How to be wildly successful at your work by following these five nuggets of wisdom
Working in a startup can be very different from working in an established corporation. There are many differences, which won’t be discussed in this article, that can either work in favor of a person. If someone is the type of person who enjoys the 9–5 life with good work-life balance, but not too fond of going out of their way for the company, maybe the corporate is a better fit. However, if you’re the type who loves making a huge difference in the place you’re in, in the caliber of dictating the course of the company, I believe there are many more opportunities in a startup.
I’ve seen people coming from larger companies coming to a startup and not being able to adjust to the massive sense of freeness. The processes, the reporting, the structure that they were accustomed to no longer exist and everything seems so disorganized. It feels like you have to do way more than you’re supposed to, and it feels like a burden because it doesn’t feel like your responsibility. Let’s say you’re a developer. There is hardly any ‘procedure’ for software deployment. You as a developer participate in the full cycle of determining the requirements, developing the app, testing, and releasing.
Sometimes, you have to go way out of your way. For example, when requirements don’t seem solid enough, you have to step in and organize a meeting to clear them up and get everyone on the same page. The good thing is that you have the freedom to walk over these boundaries. This gives you a strong sense of having ownership, and it feels great when things move in a good direction.
The people who I believe have the best trait for a startup are the ones who have a love for making order out of chaos, and who likes navigating their way through the organization. Once you’re done with your work, and if you had paid close attention, there is always something else that needs to be done, and if your talents stretch across multiple disciplines, opportunities lie everywhere, and sooner or later, you find yourself doing way more than you had initially signed up for.
For those who love making a big impact, that’s exactly the reason why they are there, and here I would like to share 5 tips for making an impact in your workplace.
1. Take ownership
Now we’ve heard of this one a lot, but there is a reason why it’s repeated. It’s repeated here again because there is no path to success without having a sense of ownership, so what does it exactly mean by taking ownership? I’ll explain with an example.
It’s Monday, and imagine that you were given a task which you are to finish it by Friday. You start working hard on it for a couple of days and it’s already Wednesday, and you’re on course to finishing it by the end of the day. You have two options.
- You decide to take it easy and stretch it till Friday.
- You decide to use the remaining two days to do something useful.
While nobody is going to blame you for opting for choice 1 and it’s fine to do so, there is more you can do to contribute to taking the company to a better position. I believe it is very important to start thinking from the owner’s point of view, and ask questions to yourself that he/she may ask if they saw you in your current position, such as, what else can I work on? What can I build on top of my current skill set to contribute more to the company? Or we can simply ask the manager himself!
2. Documentation is consolidated knowledge
Because everything is in jumbles, its really easy to lose track of things. Imagine you found a bug in the software that you decide to take a look just after you’re done with the work you’re on right now. After 5 hours you’re done, but the chances are, you’ve already forgotten about it.
And it’s just really useful to keep a record of everything that you’re doing so when you come back later, or when someone asks you about it, you immediately recall what you were up to, saving you ten minutes tracing back your memory and going through that chat history from ten days ago.
It may seem like a waste of time, and it may feel very tedious at the time of documents, but I assure you that you’ll be catching two birds with one stone, as it’ll organize the mess, and it’ll save you and the team much valued time in the long run.
Documentation is a slow buildup and a consolidation of knowledge, and it has a compounding effect in the knowledge base that you and your peers have access to, and who better remembers than the one who wrote it? After a while, you’ll find yourself stacked up a knowledge base that’s both broad and deep, which will help you make contributions in meetings with much you can impart.
3. Trust happens between the meetings
Isaac Stern, the virtuoso violinist said “Music is what happens between the notes”, Trust happens between the meetings.
Simon Sinek — Author of “Start with Why”
The above quote by Simon Sinek can’t be more true.
It was 6 p.m. and while I was waiting for my elevator to take me down, our product manager walked past holding a cup with a toothbrush and toothpaste, so I asked her, “Are you staying late?”, and she replied, “Yes! I need a little bit more time to document the meeting notes” and hurried off to the bathroom. It was a brief moment, but that moment replayed my head, again and again, every time serving as a reminder of her trustworthiness. It’s these little moments that one may easily dismiss as being subtle, that contribute towards building your brand.
4. Integrity will speak on your behalf
One of the things that happen when somebody says they’re gonna do something and does it is that you learn that person gets stuff done
Michael Seibel — CEO of Y Combinator
Imagine that you’re working with a senior, who you catch him surfing through E-bay half of the time, he pretends to hear what you’re saying with rhythmic ‘mmhmm’s, but you realize that he wasn’t listening to you; he’s always got a good story for why something couldn’t be done on time; you’ve heard stories about a couple of delayed and failed projects, and let’s just imagine that you’re in a meeting with him, and he wants to motivate the team by with “we got this team, let’s keep it up!”.
This person is a purely fictional character made to illustrate my point. I feel pity, and I don’t know what he was going through, but I can’t help but feel a sense of weakness in his tone.
Let’s imagine someone else, she completed 5 challenging projects, she’s energetic, hard-working, and is respected by everyone in the workplace. And one day in a genuinely appreciative tone, she tells you “You’re doing great work”. How encouraged would you feel? And let’s say she proposes an idea, I would imagine it would be heard.
That’s the power to make an influence, built on top of integrity.
5. Ask specifically for what you want
“Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you”
Bible, Matthew 7:7
Even if you come from a different religion, or you’re unreligious, I hope you’ll appreciate this verse from the scripture, and see how practically applicable it can be in our everyday lives.
This time, please give yourself some time to remind yourself of someone from your workplace, who gets the work done, and is respected by everybody in the workspace, but is a little quiet and timid. I love them, and I would trust them, but I can’t help but feel they’ve got so much untapped potential to make a greater impact if they had decided to leap.
Here I don’t mean that we should ask for things like the position of authority to play the politics game, but for a responsibility where you can take care of your team by knowing them allocating the right work, they’ll do their best in, or take make decisions for projects that’ll bring the best results with a limited amount of resources.
It’s difficult to know what someone wants unless they ask, and given that their request was reasonable and asked in goodwill, there is a good chance that it will be granted. Even if it’s not immediate, they’ve made the first step and set themselves on the course, because people around will know their goals and there will at least be one supportive person.
