This past weekend I attended the Houston ALT.NET Open Spaces Conference and was reminded of one of the most important productivity and career management techniques that I've ever learned. I had never been to an Open Spaces conference before, so during the Friday night planning session I learned the one law of the conference.
The Law of Two Feet: If at any time during our time together you find yourself in any
situation where you are neither learning nor contributing, use your two
feet. Go to some other place where you may learn and contribute.
Both of these ideas represent the concept of personal choice and responsibility nicely. It's important to remember that you choose the work you do. You choose the skills you have. And you choose who your employer is. But a lot of people I meet don't realize that they're choosing. They feel stuck doing what they do, knowing only what they know, or working for a company they don't believe in. This leads to feeling victimized and a host of career-impeding behaviors. Once you recognize the choice, however, you are freed from those feelings and can eliminate the bad behaviors.
This is a particularly good time to write this post because I know plenty of folks out there feel that they have no choice about their job due to a difficult market. You may expect me to say, "Go ahead and leave that job anyway. Face what will come like I did!" but I won't. I'm not saying that you need to do anything new. What I'm saying is that you need to recognize that what you're doing is your choice. You may choose a job you don't like rather than face a scary job market. Or you may choose to leave anyway and face what will come. Either way, you'll be much better prepared to deal with whatever difficulties arise simply by telling yourself, "I asked for this".
As somewhat of a footnote, I took The Law of Two Feet and turned it into The Law of Four Wheels when I left the conference after only two sessions. It's not that the conference wasn't good, it was actually very well done: great people, interesting topics, surprisingly effective self-organization, the works! I chose to leave, however, because this is one of the busiest and most exciting times in my career. I simply wanted to be doing something else instead, so I made the choice to go to work.
In last Friday's post I talked about the difference between getting things done and making things happen. In short, becoming productive is necessary, but not sufficient, to becoming a Big Swinging member of your field. Once you have capacity to put to good use it's time to make things happen, which you can do in 3 steps:
Redefine success
Look for opportunities
Take the first step
These are listed not only chronologically, but in order from most difficult to least difficult.
Redefine Success: Never Confuse the Reward with the Goal
Most people that I know and work with have a goal of making more money. Don't worry, I'm not about to get all hippy dippy anti-money on you. Quite the opposite, as a matter of fact, in that I want you to make more at what you do by being more valuable. The problem as I see it is that money is a reward, not a goal. If you have money as a goal, you'll pass up opportunity after opportunity simply because you can't see the money in it. If, instead, you take the approach of doing things and showing your value independently of money, you'll see tons of opportunity and by seizing these opportunities you'll have the chance to turn some of them into money. If you redefine success as bringing something into existence (rather than getting paid to work), you'll find lots of chances to try your hand at it. Making things happen is like any other skill in that you'll probably start out kind of bad at it, but as you practice you'll get better and better. Once you're really good at it and have a track record you'll be trusted with riskier and riskier opportunities. What's even better is that you'll get opportunities (high paying ones at that) that you would never have known about any other way. Which leads us to looking for opportunities.
Look For Opportunities: Stand In Luck's Way
Let's say that you've chosen to believe me and have decided to define success as making things happen for a bit. The next step is to take what you know and use it in ways and places that you typically wouldn't. As an example, I used to have warehouse space next to a forklift sales and service company. It was a small company and they didn't have much budget for IT work. As a matter of fact, they didn't even own the domain name that matched their company name. To me, this just isn't right. I bought their domain name and put together a small, but nice looking website for them. It was a great experience in low-cost, high-speed (i.e. I didn't want to spend a ton of time on it) web development. While I would love to tell you that this led to a multi-million dollar contract through strange twists of fate, it didn't. As a matter of fact, I never made a single dollar off of it. Something could have happened because I created the site, but it didn't this time. Oh well, I still consider it a success, because some really nice, hard working, honest guys got a good looking site that they wouldn't have had otherwise. By creating the circumstances where something great could happen, I feel that I increased the chances of something great happening.
As a contrasting example, I met someone who was interested in cloud computing. I volunteered to do some writing about what cloud computing is, where it's going, and why it's valuable. To me, the chance to write/speak about the subject and tell people what I think about an interesting subject was the goal. I ended up getting an email a few weeks later from a colleague of this person which led to a paid writing gig and a little consulting work. As it stands it looks like this opportunity may end up being one of the highest paying –and most interesting– in my entire career. And it started by me wanting to see something happen . . . not by me wanting money. So start looking around with fresh eyes. Eyes that are looking to do things instead of eyes looking for a payday. Once you start seeing these opportunities, you'll realize that there are more than you could ever jump on and you can pick and choose which to pursue based on your time and inclination.
