You Can Be the Perfect Hire and Still Perform Poorly
Improve work performance using these 3 tips.
My partner recently landed this consulting gig with the client of his dreams. He is an environmental engineer like me, and an NGO specializing in the environment loved to add him to their team. He was ecstatic to begin working with them.
He joined them 3 weeks ago and has attended three online meetings since. His colleagues are a team of lawyers needing to consult on some science behind their work. During those two meetings, he noticed he’d been repeatedly asked if the project is within his skill set, to which he always responded with “yes”.
Technically, it was true. As PhDs, what the project entailed was something we’ve already studied several times in our previous courses. He’d also worked at another NGO specializing in a closely related niche. He seemed like the perfect fit.
It didn’t seem like his colleagues believed him, though. Being the girlfriend of the year, I skimmed through the transcript of their first meeting (MS Word has this video to text feature) to get to the bottom of things. That’s how I knew he actually barely spoke, save for a couple of sentences throughout the entire hour, and two of which were short answers to their director’s questions.
“Do you have questions?”
“None. It’s all good.”
“Oh. So you perfectly got all the project objectives? If you didn’t, that’s okay. But you have to tell me.”
“Yes. I got them all.”
During those two meetings, he noticed he’d been repeatedly asked if the project is within his skill set, to which he always responded with “yes”.
And there it was. No wonder his team kept on asking if the project wasn’t out of his league. I told him these:
- Your workmates don’t need to hear you say ‘yes’ to the question. They need to be sure you knew what you said yes to.
- No new hire ever has no questions to ask — unless, of course, you weren’t paying attention or were not interested at all.
He once again met with them a week after, so I gave him a few reminders. After the meeting ended, he told me the tips worked wonders.
They Don’t Need You to be Skilled
They need you to share your skills with them.
When you tell future employers your strengths, they obviously hire you, thinking your strengths would be a good addition to the team, not just you, per se. Your signed employment contract is also not an autograph from the awesome hire that you are. It is a sworn statement that you’d deliver.
Sure, you could work silently and make the done job speak for itself. But that doesn’t work all the time. That’s also a convenient excuse for people too lazy to interact with the rest of the team. When you openly communicate, the entire team develops trust and rapport, and this eventually opens doors to more efficient task execution.
In bigger projects, employees act as pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that will only make sense after they all connect with each other. The need for constant communication is even more pronounced when you are a newbie or when your team is working on a new endeavor.
Whenever, wherever, communication never goes out of style. Meetings, as much as most of us hate them, are among the few fertile avenues that people can effectively exchange useful information to optimize their resources. You need to actively participate in meetings you are invited to. Make yourself and your skills useful.
There’s no point in attending if your active participation weren’t necessary. If that were the case, then they’re wasting your time. You probably are too.
Raising Questions Don’t Make You Look Stupid
It shows you’ve been listening and checks whether you all are on the same page.
Often, a meeting’s agenda is to disseminate a game plan or to create one. No matter how long or short this meeting is, there will probably be some ambiguous detail that will need clarification. Wait for the perfect timing and raise it.
It could also be that you’ll feel you might have a better execution plan than is discussed. When this happens, wait for the perfect timing and raise it.
The catch though is that there might be no perfect timing, and you’ll just gonna have to shoot your shot. Go try to make yourself useful.
Synthesizing a Shortlist of Takeaways Is Underrated
When meetings end with no definite takeaways or clear routes moving forward, it’s no different from a short catch-up session with friends. You all just leave knowing how each of you was doing, but no one plans to do anything about it. In a business, time is money, and you don’t waste people’s money, do you?
So I reminded him that synthesizing a bulleted summary packaged as actionable takeaways would show his colleagues and bosses two things:
- Behind his Zoom display icon was a listener who paid attention to the discussion.
- The meeting was not pointless. Obviously.
Zoom fatigue is real. The hatred against meetings is also likely worse than it seems. But no matter how much this part of the job drains the life out of us, we are currently left with no choice. Humanity will still likely need centuries of evolution until we finally find a new way to work within our teams other than through cumbersome meetings. And until then, be the best meeting attendee you could be.
