12
Tying It All Together: Work Your Way to Success
“The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can’t find them, make them.”
–George Bernard Shaw
We have seen several different soft skills pertaining to attitude, starting from ‘seeing the big picture’ to ‘resilience’. Finally, it all comes down to execution and delivery. This means work. Ever since man ‘invented’ work—perhaps around the time he was hunting and gathering food—he also invented the notion of hard work. From time immemorial, hard work has been universally revered as an important work ethic, transcending cultural boundaries and cutting across different generations. But ‘hard work’ has assumed different dimensions in the context of the vastly complex, global work environment of today.
More than anything else, hard work today is a matter of attitude and is the key to achieving success. It has assumed more than just a physical dimension (as we will see in the next section). Hard work starts with an insatiable hunger to work well and be successful in our careers. This attitude results in willingness to put in long (and often extra) hours on the job and the perseverance to chase after lofty end-goals. This attitude makes us enjoy our work and not view it as a burdensome chore standing between us and better things in life. Remember that in this globalized world, if we are not interested in doing our job well, there is always someone elsewhere—perhaps in the Philippines or South Africa—who will gladly do it and send us home. Our work is not just something that needs to get done. Hence, however old fashioned hard work may sound, there is no denying the fact that it is absolutely an essential soft skill to have even in today’s environment. It is only what constitutes hard work and how you leverage the hard work and get the best mileage from it that has changed.
In this final chapter in the attitude dimension, we will see more details about this soft skill called hard work. In Section 12.2, we will discuss the different dimensions of hard work. In Section 12.3, we will present how to get the best mileage out of your hard work. We conclude this chapter after discussing some of the common myths about hard work and some ‘work killers’ that tend to undermine the benefits of hard work.
12.1 Dimensions of Hard Work
Hard work today is no longer just slogging away and sweating it out till we are dead.
In today’s pr of essional world, simply sitting at one’s desk and plodding along mechanically will not get us anywhere. But minus those long brutal hoursof‘hard work’, we will never become successful. In our fast moving, tension-filled age, hard work is actually comprised of three dimensions—physical, mental and informational. Only when these three dimensions are recognized and a judicious balance is achieved between them, can you really expect to get the best leverage out of your hard work (see Figure 12.1).
First, hard work obviously has a physical component to it. Nothing can replace it completely. Being physically fit is absolutely essential for you to have a positive attitude and being ready to take on hard work. Burning out physical stamina by neglect of basic hygiene factors like work–life balance, diet and exercise will undoubtedly decrease your ability to succeed in your environment, especially in the long run. Tiring yourself out early or peaking prematurely with your energies will definitely make your career reach a plateau that is difficult to scale further.
Even though hard work might seem only like physical work, a good part of hard work is actually mental and it calls for a certain mental tenacity to keep working hard for long hours. It is the same mental faculty that also identifies any recurring patterns in your work. You start applying intelligence to your work. When you do repetitive work routinely, it is likely that you will invent short cuts and other tools that will make your work simpler, error free and more efficient. The ‘work hard’ at this juncture starts incorporating the ‘work smart’ components.
Do not underestimate the chance that you will first hit mental fatigue before you become physically fatigued. What you may think is manifested as physical fatigue could actually, well be mental fatigue. If this happens, it can impair judgement and cause you to commit mental mistakes that translate into execution errors. Watch out for any little warning signs your mind gives, so that you can take a break and refresh yourself. If you have several different assignments on your job, and several kinds of activities, rotate them, so that you have more variety.
A third component of getting the best mileage out of your hard work is informational. This is perhaps the single most differentiating factor that sets apart a hard worker of today with his counterpart a few years ago. New concepts are emerging—we now tele-commute, e-learn and Pod-cast. We have become smart about working hard and ‘employee productivity’, as it is called in management parlance, always seems to increase year over year. If we are going to be intimidated by technology, gadgets and overabundance of information, we are not setting ourselves up for success.
You live in times when you almost need a degree in ‘Wiki-eology’ to be successful and you need to know the precise method to Google-search for a needle in the haystack. Googling has become an accepted verb! Effective use of the Internet and other technology resources involves figuring out the appropriate Web sites, blogs (and even Twitters) and joining the relevant forums and relentlessly pursuing what you want. It also means that you will stay on top of new developments and trends, new directives from the government and the industry.
