Only the paranoid survive
A no-nonsense primer on kickstarting your career
I am really a “bad news first” kind of person. This world runs on paranoia. Politicians, news channels, the stock market, Fortune 500 companies, NGOs, and any academic, religious, and Government institution function in some sort of paranoia.
The autonomy of an institution is defined by the degree of its freedom. Fewer degrees of freedom, more the paranoia. People, money, markets, and policies are just some of these factors that define the level of constraints on an organization.
Example of bad paranoia: A media company realizes that click-bait articles are good for business, and pushes more such articles, feeding the paranoia of its readers.
But there is also a good kind of paranoia, an invisible force that compels organizations to act in a way that makes the world better. The same degrees of freedom that impose constraints on the organization also helps them to narrow their focus, differentiate their service, and build expertise.
Example of good paranoia: A media company realizes that high-quality, differentiated content earns them loyal readers, and sticks to that model despite limited readership.
Paranoia always presents an impulse two act in two opposite ways. The one that feeds into the ensuing confusion and the one that forces organizations to constantly innovate and differentiate themselves from the rest.
This meta-commentary of paranoia in organizations luckily also applies to individuals and working professionals. As a professional, you have a choice (of course the degree of freedom in the organization will trickle down to the employee level) to either jump on the bandwagon and do what your peers (within the organization and within the industry of your line of work) are doing, or push yourself and team to be creative. Professionals should always yearn for and thrive in the paranoia of the second kind.
Advice is always in full supply. The world never seems to run out of it. This article is just another addition to the sea of career-building advice. I am in a mid-level role in my current organization and what I am sharing here is my learning and experience of working in these roles. In case you are wondering if this article is worth your time, let me assign weights to the relevance of this article based on job role levels.
Entry level - 80%
Mid-level - 40%
Senior level - 20%
My role mostly has been that of a generalist than a specialist, so that’s one more caveat you need to watch out for. The skill and mindset required for a focused, patient, deep-diving specialist role differ vastly from the on-your-toes, go-getter role of a generalist.
Keep your head down and work
The buck stops with you
Demand the best from yourself, then demand the best from others
Flex your work, the right way
Always be a student
1. Keep your head down and work
As dull as this sounds, it was the most beautiful phase of my professional life. I think one might follow this advice for all her life, but it is vital during your apprenticeship phase. You are in a new environment. Everyone else around you will know what you are supposed to do, better than yourself. This is the time when you learn the building blocks of your line of work. The phrase keep your head down might sound regressive, but what it really means is to zone into the nitty-gritty of your work. You are truly lucky if your superior stuff you with a lot of work. Not having enough work in this stage can lead to distraction, boredom, or even worse - disinterest. And if you happen to be in this situation, you need to demand more work. Most of our tasks in this phase will be mundane and repetitive in nature. But we often underestimate simple, repetitive tasks and their effectiveness in building our skillset. Mastering these single-dimension skills proves useful when you, later on, start taking on challenges that have more depth and complexity.
2. The buck stops with you
Ownership implies skin in the game. In typical organization ownership, decision-making and risk accumulate upwards. If you are in charge of “x”, your superior is in charge of “x+y”, and then it accumulates upwards (x+y+z+…). Now it is your absolute responsibility to completely own x and everything that it entails. You are free to venture into “y” as well, but as long as it does not hamper “x”. Let us for example say that you are tasked with designing a print banner for an event. Sounds like a straightforward task - design the banner, and you might perform it satisfactorily and get away with it. But if you truly believe in owning up to what you do, you will probe and question your task along these lines:
Designing the banner
How is the print quality
Where will it be placed during the event?
How will it look when an event attendee photographs it
I have dimensionalized the task of designing a banner into a multitude of subtasks (x1, x2, x3…). This not only ensures that I have done a fool-proof job of designing the banner, but it also demonstrates my ability to look at the big picture, and the fact that I truly own this task.
Owning up your work end-to-end also helps instill confidence in you. Your superior will entrust you with challenging assignments that expand your horizon of concern. Working like this prepares you for a robust role in which you are capable of tackling complex challenges. It also propels you to demand the best from yourself and others.
3. Demand the best from yourself, then demand the best from others
Demanding the best from yourself results from the good kind of paranoia. At times you may not have any direct competition within your organization, but as a working professional, you are always in a state of competition within your line of work. Organizations are always playing the mimetic game of what is it that other organizations are doing better than us and how we get better. It is only natural that the management will compare the talent pool as well, across the organizations.
