Live into possibility
I am an economist by training, and economists use something called lead indicators to predict a change in an economic cycle and lag indicators to show a delayed reaction to an economic cycle. The world of performance management has borrowed this terminology from economics to create lead and lag indicators for business and technical performance.
Lead indicators are easy to influence because they are forward-looking but hard to measure. Whereas lag indicators are easy to measure because they focus on output, but harder to influence. For example, the housing market is a lead economic indicator. When the housing prices drop, it points to a downturn in the economy. And lag indicators are things like changes in GDP, wages, or unemployment.
If you want to influence your performance, look at your lead indicators.
Where are you focusing your efforts? What if you could influence your performance in an exponential way? What if you could stand in possibility and have unbounded returns?
When we ask open-ended questions, that’s exactly what we are doing. We are standing in possibility and declaring, “look what could be!”
I have developed 12 lead indicators that will absolutely help shape your career performance. I have posed them as open-ended questions, and there are unlimited ways you can answer each question. The question is all about possibility. And these questions are invitations for you to live into. You can ask yourself these questions every day over the course of a year, and how you live into them and answer them will have a huge impact on your career.
1. What am I curious about?
This is such a simple, yet powerful question. When you don’t understand something, get curious. When you think you understand something or someone, get curious—maybe you have misjudged. When you don’t know what your next step is in your career, get curious.
Curiosity is a powerful tool that opens up new possibilities to you. Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love, and her new book, Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear, advocates that following our curiosity instead of our passion is the real key to an interesting and creative life. She says, “Forget about the notion of passion, and give your attention to your curiosity. Passion burns hot and fast, which means it can come and go. Curiosity is so accessible and available, every single day of your life.”
Stay curious and see where your curiosity takes you.
2. How can I contribute to my organization’s/team’s goals/mission?
Regardless if you work for yourself or if you work for a large company, making it a priority to support your organization’s and team goals will be a win-win for your career. When you make your company look good, you look good. When you make your manager or your team successful, you are successful. You are there to add value and have an impact. Contributing to goals is one of the best ways to do this. Author Napolean Hill said, "you can succeed best and quickest by helping others to succeed."
3. How can I build trust with manager/my team/my clients?
I believe that building trust with your colleagues is the most important thing you can do in the workplace. Others either trust you or they don’t. In any relationship, trust is the backbone. When your manager trusts you, she will give you increased responsibility. When your team trusts you, they know you will pull your weight and you’ve got their back, and it builds morale. No one wants to work on a toxic team where everyone is out for themselves. When your clients trust you, it can result in new work for your company.
How do you build trust? Lots of ways. Do excellent work. Meet deadlines. Follow through when you say you will do something or have been given an assignment. Give credit to your teammates when they help you. Celebrate the team’s accomplishments, not just your own. Become known for your expertise. Make someone’s life better. If you have done something that makes your manager’s life better, you can’t lose. Be eager to take on new assignments. When appropriate, opt for in-person communication rather than virtual.
Benjamin Zander, the Conductor of the Boston Philharmonic, describes one of his most vivid childhood memories of his father, dressed in a three-piece suit, leaving on the overnight train from London to Glasgow. He was going to meet a gentleman for breakfast in the Glasgow Railway Station, and then take the next train back to London. Later, Zander asked his father why he had not used the telephone. His father’s reply was this, “certain things in life are better done in person.” In a day and age where electronic communication is the norm, don’t underestimate the power of in-person communication for building trust.
4. How can I go above and beyond to support my team or provide client service?
When I supported a National Cyber Security client, one of the things our team was contracted to do was to conduct a 10-year cost-estimate for the program, which we did. Then, the client became interested in understanding what benefits their program would provide to the Federal Government, which was not within the scope of our work. I reached out to a team within our firm that did this type of benefit analysis, and had them come talk to the client. After months of shaping this work, the client awarded us $900k to do the work. If I had the attitude that “this was not our job” to do this type of work, the client would have missed out on this service offering and our firm would not have won new work.
5. What needs do I see that I can meet? How can I take the initiative to meet the need? (yes, even if it’s not in my job description)
More often than not, there will be needs that you identify in your job that are not clearly defined in your job description. The ability to identify a need and then how you respond to those needs is what will separate you from the others, and you may even create a new role for yourself, and in some cases, a new job.
Rather than asking “what can the world do for me,” you are asking, “what can I do for the world? Or your organization.” Cal Newport, an author and professor at Georgetown University, calls this having a craftsman mindset. I call this service.
A client of mine who was job searching did this when he read a book in a personal area of interest, Peace Keeping, and noticed that there was no modeling & simulation to support the author’s research. He created his own model in his free time, and then contacted the professor who wrote the book to see if his model would be of interest to her. Not only was she interested, she hired him to help her develop another iteration of the model to support her work.
6. How can I improve a process, create efficiencies, or save my company money?
If you are paying attention in your job, there will undoubtedly be a way for you to improve things. In some cases when you do this, you will be able to quantify your results. The things you do to live into this question will be solid resume highlights. One client of mine noticed that analyses and methods were not standardized throughout his design team, so he created efficiencies by writing scripts for two technical computing and design software applications. (ANSYS and MATLAB). He also proposed a design change that significantly reduced sensitivity error in reliability and became a company standard.
7. What ideas can I bring to create something new? And how can I garner support for them?
Any business that exists today started as an idea. When you join an organization, you will have lots to learn, but you will also have ideas about what you observe. Maybe you see a need, maybe you can bring a solution to a problem, maybe you envision something that’s never been done before.
