Hi Everyone, thanks for joining me!
Today, I’m going to talk about a piece of career advice that I received as a fresh grad, starting my first job, which was as a postdoctoral researcher. This advice is universal, and the way my boss told me, I’ll never forget it.
Picture this scene. I’ve recently finished my PhD, and it’s my first day on the job, and I’m waiting to meet with my new boss, and I’m really excited about starting. I had only met with him during my interview, so I did not know him very well at this point in time. So finally, I’m in his office and he tells me basic nice things like “congratulations on your degree” and “welcome to the team”, etc. Literally, the next thing he told me was, “Well, since you have a PhD now, you should already know how the world works. Science isn’t fair. You can work very hard, and not produce any breakthroughs ever.”
Although I was taken aback by my new boss’s intense words and demeanor, given my personality type, I was quite motivated by that no-nonsense style. He made his point really obvious, which is that after all is said and done, it’s really about the results that we deliver.
In my following years in that role, I did work very hard, of course, but I pushed myself constantly to be in a results oriented mindset. This was the first time in my career where I started to think in terms of trade offs, meaning asking myself questions like:
- Where is the best place to focus my effort? And what return do I expect from it?
- Am I spending too much time on something that may not be feasible?
- Should I delegate something that requires specialty knowledge that I don’t have to a colleague with the relevant expertise, and collaborate with them instead of trying to be the supposed hero by solving the problem individually?
I would go as far as saying that if I did not shift my approach to work in this way in this particular role, which was very challenging, I certainly would have become overwhelmed, overworked myself, burned out, and ultimately failed miserably.
I’ve always remembered this advice in all the roles I had after this first one, and continue to strive to get myself to deliver better and better results more efficiently at whatever it is I’m working on.
Paradoxically, although delivering results is so important for us in our professions, and for the survival of institutions, and companies, etc., I often find that these same institutions, somehow, separate us from this mindset. This experience was quite acute for me while I worked at a huge company with tens of thousands of employees.
As you can imagine, working in a tightly knit, intense research team as I did as a postdoctoral researcher is very different from working as part of a team in a huge company. In a huge company, there are so many layers of management that seemingly shift the goal posts of what is expected of us, in ways that sometimes appear to not make sense, that people tend to just end up going to work each day and performing their day-to-day tasks in a way that seems dissociated from the end result that they’re producing. The sad part of that, is that people tend to end up taking less ownership of what they do, and there’s a whole array of other negative consequences that evolve from that, both for them personally and for the company. But that’s a topic for another day.
My experience working at a big company was not my favorite, but I was determined to find the way to be successful despite these obstacles I encountered. What I did, and what you may want to consider doing if you find yourself in this situation is to go back to what I call the “first principles” that I summarize in four steps. Here they are:
Step 1: Write down how the company makes money. Be very literal. If you work for a drug company, it is by discovering and selling drugs, if you work for a software as a service company it is by developing software and selling subscriptions, etc.
Step 2: Look at the org chart of the company, and identify all of the managers in your chain of command. Read about their divisions. Read internal documents that describe their function in the company and their high level organizational goals for the year.
Step 3: Re-read your job description.
Step 4: Take the information from the previous steps and map the activities you can do each day that align with how the company makes money and the broader organizational objectives within the parameters of your job description. You’ll be surprised to find activities that pop up that you can do that you otherwise would never have thought of.
There are a lot of benefits to following these steps. Firstly, when managers come to you to shift the goalposts for the umpteenth time, you can ask them meaningful questions about how changes will propagate throughout the organization and to your daily activities. Not only will you get clarity on what’s expected of you more effectively, your speaking up will call attention to how thoughtful you are and, quite frankly, will help you get noticed by senior leaders, which is always a plus for your future advancement. Secondly, when managers and peers inevitably ask you what you’re doing and why you’re doing it, you’ll be able to provide sound justification. The bonus is that it makes you appear highly competent, which is again a plus for your future.
It amazes me that people do not think more broadly about their roles and consider steps like these. But, for me, coming from the background where my first boss told me “science isn’t fair” I couldn’t imagine working without taking a strong results oriented mindset to my role and adapting it to the circumstances.
Well, that’s all I have for today! Thanks again for joining me, and ‘til next time! Bye!
Innovate and Improve 