How to work "hard" in a team: A lesson learnt from my first corporate misstep
The last couple of weeks afforded me some time to engage in several "virtual" conversations around career and professional growth with a lot of my peers. As we discussed on these topics, particularly around the challenges we face while trying to navigate through our professional journeys, I recognised a pattern - regardless of our different physical locations or organisations that we work for, many of us had experienced situations where we invested enormous time and effort in the work we do, but it turned out that such effort didn't always lead to the desired outcome.
With this article, I wanted to share an experience from one of my first job roles, having to deal with such a challenge for the first time and struggling to make the wisest possible investments towards achieving workplace success.
My first corporate missteps
"On an assembly line, it is easy enough to distinguish output from activity. It gets trickier when employees are paid to think." - Andy Groove
It was only a couple of months on the job that I experienced one of the most difficult professional challenge. In search of remedies, I had approached one of my managers for advice. During one of our several "feedback" sessions, he said to me;
"Kingsley, it is not about what you do, but how you do it."
To be quite candid, at that point in time, I couldn't really put the puzzle together. For one, I assumed that I was working hard enough to get the job done and meet the required expectation for every task. So this feedback got me confused. For a short while after the session was over, I sat back on my chair wondering to myself, was "hard work" not enough to achieve success in this environment?
P.S: It is not just only about what you do, how you do it, but why, you do it that will count.
"Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted" - Albert Einstein
I can vividly recall an incident that took place during the first few weeks on the job. I started working on a project topic I was quite passionate about, and presumed was relevant to the work we did in the team. But unfortunately, other members of the team didn't hold the same evaluation. Nevertheless, I continued with it, gave it so much time, effort as well as committing lots of my personal time and resources into it - with the expectation that everyone will eventually come on board with me once the results started to show.
But even after achieving considerable success along the way, I still didn't receive the expected buy-in of my then team members. As I later came to realize, while the project topic was a priority for me, it didn't become so for other members of the team.
My hard work was not aligned with that of the team.
Especially when you work in a large organisation, it will become necessary to align your work and priorities with that of other stakeholders as well as team members. As it turns out, the most successful team are clear on what matters most for them, how work should be done, why it is done, and make an effort to provide a precision tool to communicate this to individual contributors and team members. And as an individual contributor, understanding this can help you connect with other team members towards maximizing your output and making a difference within the group.
But not all teams have figured this out... yet
Out of eleven thousand senior executives and managers, a majority cannot name their companies top priorities. Only half could name one. - John Doerr in Measure What Matters
In most large organisations, there will be situations where the team priorities are not always going to be clearly stated or known.
"When there is a serious lack of clarity about what the team stands for and what their goals and roles are, people experience confusion, stress and frustration. When there is a high level of clarity, on the other hand, people thrive." - Greg Mckeown
But it will be your duty as an individual contributor to finding ways towards aligning your work with that of others you work with. And by successfully doing so, you will be able to identify cross dependencies better and build great relationships that will guarantee your success as a team member.
As I begin to contemplate the next steps in my career journey, I would be glad to learn from your experiences on the topic of how to achieve workplace success.