Take the First Step: The "Making Things Happen" Part
Everything up to this point has been prep work. Preparing yourself to see things and finding things to do are necessary steps, but you still need an action step where things start happening. The key here is finding the first step. For example, when I talked to the forklift guys the next step was to find out if their domain name was available. When I talked about cloud computing, the next step was to outline what I thought was important about the technology. When I meet others, the first step may be to build them a small piece of software that can lead to a bigger project down the road. Because I've practiced doing these things so many times, they cost me less than they would cost others. I know where to get inexpensive hosting, web templates, development tools, stock photos, etc. I would never have had these skills, or they wouldn't be nearly as developed, if I had waited for paid opportunities each time. Instead, once I saw something that I could do, I volunteered to take the next step since the next step cost me relatively little. Right now I have a financial threshold of about $100 and a time threshold of about 20 hours. Any time I see something that I can do in less than 20 hours for less than $100, I consider it "free" to me. This means I can try something every other month for $600 and 120 hours per year. That's 6 additional opportunities a year for something great to happen and through making things happen, I meet people, upgrade my skills, and uncover even more opportunities.
In summary: Take small, bounded risks where the payoff is doing something that may otherwise have not been done. Over time you'll get better and better at both seeing opportunities and capitalizing on them. And who knows, maybe one day you'll wake up and find out that something you did has paid off in a Big Swinging way.
I'm a big fan of Getting Things Done and other productivity systems. I use Nozbe as my action management app since it's dead simple and works well for me. I carry a small Moleskine notebook in my pocket to jot down things I need to remember. All-in-all, I'm an effective and productive person when I want to be.
Here's the problem: Productivity is a prerequisite.
Becoming productive isn't the goal, it's just another skill. What you do with your productivity superpowers is what really matters. Maybe you can plow through whatever gets thrown in your hopper like an Asplundh chipper/shredder . . . you know, the ones that can turn telephone poles into a mulch that's beneficial to your garden in 15 seconds. Even if you become a highly effective machine, you'll be treated like machine. Machines are commodities and when their cost outweighs their output, they get replaced by cheaper machines.
Instead of just getting things done, you need to make things happen.
Here's the difference between the two: If you're just an expert on getting things done, then whatever is given to you could be given to someone else who could, eventually, get it done. If you become an expert at making things happen, then the work you do wouldn't get done any other way. Can you see the difference in value? With getting things done, you have given inputs and given outputs and the best you can hope for is that you're worth 2 or 3 or n other people (until they read the GTD book and buy the Moleskine notepad). With making things happen, you're invaluable . . . you literally cannot be replaced with someone else. Sure, your employer or client may decide that they don't need what you do, but that's a much more manageable position than an employer or client choosing someone else over you. Plus, if you're an expert at making things happen then when you notice your workload winding down you can simply make more things happen.
On Monday I'll post a dead simple guide to making things happen. Since getting things done is a prereq to making things happen, though, please post your GTD resources or questions in the comments.
The secret to being a Big Swinging Developer is to be a force multiplier; make other people more valuable and you become incredibly valuable. Don't believe me? Which do you think is worth more: improving your own effectiveness by 50%, or improving 10 people's effectiveness by 10%?
There are several ways to improve others' effectiveness: tools, techniques, processes, infrastructure, the list goes on. The most direct way, however, is if you're the manager or team lead. If you've never lead a team before, or are afraid that you're bad at it, here is a dead simple guide to get you started or turn things around.
Step 1: Find out what success looks like for you & your team.
Your team exists for a reason. It's there to build features, or test stuff, or support a system that's in production. Whoever signs your check has a vision for what makes you and your team valuable and what success looks like for you. And if they don't? Easy, you find out elsewhere. There are only 3 ways to provide value to an organization: increase sales/revenue/demand, decrease costs (aka increase efficiency and output), or decrease risks. Your team is responsible for one of these, guaranteed.
Step 2: Determine how each team member can be valuable.
Remember in step one where I said, "Whoever signs your check has a vision for what you valuable"? Well, you're that "whoever" for each of your team members. Even if you don't actually sign their check, you are responsible for knowing what each person can do to be valuable and then communicating that clearly. NOTE: This is the hardest part of management. If you know what someone can do to help out and can communicate that clearly, you have it made.
Step 3: Monitor.
Lack of monitoring is the Heart Disease of management: It kills more teams more quietly than anything else. Even worse, lack of monitoring can look like so many other things. You see, one of the problems with organizations is that they're dynamic. If you're not monitoring what they need, you may find yourself doing what you've always done and unemployed because that's not what's needed anymore. Or you may do what you think is a great job of communicating to your team what you want them to do, but if you don't monitor them and provide course corrections then they could end up working really hard on something that you don't need.
If you put those 3 steps in an infinite loop, you can successfully manage teams for the rest of your career. If you need more supporting evidence, look around where you work for teams who are struggling and you'll probably see lack of monitoring, poor communication, or lack of vision.
That covers the basics of running just about any team. Next time I'll talk about how to build a really kick-ass team.
