Section 15: Look at Every Activity as an Opportunity

Overview

Rose was given an unpleasant assignment. She was to be involved in decisions about how to reduce expenses in the department. She knew this would mean painful squeezing of purchases, travel, and possibly even the loss of jobs. She didn’t know how these sorts of decisions got made. All she knew was that it was painful for everyone involved.

Once she acknowledged the decision was made, she started looking for a silver lining to this dark cloud. She figured out that this experience might help her possibilities for future promotion since it would involve her directly with some of the toughest decisions. She also would get direct hands-on experience with analyzing the budget. Possibly she could find ways to change some impediments to team success while saving money, such as the way decisions were made about travel. Certainly, if she did a great job, it would encourage her manager to view her as valuable employee.

This also helped her build her enthusiasm around this assignment so she could put in the hard work necessary to do a good job. And, she worked with her boss to act as the key decision-maker and communicator so she wouldn’t be rejected by the rest of the team for the impact of the budget cuts.

Every job is a balance between good and bad experiences. One way to get through the painful parts is to find what you can learn from the experience. This gives you hope that your skills will improve over time, things will get easier, and you will deliver more value to your group.

Rose knows every job is an opportunity to make a contribution. Certainly, if a company invests money to create your job, someone believes there is value in it. When you are unclear about the value of your contribution, it is uplifting to find out who created the doubt. Often, it is your boss. Talk to him or her about how you could improve the value of what you do. When discussed in an open and honest manner, the manager usually will see you as an energized employee the group’s best interests at heart. You will learn a lot about how you can improve your real and perceived contributions.

The more control you have over your work, the more you can design it to give you opportunities to learn new things. This extends well beyond the technical aspects of your job, to working with people, communication, self-management. The list of opportunities is endless. When you are growing a little bit every day, the cumulative impact from year to year can be huge.

Finding and creating opportunities to learn is quite different from letting others dump all their unwanted tasks on you. The former is for the purpose of learning and developing. Over time, it will become natural to seek out more tasks in areas that you believe will contribute to your career. Once you see how to do that, then the next step is to change your existing work so it enhances your opportunities to learn and grow. Then ultimately you may have the chance to sculpt your own job description in such a way that it delivers maximum value both to you and your employer. (Butler and Waldroop, 2000) This process is described further in Section 12: “Look for Jobs That Align With the Organization’s and Your Personal Goals.”

Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.

—Thomas A. Edison, inventor