Hi Everyone, thanks for joining me!
Today, I’m going to talk about a principle that is very important to me, because it has helped me a lot in my career. For this reason, I’d love to share it with you here.
This principle is to work for yourself to win big, because value creation comes BEFORE the reward. And by working for yourself I don’t necessarily mean going out and starting your own company, although this principle would also be relevant to doing that if that’s the path you want to take.
In the rest of this episode, first, I will talk about what I mean by this principle. Then, I will list steps you can take so that you can apply this principle toward your career success and what the advantages of doing so are. Finally, I’ll finish off by sharing an example of exactly what I did in my career to apply this principle and the associated steps to achieve the reward I wanted.
So first, I’ll talk about what I mean. We all want REWARDS in our careers, of course, that could be that great job, a promotion, or a raise. Who doesn’t want those things?
And, we all do well in our roles by following the conventional wisdom of meeting and exceeding what’s expected of us in our job descriptions.
However, I’m going to take a contrarian position and say that doing those things will only get you so far. If you want that new great job, raise, or promotion – that big reward – that means you have to be thinking outside your job description.
Instead, think about how you could leverage your skills and expertise from your current role to independently create value outside of your role, and to leverage that value to move your career in the direction that you want.
So before I go on, the most important thing you need to keep in mind here, is that you’re going to do a lot of work for yourself for free in order to create the value you need to create in pursuit of the reward you’re seeking.
That means that you need to take the following steps on your own:
(1) Be proactive about identifying what you want to do next,
(2) study the needs and challenges of your domain,
(3) develop an independent, personal project addressing the needs you identify,
(4) working on the project to create a deliverable that demonstrates VALUE,
and finally
(5) leverage that deliverable to have targeted discussions with important decision makers in companies, teams or managers within the company you work, or possible clients that you want to work with that are aligned with the deliverable you created.
Step 5, where you leverage the deliverable to have targeted discussions with important leaders is where all the advantages are for you when interacting with them.
That’s because first, since you put in all this effort, the senior decision makers you’re trying to engage with are more likely to take the time to listen to you, take you seriously, and not ignore you, because you’re sending the message that you are serious about what you are trying to achieve.
Second, showing an actual deliverable that you created communicates your ideas and the direction you want to go in much more clearly than if you were just talking about it.
Third, because you went through the struggle of thinking about what you want to do next and why you want to do it, identifying a problem to solve, and creating a deliverable to solve it, you will definitely have learned a lot. So you will be able to answer tough questions that senior leaders ask you with ease and speak very convincingly about what you want in an authentic way. Overall, you’ll have much richer and productive discussions that you can drive toward the result you want.
Now, to illustrate my points, I will talk about an example in my career where I applied the principle of working for myself for free to achieve the reward I wanted following the steps I outlined.
Early in my career I worked for a company that did laboratory testing for clinical trials. So this is a company that contracts with pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies that need to perform clinical trials to make sure that the drugs they are developing are safe and effective for patients. This involves a lot of laboratory testing on things like blood samples that are coming from the patients participating in the clinical trials. As you can imagine this is a huge undertaking because it involves collecting and analyzing thousands of samples from around the world in different ways.
When I started working for this company, my role involved supporting one of our big pharmaceutical clients with cancer research, because I have a background in oncology. But as time went by, I realized that there was a huge opportunity. The lab company was analyzing thousands of samples for our clients and hence producing a lot of numbers and data buried in spreadsheets. However, we were not doing anything to help them understand their data.
So I approached the senior leaders at my employer with an idea – that I can build a software tool for analyzing and visualizing the clinical trial laboratory data that we were generating for all of our pharmaceutical and biotechnology clients.
The senior leaders thought this was a great idea, so I started building the tool. It is important to note that I was building the tool for free on my own time during evenings and weekends, because this was not my job at this company at that time. But I knew that I wanted to move my career in a direction where I could lead building useful analytics tools for our clients.
I ended up building a prototype, beta testing it with some of our clients, and ultimately launching the tool. Once the tool started gaining traction with our clients, I was able to transition to a role where I was doing exactly what I wanted – which was to lead building useful analytics tools for our clients.
I hope you realize that value creation really does precede the reward that you want, and working for yourself for free really does enable you to win big.
I also hope that you try applying this principle to your career and follow the steps I outlined in this episode toward your success. All the best to you.
Well, that’s all I have for today! Thanks again so much for joining me, and ‘til next time! Bye for now!
Innovate and Improve 