker who’s obnoxiously standoffish about his own talents in relation to the team and their objectives. At times, I have intentionally been a difficult employee because I thought I knew what was best, because I thought I was better.

But no matter if that was true, I was still miserable in the workplace. I did good work, but I didn’t want to work with anyone, and they didn’t want to work with me. Tom Paris types tend to job-hop regularly because they outstay their welcome, relying on their family’s connections to find their next gig, since they certainly wouldn’t get a good recommendation from their prior boss or coworkers. That is – unless they accept the challenge to figure out something about themselves and how they interact with the world.

The Chance

Halfway through Voyager, Tom Paris was at a crossroads. Sure, he was a cad with women, rebellious to direct authority, and capable of only one real friendship (with the goody two-shoes, Ensign Harry Kim), but he was slowly developing a sense of inner purpose. A perpetual rule-breaker and shit-talker, he found himself working alongside people who lived by their principles – even when they went astray from the regulations. In fact, Captain Janeway made a habit of bending the rules when it served the greater good of the ship. She was by no means an “ends justify the means” sort of person, but she regularly recognized when she had to trust her guts, experience, and intuition, no matter what the letter of the law dictated. That was a revelation for Paris, but he also had to recognize that such an embrace of the spirit of the law was earned through trust.

And, as we’ve discussed, Tom wasn’t trusted by anyone on the ship when he first joined. Thus, he faced a rolling series of chances to reverse his course and pursue a different destination. To the writer’s credit, they didn’t turn him into a bland rule-follower in a couple of seasons. He frequently found ways to piss off everyone around him, including a demotion and time in the brig for his antics. But he kept chasing those chances – not to change his personality or squelch his temperament, but to discover his true character on his terms.

As many of us know from our own experiences, changing for someone else never works. You must do it for yourself. This includes your career. Sometimes, “career development” isn’t about what happens at the job – it’s about what you bring to the job. No job is perfect. No boss has all the answers. No team does their best work all of the time. But you can’t really change that situation without going to a new job. Hence, you have to change you. You must be willing to grow and adapt. You don’t have to necessarily “fit in” – you don’t need to change everything about who you are – but if you choose to work for a company, you have to be a team player some of the time.

The Choice

It all comes down to how you react to workplace culture. Sure, Tom Paris was trapped on Voyager, so he couldn’t leave for another ship or civilian life, but he could have definitely made life difficult for himself and everyone else. However, he eventually realized that he was in a place that encouraged him to grow up and become a better person. He’d obviously never had good leadership on earlier ships, because a better support structure might have prevented the poor decisions about his life and career that led him to betray Starfleet and the Maquis.

To be clear, we are not letting Paris off the hook for his choices. He faced the consequences of his actions, as I did at my earlier jobs. He was reprimanded, thrown in the brig, demoted down to Ensign, taken off plum projects, given menial tasks, and much more as a direct result of his actions. In earlier environments, none of this fazed him. But Voyager was different. Maybe it was Janeway’s leadership style. Maybe Paris finally decided to grow up. Maybe he thought that succeeding on his terms was the best way to step out from under his father’s shadow. Whatever it was, he became a valued member of the crew, not because he was the best pilot, but because he earned their trust by discovering himself.

I would go as far as to say that Tom Paris was never interested in promotions like most Starfleet officers. He was a pilot who preferred working with his hands and doing practical tasks. In Janeway, he found a leader who actively found ways to magnify his strengths and downplay his weaknesses – while also not taking shit from him or letting him coast on his talents. Paris responded by rising to the challenges set before him and making different decisions than he had in the past. He eventually achieved the rank of full Lieutenant before the show ended.

Many of us feel stuck in our current jobs, so we lash out at others. This could be poor bosses, terrible ownership, or inadequate teammates – but maybe those people aren’t as useless as we perceive them to be. We don’t even have to be an obnoxious beneficiary of nepotism to be in the same boat as Tom Paris. It simply starts by thinking you’re better than everyone else around you and then intentionally rubbing your personality in everyone’s collective face.

But I’m here to tell you – I don’t care how smart and capable you think you are, but you will never succeed in a vacuum. You might try, but you will ultimately bounce from role to role, from job to job, pissing people off and frustrating yourself. You can even try to be a completely solo self-employed entrepreneur, but since we live in a society, you will always work with someone else in some capacity. Not only will your reputation precede you, but it will define you.

Do you truly want to advance in your career? Then you must choose to pursue personal growth. You cannot blame others for your failures. You cannot rely on your connections for your advancement. And you cannot coast solely on your talents, no matter how prodigious they might be. You must take accountability for your actions – good AND bad. Does it help to have a good boss and good coworkers? Absolutely. But you must choose to be a good teammate and a good person.

Just ask Tom Paris.

Image of Tom Paris courtesy of Giant Freakin Robot.