Your ideas could generate new revenue, or save your company money, or change the way your team works. AND, in order for your ideas to be received, you will need to wield influence. Influence is slowly built. Go back to the trust question. Have you built trust in the right relationships in order to be listened to? If you have an idea but you haven’t yet taken the time to learn the business or what your teammates do, your idea may fall flat.
One of my clients was a non-profit executive. He had a vision for a new internal network for his organization that would allow maximum flexibility and facilitate enhanced user experience. He got the buy-in from senior leadership, and designed and built the network, resulting in $1.18M of new business.
8. How can I improve the skills I already have?
How can you go deeper with your skills? What professional development classes will you take? How will you stay current on the latest thinking or technology in your field?
Over a hundred years ago, Dr. Maria Montessori applied the scientific method to children in a classroom and developed an educational approach based on her observations of how children learn. In a Montessori classroom, if a child is engaged in meaningful work, they are not to be interrupted. Concentration is highly valued, because Dr. Montessori understood what brain scientists know today—that important connections happen in the brain when it can focus deeply on one thing. Adult brains can focus for 2 hours at a time before needing a break. How can you cut out distractions so you can develop deep focus in your work?
Professional musicians and athletes know that they can improve their craft with deliberate practice. You can spend an entire career building experience in an area without ever doing deliberate practice. Deliberate practice involves focusing on a specific area that you can improve, and then getting feedback on it and making improvements.
Getting feedback on your skills is the only way to know how good you really are. Actor Steve Martin said in an interview, “you have to be so good they can’t ignore you.” Don’t wait until your annual performance review to get feedback on your skills. Proactively check in with your manager quarterly, after a big deliverable, whenever it makes sense.
Will you be bold enough to seek feedback on your skills? And then, will you take the time to go back and improve them?
9. How can I expand my range of skills?
I had a client who chose engineering just so she wouldn’t have to write in college. For many engineers and technical folks, writing does not come naturally. However, writing is a skill that is needed in almost any career. If you ever need to send an e-mail, you need to be able to write. If you ever need to write a memo for your manager, you need to be able to write. If you need to provide a user manual for a tool, you need to be able to write. If you need to make a pitch, you need to be able to write. If you want to work in policy, you definitely need to be able to write.
What other skills might you need? You may not know what you skills you will need. Remember the power of feedback. Ask your manager or mentor for feedback on areas where you need to grow.
How are your presentation skills? Can you persuade others when you have an idea you hope the team will adopt? Can you manage your workload efficiently? Does your manager feel comfortable letting you talk to the client? Do you understand what it takes to provide stellar customer service? These are just a few ideas, but having a growth mindset about building new skills will support your career development throughout your lifetime.
10. Who can I collaborate with?
Steve Jobs said, “Great things in business are never done by one person. They’re done by a team of people.” I worked on a matrixed team of different functional teams supporting a National cyber security client. I led the business and program management team, and teamed up with the lead and deputy of the Systems Engineering team. We said, “let’s see where engineering and business intersect so we can create something new.” Three of us sat down and mapped out the touchpoints of the requirements process with the business process in order to integrate them and generate something valuable for our client.
Research on technological innovation shows that increasingly, the most impactful patents are not authored by individuals that drill deeper and deeper into one area of technology, as classified by the US Patent office. But rather, by teams that include individuals that have worked across a large number of different technology classes and often merge things from different domains. Frans Johansson is a writer, entrepreneur, and public speaker. He has coined the phrase for this type of innovation where ideas and disciplines intersect: “the Medici Effect.”
Look for people to collaborate with in your career, especially people who bring a different background, perspective, or subject matter expertise to the table.
11. How can I bring innovation to my work?
Marketing Guru, Seth Godin says, “all innovation is doing it wrong again and again until you get it right.” He goes on, “Don’t be afraid to innovate. It’s risky, but you must embrace the risk of failure. Without failure, you’ll never become successful.”
You probably noticed that number 10 touches on innovation as well. It’s more and more common to find innovation and collaboration working hand in hand.
On the Cyber Security contract I previously mentioned, the enterprise architecture team had developed a 5-year roadmap. We proposed to the client that our cost team could help her cost out certain elements of the roadmap. It was a bold suggestion, and something the client had never done before. In fact most teams don’t operate this way, with the business functions interacting with the enterprise architecture functions. But because we had such a collaborative relationship on the team, we had a strong sense that there was value to the client there, and the client was willing to go with our recommendation.
Sarah Parcak’s grandfather was one of the pioneers of using aerial photography in forestry. When she started studying archeology in college, she thought for sure that others had already use aerial photography in archeology. Then she found out that virtually no one had used it before in Egypt. She is now known as a “space archeologist” and has revolutionized the field of archeology by using satellite images and processes them using algorithms and looks at subtle differences in the light spectrum that indicates buried things under the ground. This technology has led to the discovery of thousands of new archeological sites, all on her watch.
12. How can I overcome obstacles or bounce back from a setback or a failure?
How will you overcome obstacles in your path? From a consulting perspective, I can tell you that when your company loses a recompete, you have to re-shuffle the entire team. It is a major setback. There are some people who are easy to place on new projects, and some people who are not easy to place. The easy-to-place staff are rock-star performers, have positive attitudes, and are willing to roll up their sleeves and work. The not easy to place staff are, you guessed it, the opposite. Their delivery is inconsistent, they aren’t team players, and are prima donnas. Which kind of staff will you be? While the setback of losing a recompete may not be in your control, what comes next, and how easy you are to place on a new project is absolutely in your control.
You now have 12 powerful questions at your disposal that you can live into to boost your impact at work. What other questions occur to you as you consider how to increase your impact?
