To excel at your job you have to realise you don’t have 1, but 3 different ones.
The dirty secret to excelling at your job is realising you don’t actually have just one job, but at least three. And it is a whole lot easier to excel in some of those and others. This is from my experience as a consultant, but having talked to enough of my permanently employees friends paints a very similar picture.
So what are your three jobs? “The Job You Signed For”, “The Job You Were Hired For” and “The Job They Need You to Do”. Let’s look at each of them.
The “Job You Signed For”
This is the easiest job to describe and it is often the only job people think they have. It is the one with your signature below it. It has a job title, a renumeration package and responsibilities. It is usually very clear cut and obvious what you need to do to succeed.
The problem with “The Job You Signed For” is that while it is possible to succeed at this job, it is next to impossible to excel at it. First problem is that you are not just competing with all the internal people with that job title, but also with all people outside the organisation with that job title. But more importantly, this job is almost certainly described as given a few inputs, you have to create a few outputs. You created 20% more widgets! Wow..
This isn’t to say you should ignore this job, because if you do not perform the organisation will notice and fire you. But you should do the bare minimum to get by. And if you are half-competent in a large organisation you can get by in a fraction of the time that people think is required for it. That gives you the time and energy to focus on the more important jobs.
The “Job You Were Hired To Do”
A lot of people mistake this for the same thing as the “Job You Signed For”, but this couldn’t be farther from the truth. The person that hired you has a very specific problem when they hired you, but because the way procurement or HR works is they have to specify the job requirements in broad & vague, standard templates.
A manager might see a problem with the quality of a system and is looking for someone to take charge of fixing the quality problems, create guidelines for future development and teach other developers how to write quality code. But on the job ad it says “Senior Developer”.
Sometimes people will tell you why they hired you, but often (especially in consulting) they won’t and you have to figure it out. It can be as innocent as the above example or a more sinister getting ahead of a rival in the organisation at any cost.
This is a much easier job to excel at, but the problem is that it is often only appreciated by the people who are having the actual problem, which might just be your manager. But doing this job well enough will gain you an ally or two in the organisation, which will really help you with your real job:
The “Job They Need You To Do”
What is the biggest, baddest problem or opportunity that is facing the organisation? What can you do to help? Go do it.
Your job is safe because your hiring manager has your back and the dogs in the rest of the organisation are fast asleep because you produce enough widgets.
So in your spare time you can start working on this amazing problem or opportunity. There are no real guidelines here, because these are mostly complex problems. Sometimes you want to volunteer your time & skills, sometimes you want to take a much stealthier approach. But whatever it is, this is by far the hardest to do, but also the easiest to excel in. And most importantly you will get recognition from the entire organisation, not just your manager.
Conclusion
So go out and be amazing. Go find those wicked problems and endless opportunities in your current organisations. These are the problems we need to solve if you want to create better organisations (and a better world because of that).
Let me know how you go!