For example, if your organization wants to choose between Nairobi and Lagos for its African sales office and asks you to find out rough-cut information about these two African cities, you should know exactly which sites and forums to go to and for what information. You should not only get narrowly focused direct information, but also some ‘related information’ that can come in handy to help you do a detailed analysis later. Thus your hard work can take you through more miles than it is ever possible to go without the informational dimension.
To be of the best breed of employees today, you need to have a judicious mix of nascent hard work, smartness and being information savvy. Your bag of tricks should include ways of getting maximum output for your physical hard work, the intelligence to identify and use resources, the temperament to acquire and use knowledge and the aptitude to pursue and solve complex problems along the way.
12.2 Hard Work—How to Get Most Out of It
The steps to maximizing the results of your hard work, considering the three dimensions discussed above, are:
- Visualize
- Organize and prioritize
- Practise
- Exercise judgement
- Recharge yourself.
12.2.1 Visualize
It is important that you understand the big picture (Chapter 2) and in particular your role in your organization. This will give you a context and a perspective to your job and will work as a motivator to do hard work. If your organization is a huge puzzle, which little piece are you and what is the value you bring to the table?
Know the organizational structure and the work flow in your immediate vicinity. Do you know who supplies you with your assignment and gives you the inputs to do your job? Who takes your output and uses it in his or her job? Who are your stakeholders? What are the expectations from you in terms of schedule, productivity, deliverables and so on? Who do you complain to, if there are problems? What kind of paperwork and data entry do you have to do?
Figure out your physical environment. What are the limits to what you can do?
What is going on around you? What resources are available to you in your immediate vicinity? Are there any people who can help you or resolve things for you in a crunch? Such elaborate understanding of the big picture can give you a psychological comfort-zone to operate out of.
12.2.2 Organize and Prioritize
It is a good idea to organize yourself and your space before you go full throttle on your job. Like we already discussed in Chapter 9 on Time Management, scheduling and prioritizing your activities are important and you need to execute your commitments in a certain order. Even if you don’t have very many activities crying for your attention, try to make at least a short list of things to do and operate according to it. Simply making a laundry list of your pending tasks will bring clarity and control to your workdays and give a direction to your hard work.
It is important that you keep your workspace clean and clutter-free. An organized workplace in itself can improve your productivity by cutting down on the time you take to search for things and so forth. There is a home for everything in your work area—the files, the letters and the work pieces—and make sure you dock them in their appropriate places. Likewise, un-clutter your computer too and have a neat directory structure of folders, files and e-mail boxes. File away information and paperwork in a timely fashion instead of laying them on the nearest flat surface. Of course, such things are easier said than done and in spite of your extreme meticulousness, mess will find a way to creep up on your space and you may have to do periodic housekeeping.
12.2.3 Practise
Even if it is clichéd, let us state this: practice makes you perfect. When you are engaged in hard work, you are so focused on the work in your hand that your only goal is to execute it as best as you can. There will be periods when you will be bored, but you will still need to keep going after taking timely breaks. As a pr of essional, you have to be disciplined enough to put in hard work day after day after day—like how Tendulkar puts in several hours of practice every day, even if he is on top of his game. Discipline is the key to working hard consistently. You cannot work in spurts or only on ‘good days’. While going through your work, keep an eye on the numerical targets you had set for yourself, the time factor and the quality of your work.
When a pr of essional sportsman like Tendulkar hits hundreds of balls in practice, to an outsider it might look like a mindless, repetitive exercise. But upon closer inspection, you would see that Tendulkar was actually focusing on making subtle improvements to one of his strokes and in fact, was getting better and better as he kept practicing. Researchers like Geoff Colvin,1 Anders Ericsson and colleagues argue that you too should view the hard work you put in your activity as a practice session toward improving some of your skills. A hundred hours you put in writing C code, in effect, is like a hundred hours spent by Tendulkar in practice—although this analogy is somewhat stretched. The point is, once you see your hundred hours as a means of improving, say, your C skills or interpersonal skills, you will derive more out of the activity and what’s more, you will actually improve those skills on top of delivering the C code.
