When Small Steps Are Too Small to Create Real Career Change

In career development, some steps are so small that they keep us exactly where we are.

This quiet stuckness often sounds like: “I’m doing everything right- but nothing moves.”

Small steps feel safe. They create the appearance of momentum. But when they never stretch identity, never challenge perception, and never shift how others see us professionally, they become something else entirely: maintenance disguised as growth.

A fundamental career shift doesn’t begin with external action. It starts with the moment you recognize that the steps you’re taking no longer change your trajectory.

1. The Emotional Signal - Progress Without Fulfillment

When you’re moving but not advancing, motivation slowly dissolves into frustration. Locke & Latham’s Goal-Setting Theory (2002) shows that progress requires challenging, directional goals. When goals become too comfortable—tiny steps, endless tweaks—motivation weakens because the effort has no visible return.

The emotion beneath it isn’t failure. It’s misalignment.

Ask yourself: Does the effort I invest actually change anything in my career, or only how busy I feel?

2. The Behavioral Signal - Activity Without Meaningful Movement

Professionals often engage in behaviors that feel productive: updating a CV, rewriting a LinkedIn headline, consuming career content, “preparing” for a change.

But as Argyris & Schön (1996) note, learning or effort doesn’t create impact unless it transforms behavior.

Small steps lose their power when they repeat the past instead of shaping the future.

Movement isn’t the same as mobility. You can be active every day and remain professionally invisible.

3. The Psychological Signal - Avoidance Disguised as Discipline

Research on avoidance learning (Krypotos et al., 2015) shows that people gravitate toward low-risk actions that give a sense of progress without social exposure.

This is why many professionals rewrite their profiles but never post, follow industry leaders but never engage, study job trends but never reach out, or refine their narratives but never share them.

These are safe steps - not forward steps.

Smallness becomes a shield.

4. The Identity Signal - When Steps Don’t Change How You Are Seen

Career progress is not only internal; it is relational. Opportunities emerge through visibility, signaling, and connection - primarily through weak ties (Granovetter, 1973; Burt, 2004).

If your small steps never change how others perceive your value, your direction, or your voice, they cannot create new opportunities.

Identity evolves in public, not in silence. As Ibarra (1999) writes, we grow professionally by experimenting with new roles and narratives—not by preparing endlessly in private.

Small steps work only when they change the story others can see.

5. The Structural Signal - Consistency Without Direction

You can show up consistently and still go nowhere if the presence you build lacks narrative.LinkedIn activity scrolling, liking, saving, occasional tweaks—creates motion, not positioning.

Positioning requires a throughline: What do you want to be known for? What direction are you signaling ? How does your digital presence reflect who you have become, not only who you were?

Without direction, small steps scatter instead of accumulating.

6. What You Can Do - Purposeful, Visible Steps

You don’t need a dramatic change. You need meaningful visibility.

Start by identifying which small steps genuinely move you toward a new professional identity. Updating your LinkedIn to signal direction, not just history. Sharing insights that reflect where you are heading, speaking with people who already work in the space you aspire to join, seeking professional guidance to refine your narrative and amplify your presence

Small steps are powerful when they reshape how you show up.

7. How I Help

If you feel you’ve been moving without advancing, this is the exact moment to realign.

My one-on-one LinkedIn positioning and career visibility process helps professionals:

• clarify their future direction

• articulate a narrative that reflects who they are becoming

• translate expertise into a recognizable digital identity

• build consistent visibility that attracts aligned opportunities.

Because sometimes the issue isn’t effort. It’s that your steps are too small to change the story.

References

Argyris, C., & Schön, D. A. (1996). Organizational Learning II. Addison-Wesley.

Burt, R. S. (2004). Structural holes and good ideas. American Journal of Sociology, 110(2).

Granovetter, M. S. (1973). The strength of weak ties. American Journal of Sociology, 78(6).

Ibarra, H. (1999). Provisional selves: Experimenting with identity. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(4).

Krypotos, A. M., et al. (2015). Avoidance learning. Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, 9.

Locke, E. A., & Latham, G. P. (2002). Goal-setting theory. American Psychologist, 57(9).