Inform Yourself

My good friend Jay Niblick, founder of Innermetrix International, recently completed a study called The Genius Project. His study became the basis for his latest book, What’s Your Genius?

C2 - Change the way the role is performed:

The next option for improving performance is to change the way the job is actually performed. When a duty or task is a more integral part of your role, it is probably something that you can’t just get rid of and so complimentary collaboration might help there. Many times, however, some of the tasks people perform are not nearly as vital. Many times managers assign responsibilities to a job arbitrarily out of convenience or even just as a random assignment (e.g., someone’s got to do it). Often these expectations are given without much thought, if any, for the natural talents of the person filling that role. Many times they create roles that are looking for a superman, where many of the talents are even opposite and just down right impossible to find in one person. We’ve seen thousands of roles that were looking for someone who was: empathetic – yet detached, detail oriented – yet big-picture focused, competitive – yet cooperative, compassionate – yet aggressive, strategic – yet tactical. No human on the planet could be all of these things at the same time. The problem is that people assume that natural talents, like skills and knowledge, can be developed, so with enough intelligence and hard work a good employee would get proficient at all of these things. It’s ludicrous to think that anyone could be all this, at least to a degree approaching 4th or 5th level performance anyway.

The best thing you can do to help yourself reach higher levels of performance is to change the way you fulfill a role based on what works best for you. Many times a great deal of the competencies that managers list are purely subjective and have little to do with reality anyway (trust me, one of the core deliverables at my company is helping corporate clients determine exactly what competencies are really needed in a given job, and many of them don’t have a clue). Changing the requirements of a role means working with the same objectives, but finding new ways to reach them. It requires flexibility to adjust how you fill your role, but if you are chasing the final objective anyway, which you should be, then how you get there is not as important as getting there in most cases. What should be of most importance is the best way for you to get there effectively. Gretchen’s story in Chapter __ is a great example of how someone can change the role to better fit their natural talents. She didn’t delegate, she changed the rules of the role.

Often times this simply means completely getting rid of a duty or task. If you can’t get rid of it, create a complimentary collaboration to get some help with it, but if it’s not an important part of the job and just some assignment left over from all those who previously filled your role - some inherited part of the role that exists more because it has always existed than for any real practical reason - ask yourself why you would continue to do it. Justify your answer to yourself. “Because they tell me I have to”, or “Because that’s the way it is done”, or “Just because” are miserable answers so don’t accept them from yourself. If you can’t find sufficient reason for it to exist, then dump it. One good rule of thumb is to imagine you are creating your own company, and you have to create a list of responsibilities for a new role. You own this small start-up and so you will be paying the person who fills this role, not some huge conglomerate. Would you include the tasks or duties in question if you were starting from scratch, and why? If you can justify the existence of these tasks, then go back to the first step in this section and seek to find ways of creating complimentary collaborations; because while important to the job, you still don’t do these things well. If you can’t justify including these tasks in your own new company’s role, however, then why should they be in your current role – really.

Action Step:

Unlike the previous post’s action step, where the tasks or duties were a more integral part of the role, other duties are often just randomly assigned and could just as easily be offloaded or even done away with completely (i.e., removed altogether). Think of two tasks or duties of your role that,

A.) rely on your non-talents, and
B.) are not truly vital to achieving your overall objectives or goals.

1.

2.

Ask yourself if these duties or tasks really make sense. Are they there because they have always been there? Are the really practical? Look at the example we saw in Gretchen where the responsibility to make a certain minimum call quota each day was limiting her ability to achieve. In the end, the daily call quota wasn’t really an important part of the job. It was more than likely something a manager created to try and improve performance. It’s doubtful that anyone had every really questioned the efficacy of such a rule and since it persisted all it actually did was hurt performance in Gretchen’s case. Take a look at the two tasks you wrote down above and figure out how to remove them.

Next, we’ll look at the third C, Losing The Role Altogether.