Ericsson et al call this deliberate practice (meaning deliberately practicing a particular technique to get better at it) and outline it in a three-step process, which is roughly:
- Focus on technique as opposed to outcome
- Set specific goals
- Get good, prompt feedback, and use it.
At the gruelling practice session—whether it is you writing C programs or a Crickete hitting balls at the net—you should not worry much about the output, but concentrate only on improvement. Your level of natural talent doesn’t matter here because excellence is accomplished through deliberate practice. This recipe is a mental exercise and you should tell yourself that this time you are going to improve such and such skill and focus on that while you go about working hard. This is yet another place where you bring smartness to your job.
Realize that everyone who is successful in your organization has paid the devil its due and has put in many, many hours of hard work before moving up. Remember that work equals hard work plus everything else. If someone like Tendulkar has to practise so much, we all also need practice to smooth out any rough edges in our work and get the best mileage out of the hard work we put in.
12.2.4 Exercise Judgement
One of the indications of working smart is the ability to comprehend things and make judgements. Whether you are reading an article or simply visually observing something, you should be able to see the main points—and the subtleties—and be able to connect the dots and draw inferences.
A lot of jobs would demand this skill. If you are a loan officer working in a modern bank, you might be processing, twenty loan applications a day. Although you may have some initial quantitative screens to shortlist applicants, eventually you will have to make a subjective decision on whether to issue the loan to an applicant or not. The ability to pick out the deserving applicants out of a pile, the ability to decide whether A is better than B, will give you a solid edge over the others. Poring over sample case studies, prior examples in your organization and so on, can help you hone your skills in this.
12.2.5 Recharge Yourself
Modern workplaces are high-voltage environments—definitely no place for pussy-foots—and you should have the stamina and the toughness to perform your job. Most jobs these days are not of the nine-to-five variety—especially if half the members of your team are sitting on the other side of the globe. You may be asked to attend a high-powered meeting at seven in the morning, followed by two hours of intense client visits, then two acrimonious conference calls and just when you are packing up for the day, you may be asked to finish a report that is urgently needed. Not only should you have sufficient energy throughout the day, but you should also know how to ration it. Otherwise you will end up looking harassed. Remember that you cannot sprint all the time and you don’t want to burn out prematurely.
You should try to schedule in some sort of a physical activity every day to build up your stamina and endurance and also to afford you that personal time for yourself. It can be a brisk walk around your house, jogging on a treadmill or biking, Yoga or a workout in the office gym. There is nothing like a well-conditioned body to take on hard work.
12.3 Some Work Killers and Myths About Hard Work
There are a number of myths about the concept of hard work that we would like to address briefly and present the underlying reality (see Figure 12.2):
‘Only some jobs require hard work’: This stems from the misconception that hard work is essentially physical work. A white collar, typical nine-to-five job, it is argued, does not require hard work. There is no job on earth, however ‘cool’ it may be, that is exempt from hard work.
‘Hard work is others’ perception of how I work’: Hard work, as we have defined it here as a soft skill, is intrinsic and stems from an attitudeof‘I will give my best.’ It is not just staying back in the office till late night and doing nothing (or meaninglessly chit chatting away); it is about doing whatever it takes to do what you have set out to do—of course, within ethical limits. When you do real hard work, you will not care about others’ perceptions; you will know from your own heart.
‘Short cuts will eliminate the need for hard work’: Short cuts and improvisations are always good. These improve your effectiveness and efficiency. But don’t forget that you get to learn these short cuts only by hard work! Once you know these short cuts, you will not cease to do hard work, but you will rise to the next level of work and start the hard work at that new level all over again.
‘You should work smart, not work hard’: People who voice this opinion are fundamentally viewing working smart and working hard as mutually exclusive and tangential. As we discussed in the previous paragraph, you will learn the methods of working smart only by working hard. Working smart will leave you more time to work hard on loftier goals.
