7 essential skills to work better

Most learning that happens throughout our life is accidental, and not deliberate. After formal education, we learn from our environment, through the consequences of our actions, or copying from successful examples of others. There is no template to follow and not much access to sincere and personalised feedback.

This slows down the learning for many of us, as we are largely dependent on the environment. Furthermore, we might get good at some skills but remain weak in others (without ever realising how weak we are).

Some people who are really good at doing their work but poor at communicating them or asking for more resources could feel frustrated with their manager or their organisation. Alternatively, they could work on their communication and influence skills to affect the outcome positively (not saying that it’ll always work but using this as an example).

Here are 6 key skills that you can master, irrespective of whatever work you are doing, to become a far more impactful contributor:

1. Goal setting:

The first step in hitting any target is to set a target. Which is why, goal setting is a skill that is featuring first on this list. Many people have an indifferent attitude towards goals and they run the risk of getting sidetracked by all the noise and distractions. Learning how to set goal and how to continue focussing on it is the most important skill for anyone to learn. If you’re in the process of letting others set goals for you, you are letting others set the direction for your life which might be good in some cases but not in most.

Bonus tip — I recommend RPM (Rapid Planning Method) by Tony Robbins — https://www.tonyrobbins.com/pdfs/Workbook-Time-of-your-Life.pdf or a standard OKR template so set and review your goals https://coda.io/@coda/okrs

2. Accounting for resource management:

Accounting is a very powerful concept in management. Recording and auditing usage of any resource, and evaluating the returns can help you manage that resource better. You can apply this to anything — finances, your time, your energy, or even your personal brand. Essentially, you need a process to record your usage, record the outcomes, and a set frequency to review the two. Sticking to a sincere accounting process is a great way to discipline yourself on usage of any important resource.

3. Mechanism building for leverage and compounding:

The power of compound interest and leverage unlocks for you when you can transfer your learning to mechanisms. Imagine you send out thousands of emails daily to your audience to get some transactions. Let’s say you only have enough time to complete the operational processes for sending the emails. Clearly you will find it difficult to scale the volume and outcome. Which is why, you will run the risk of doing the same work, getting the same results, and hence missing out on growth.

Instead, if you can automate the process of sending out an email, you can then devote your time to improving the communication design. Or better, if your conversions are optimised you can build more audiences or more automated funnels thereby exponentially scaling your output.

Remember, mechanism building helps you compound your work thereby giving you leverage to scale your output. Automating, using tools, building processes, setting up teams, creating documents, etc are all examples of mechanism building.

4. Communication and influence

Communication and influence are among the most ignored skillsets that most managers need to develop. These concepts are so nuanced that one could spend a lifetime working on them and still feel like there’s a room for improvement. More importantly, these skills cannot be grown without an extremely sincere and patient mindset.

Understanding the needs, interests, and vocabulary of your audience is a key element of communication and influence skills that is easy to understand but takes a lot of practice to implement successfully.

Most professionals are skilled only at using email as a tool for communication. But, let’s say for a complex cross functional project, email might be a sub optimal choice to collaborate. There a documentation oriented tool and more frequent stand-ups could serve better to keep the project on track. Learning how to document can help you work far better on deep complex cross functional projects.

The book titled ‘Influence’ by Robert Cialdini is considered as great starting point if you want to explore principles of influence.

5. Deep work:

Ability to think deeply and solve new problems from first principles is a rare skill and is hard to develop. However, it is one of the most rewarding skill in terms of satisfaction and fullfilment. When you do deep work, even for an hour a day, the quality of your work improves to such an extent over time that you unlock a whole new level of performance.

Imagine you are a content creator on instagram. It is one thing to post photos/videos daily on social media, it is who another to think deeply about the quality and strategy around your content. What should you change in terms of camera and lighting, what setup and background should you use, what story do you want to tell. These are some questions which can be explored to great depth depending on your priorities as a creator.

Deep work helps you develop clear thinking and focus, and also help you build confidence on solving hard and ambitious problems through first principles.

Cal newport’s book — Deep work is what introduced me to this idea and I would recommend as a must read to all who haven’t heard about it or read it.

6. Understanding systems and power:

This is one of the most complex topics to explain.

Have you read this quote — “ It is impossible to make a man understand something if his salary depends on not understanding it.”?

What do you think about it?

After reading about the works of Edwards Deming and Russel Ackoff — I got introduced to systems thinking and how different components interact with each other.

Sometimes, when we view systems as catering to a need but not doing it well, we fail to understand that the system might be catering to a different need.

As Russel Ackoff pointed — the role of universities is not to educate students but to provide for lifestyle and research for professors, teaching is a cost they need to pay to enjoy those privileges. Once you develop more clarity on understanding why different systems work the way they do, and how power flows within a system, you stop wasting your time on useless battles.

7. Health and mindset

Last but most foundational, is the ability to manage your health and mindset. Good health and sound mind are things you always need to have on your side if you want to achieve anything worthwhile. Regular workouts and meditations, investing in personal trainers, eating healthy, and nutrition supplements is what a lot of people have started doing to take care of their physical and mental health. Spending time in nature, having an active social life, and a hobby can also help you rejuvenate after extensive work. Besides regular checkups, taking up a course or reading books can also help you develop more clarity on how to take care of your health.

If you have read this far, I hope you found something meaningful to apply to your life. Feel free to comment and suggest improvements. Wishing a great year ahead to you.