Workplaces are getting complex, mature, sensitized, and diverse. Your core skills are necessary but not sufficient to function effectively in modern-day organizations. Soft skills play an equally critical role. Negotiation, conversation, public speaking, collaboration, etc. are true differentiators when professionals with equally competent core skills. Working in these roles requires you to develop an all-round personality. You are assessed on your attitude before aptitude.
When you constantly work on yourself, improving every aspect of your personality, you develop a kind of superpower. When you shed the naivety of your apprenticeship, you begin to see the forces that control decision-making within your organization. The slow and painful realization that it is not just about skills anymore, but the way those skills are applied and perceived by the organization and employees. Because the organization is made of its people, it also functions with inherent biases, flaws, and processes. No matter how structured and process-driven an organization is, human bias and perception do tend to seep in.
Your professional metamorphosis also invites you to look at others very closely, and it drives a virtuous flywheel of improving the organization. You tend to encourage the positive aspects of your co-workers and develop a positive-sum symbiotic relationship in the organization.
4. Flex your work, the right way
“I don’t get recognized for my work” is a phrase we most commonly come across. It is not that the organization doesn’t care. It is simply because your work is not visible to the decision-makers. We can take a cue from the creator economy, where there is great emphasis on putting out your work in the public domain. Now be careful if you watch yourself saying - my work doesn’t require to be in the public domain. If you are into coding, people are interested in it, if you are a CEO, people are interested to know how you manage your time. The world always needs more ideas, thoughts, and opinions. Coming back to how this relates in the context of the workplace, bring up your work in conversations, meetings, and other in-house forums. I don’t mean to go on announcing what you have done everywhere. Present a differentiated view on the topic under discussion and then back it up with proof. For example, let us say there is a general consensus in your team, that making more than five social media posts per day affects the brand negatively. You then present an alternate data-backed view that there is no correlation between the number of social media posts and brand image. Your view may or may not result in actual change in the organization, but you achieve a lot of things in due process:
You exercise your voice and make yourself heard
You project confidence, authority, and expertise in the domain of your work
You open a small window to encourage a difference of opinion within your team
To elaborate on the last point, contrary to what many experience, your superior or the upper management at times look for voices that contradict, or challenge their opinion. This is a booster shot to their confidence as well when they realize they are building a team of knowledgeable, critical-thinking professionals and not mindless robots accepting everything as an order to be followed and executed.
Also, as much as you want to work for the organization and build its capabilities, it is critical to move beyond the organization and build yourself as a professional doing novel stuff for your domain. When you put out your work on LinkedIn for example, you educate your peers working in the same domain. Your worldview matters to the people in your network. If you present something truly differentiated, and valuable to the world, opportunities from other companies may come knocking…
5. Always be a student
The world is evolving faster than ever. Gone are the days when one’s career progression was stable. The framework to climb the corporate ladder was pretty well defined. People, process, and technology is leveling up with every passing day. It requires a concerted effort to be more aware of the world around us. Unfortunately, picking up a new skill or learning something new feels like a mountain one must climb. The trick to doing this is to observe yourself at work keenly. There is always an area you think you can improve upon. Find out how you can take that one small step to make an incremental improvement. Trust me, a discovery will dawn on you that what you do is not that unique, and there are others who have encountered similar challenges and have laid out actionable steps to achieve what you are aiming for.
Let me give you an example of copywriting. When I was struggling to make my copies more effective, I stumbled upon some advertising legends who were masters of their domain, and they have in fact documented simple and effective ways to write copies.
Upskilling is just one part of being better at what you do. You also need to constantly update your mental models to evolve as a professional. You need to pay closer attention to the things you tell yourself, workplace dynamics with your colleagues, where your company stand vis-a-vis others in the competence hierarchy, the looming fear that AIs can replace your role at any moment.
The best way to update your mental model is to have conversations with - yourself, colleagues, external agents (consultants, agencies/vendors, other ecosystem players), and customers. Conversations with them can function as a constant feed of information that can lead to insights, followed by change.
There is something truly remarkable about committing yourself to discipline. Working 9 to 5 is not about clocking work hours anymore. It is a sandbox to clarify your thinking and to make yourself resourceful for the world.
Yes, there is a humdrum, cold way of looking at ourselves as cogs in a machine, but then there’s also Walt Whitman who said :
“That you are here—that life exists and identity, That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.”
Commonplace Musings is my social experiment to make a better sense of the world. Do consider subscribing if you liked my work.
Chat later,
~ Mandar