Examining improvement at work
It's crucial to nail down the factors holding you back from having a higher output at work.
- Speed — You are not producing enough. Happens in fast-paced environments. Maybe you have changed jobs recently and are not yet accustomed to the pace at a newer place. Or you need to be more focused (less distracted) to deliver quickly. Speed is hampered if you frequently switch between multiple tasks, so you need to cut down on the tasks you juggle between at one time. Or, likely, you are doing tasks inefficiently — manually doing tasks that could be automated. Look around for how others do the same task. You need to automate some mundane parts of your work.
- Quality — You deliver things fast, but they are not up to the mark. This requires understanding the standard of quality at your organization. Quality is a straight trade-off with speed. You might need to adjust your position in the quality-speed trade-off graph. This means slowing down to produce higher quality work, which requires doing the last 10% of tidying up (final optimizations, more presentable PPTs, documenting code, etc) or toning down on quality to produce faster.
- Prioritization — Your quality and speed are great, but you are hitting the mark in making an impact because you aren’t prioritizing the most crucial tasks. You may be caught up in low-impact tasks. Getting prioritization wrong happens often because you have only a subset of information about the product — e.g., engineers may not know the exact customer pain points. To be aligned to what is the highest priority, you need to understand different stakeholders — customers, investors, and the product roadmap. This requires planning and discussing well with the manager on what is the most impactful task at the moment. This could also happen after a promotion (or change of responsibility); many people continue to do the same tasks they did before instead of delegating and freeing up their time.
- Communication / Visibility — Your work is not getting the recognition it deserves. There could be multiple ways to improve this. First, build a better relationship with your manager and communicate often with them. Speaking up during meetings and sync-ups to promote your work and its impact. Asking for higher visibility projects (i.e., customer-related issues, for example)
- Reliability — It’s crucial to strengthen the relationship with your manager. They should be confident that the work they delegate to you will be high in quality and won’t require a second pass from them. This encompasses delivering high-quality work on time for an extended period. Respecting deadlines, showing up on time, and taking responsibility for your work (meaning admitting mistakes if something goes wrong and working to fix it). Building reliability will make you the go-to person during disaster management and make you invaluable at work.