The Secret Formula For Personal Growth is “No Secret”
Contributed By - Yogs Jayaprakasam
I had two interesting conversations that prompted this article. One of the strong engineers asked me, “I shifted three groups in the last three years; I learned all I need to within the first few months and in a year I get bored and want to move to a new assignment. What do I do?” In another conversation, two of the team members said, “we pretty much solved many of the opportunities that you are proposing for our group; can we get new opportunities or challenges to solve for?” I asked, “why don’t you make those solutions generic for others across the company to reuse?” The team’s answer was, “as engineers, we don’t enjoy working on the problem that we already solved, it’s no longer fun. How can we make it fun?”
Charlie Munger, the successful investor quotes, “spend each day trying to be a little wiser than you were when you woke up. Day by day, and at the end of the day-if you live long enough-like most people, you will get out of life what you deserve.”
In both conversations, clearly the colleagues showed curiosity to learn new things, solve new problems and get wiser everyday. They showed great “learning ability” and at the end of the day, as Charlie Munger quotes, life will give them what they deserve. However, I have argued that learning should be considered as a key to unlocking new value. As you unlock new value, you will open new doors of personal growth for yourself. In other words, people get hired for what they know, but get promoted for the value they delivered.
I have been a strong engineer from the beginning of my career. I worked for a start-up for the first few years of my career that allowed me to master all aspects of software engineering. I was the web engineer, user experience designer, data base administrator, application server manager, network engineer, tester, so on and so forth. When I moved to a well-established consulting company, my assignments changed to working on an excel to analyze the portfolio profitability and writing employee time-tracker program for their newly acquired company. It’s not the most fancy programming challenge for the hardcore engineer. I was not keen on working on the assignment. However, I was super energized, because our head of the department interacted directly with me on a daily basis; and gave me a lot of time to share the progress and insights directly with him. I later realized that they were struggling to establish proof of work with their new client to raise their invoice, and the invoice drove their direct revenue. Our head of the department was measured based on the revenue generated by the group.
That early lesson shifted my mindset, “FROM focusing on the technology that I got to work on TO focusing on the value of the work that I was assigned to”. This is the essential part of the “product mindset” that the father of product mindset “Marty Cagan” emphasizes in his famous book “Inspired”.
When people perform any work or complete a project, they often celebrate the hard work that they put in to completing the work. Accomplishments are tracked based on the number projects delivered, number of hours worked etc. I propose to my team to think of the following three questions, when they think of their accomplishments, 1. What is the value of the work or why does it matter? 2. Who should care about the value? And, last but certainly not the least, 3. Did you ensure that the stakeholder, who should care, actually knows about the work and the impact that you have created? Until all the above 3 steps are done, your work is as good as “not done”.
If you start to apply this formula, you will start to care more about the value you created from your work and you will get noticed for your work. As you get noticed, rewards & recognition follows which leads to your career growth. Learning is fun as long as you can enjoy it, but most often the implicit reason people want to learn is to grow. You will grow, when you shift your focus on driving value for your key stakeholders or for the company.
Disclaimer: Opinions expressed in this article are solely mine and do not reflect the views or opinions of my employer.