‘I am a visionary and thinker…hard work is for lesser mortals’: It is argued that there are two classes of people—those that think of the great ground-breaking ideas and those that are supposed to work hard to achieve those noble goals, being cogs in the wheel, following and executing instructions like a programmed computer. When you look at the annals of successful business people, you will quickly realize that this is not true at all. Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Ratan Tata or Azim Premji did not become business icons by simply conceptualizing great ideas. All of them worked closely on the ground with the troops to realize the goals. And they worked very hard indeed!
Why can’t Akash Malhotra work too well?
Akash Malhotra is your regular IT pr of essional who puts in ten-to-twelve hour workdays, but still something seems amiss in his work habits as his productivity falls way below the average. It is not as if he is a chronic poor-worker who sulks and feels lazy or indulges in time-wasting activities. Sure, sometimes he feels tired and slow— but it’s nothing that a cup of good c of fee won’t fix.
The first thing we noticed about him was that he was highly susceptible to interruptions and diversions and could not recover swiftly enough to get back to where he was. We advised him to put on a big, virtual ‘do not disturb’ sign on his back sometimes when he worked and tune out any phone calls or meddling colleagues. (Looking busy in itself dis-invited a lot of people to his desk.) At other times, when interruptions are inevitable, we suggested that he parks his work at a logical point so that it would be easier to get back. Yet at other times a simple ‘to-do list’ can track where he was before the interruption so that he wouldn’t be so lost getting back to the original point of his work.
He would also get sucked into skunk projects—those un of ficial, yet highly interesting projects (sometimes simply because ‘someone has to do it’). This may be as simple as spending half a day with a summer intern on his college project or writing a cute java applet that absolutely adds no value to anything. There is a time and place for skunk projects. If Malhotra has neither, he shouldn’t be doing them.
Sometimes, Malhotra is hit by the expanding favour syndrome where someone asks him to do a simple favour, but the favour expands and consumes hours. A simple request to e-mail someone a report that he filed away somewhere in his computer under some godforsaken name can become a challenging project. Now Malhotra has learnt to limit the time he spends on such requests and suggests possible alternative sources for such information or asks them to wait until he is free enough to look for it. He doesn’t quickly ‘buy into’ such requests.
Malhotra also exhibited the ‘too many balls in the air’ syndrome because he didn’t know how to say no to various assignments piled on him. (We will deal with this in Chapter 37.) He ends up taking on too much work and responsibilities and is unable to cope with them all. He told us he didn’t want others to think badly of him for not being able to handle the workload. He should look at his plate first, before loading it up with some more work.
Occasionally he suffered from the out of sight, out of mind syndrome too, where he would discuss about doing something, but would not get around to doing it or completing it—unless the person who requested it showed up again and pestered him about it. Malhotra was simply scheduling work very poorly. Some other times he would say the right things in a meeting, but not follow it through. This, we pointed out, was because Malhotra didn’t realize these were real action items and not idle discussions.
And finally, Malhotra also on occasions suffered from over-promising and under-delivering, where there was a major disconnect between him and his stakeholders on what the deliverables were. Now, Malhotra gets everything documented clearly and knows exactly what is promised and how and when he should deliver them.
Malhotra is back at work with a vengeance.
12.4 In Summary
We spend a good part of our lives at work. We even derive our identities through our jobs. (We are what we do, right?) We get all sorts of rewards and recognition through work. And for many of us, this is probably the only path to success available in life. So, it behooves us to be exemplary workers and make a mark at our workplaces. We should not be afraid to use every tool in our arsenal to achieve this. We collectively referred to this arsenal as the soft skill, ‘work to succeed’.
Hard work starts with vision. But, it does not end there. As an old saying goes,
The vision must be followed by the venture. It is not enough to stare up the steps—we must step up the stairs.
Hard work is not just about the number of hours you put in, but also what you get accomplished at the end of the day.
It’s not so much about how busy you are, but why you are busy. The bee is praised.The mosquito is swatted.
When people are not successful, they blame it on luck, without introspecting whether they have given the devil its due and worked hard. It is useful to realize that
The only way to overcome hard luck is by hard work.
We will conclude this chapter with a quotation from Thomas Alva Edison, which summarizes the role of hard work.
I never did anything worth doing by accident, nor did any of my inventions come by accident; they came only by work.
If that is the case for a genius like Edison, should we say anything more about hard work for lesser mortals like us?