Early in my time at Deloitte I was given the chance to attend an exec education class with 3 other Deloitte employees for a week. Prior to the course, I didn’t know any of my other teammates but by the end of the week we became friends and professional colleagues. During the week, in addition to learning about digital strategy and learning from other Directors at F500 companies about digital strategy (in 2011, that was a big deal!) We collaborated on a project and got to know each other better.
After the class was over, we stayed in touch, and I ended up relying on them on a multitude of client projects as well as other internal initiatives within the firm. One person’s experience was valuable for a client project, and I was able to bring them onsite for a client workshop. Another individual had a deliverable they previously created which was useful for another client project. And the 3rd person was looking for projects, and I was able to connect her to a few other people who were able to use her skill set for the projects they were working on.
Collectively, we all sat in entirely different parts of the organization doing similar jobs but in different ways, but each of us was better at our job in some way, shape or form for knowing one another, and using that relationship to drive impact in the work we did. The combination of ideas, relationships and knowledge gained from just knowing these three people changed my experience significantly.
That experience made a huge difference in helping me understand how exactly I, as a foot soldier in a 100,000 person organization could actually make a difference in the work I was doing, and not only be excellent at doing the work, but truly make an impact on people and clients even as 1 small person in a larger machine.
When you work in a knowledge-based job, or in an organization or company where your product is not a tangible one (and/or both) your job is to impact an on a business outcome (usually collectively,) and you’re measured on your ability to impact that outcome. Because you don’t physically make a product that you can see or touch (ex: a tide pen, a iphone, a laptop) your “outputs” are often a mixture of data, decisions, deliverables, and require you to work with others to complete them.
For engineers, its lines of code, for marketers, its copy on a landing page, and for user experience designers it’s the sketch file that becomes the new ux for the next release of the mobile app. These deliverables are a combination of your own knowledge and skills, but often rely on a set of core elements that are the underpinning of an outcome in any knowledge-based job. Here are four:
- Identifying Knowledge – Identifying the knowledge (tacit and explicit) that exists in an organization, or in many cases, within people in the organization and synthesizing and organizing it in a way that it is usable.
- Generating Ideas – Generating new ideas that can lead to further discussion, collaboration and eventually some form of work product (ex: deliverable, project, initiative, program etc)
- Finding People – The ability to bring the right people, through relationships or connections into the fold who have the knowledge you need or can collaborate and spar around to generate ideas that can lead to solving problems, creating solutions, etc.
- Building Awareness – Getting your work seen and visible not only helps you make an impact, it also gets you feedback and more ideas, knowledge and people. People often bristle at “personal branding” (for good reasons) but the reality of things is that there is so much noise and distraction within a company that if you’re not getting eyeballs on your work you’re potentially missing out on making your idea and work even better.
How Do You Stand Out When There is So Much Noise?
If you are someone who does want to make a bigger impact in your work it’s easy to assume that if you just work hard and do your assigned tasks that it will take care of itself, and in some cases that is true. If you work in sales and close a huge deal, that clearly has a direct impact on your company and your customer. But for many of us, getting a deliverable done isn’t as easy as just staring at a computer screen typing words and generating an outcome, it is much more nuanced than that.
The unlock for me came in realizing that while any workstream or deliverable I got on a project had a set of defined “outcomes” the activities that I could use to generate that outcome were often left to me. Using the framework of knowledge, idea, people and awareness became my go to for trying to produce outcomes that made an impact. Here are a few examples of this:
- Knowledge: Identifying the “tribal knowledge” that existed within the firm’s archives and documents, and bringing the right set of slides or information that we could use as a team, or with our client. This meant combing through old deliverables, reviewing people’s documentation, and sharing that knowledge with others.
- Ideas: Making time to create new and novel ideas, that were based off of knowledge as well as my own insights, and being able
- People: Bringing in the right people together, either because of their knowledge or ideas, or because of their background, to strengthen or become more creative about whatever I was working on, and having a diverse set of people to call
- Awareness: Sharing the knowledge and ideas I was creating with others to get feedback or to “hook in” the right people,” or gaining awareness by proactively reaching out to people who might benefit from the work I was doing.
When I started thinking more intentionally about the activities I did to generate the outcomes of my work against this framework, interesting things started happening.
- People started coming to me for knowledge, because while some knowledge is visible (explicit) a lot is not (tacit) and I could often decode things for people who needed to understand.
- People started reaching out to me for feedback on their ideas and their work, because they saw some of the ideas that came from me sharing my own, and started involving me in their work
- People started sharing my ideas with others, and that in turn helped generate even more awareness for what I was doing.
One of my more humbling and cool moments was in my final year before business school seeing the Head of our 10,000 person group send out an email highlighting the Top 10 initiatives for the year, and seeing that I had a direct role in 7 of those projects.
Spend time finding and synthesizing knowledge – The former CEO of HP once said, “If HP knew what HP knows, we’d be 3x more productive.” – Great knowledge already exists within your organization, it’s often just a matter of finding it. Synthesizing and curating knowledge through documentation and insights is a great first step. I used to spend some time each week combing through emails, project highlights and former deliverables and found so many useful nuggets that I used in my own work.
Make space for creative ideas – Finding new ideas for solutions or projects doesn’t happen in a flash bang moment, it often marinates over time. As I previously wrote about, having time to be creative means taking some space to actually think, observe and use your talents to generate new ideas.
Map your 3rd Places and Spend time with them – Companies, especially large ones are like high schools with a bunch of cliques. But you can make that work for you. One way to do this is to do the constellation exercise (see image above) and document all the different “third places” that you are a part of in your organization. These are all areas where you can go and connect/collaborate with others to share ideas, stay connected, and help one another. When I do this exercise within companies, people are often surprised just at how many third places they actually have in their network.
Document and share your ideas – Sharing your ideas and your work can feel awkward or seem like it’s not part of your job, but I would reframe it as just another way that it improves the quality of your work. If this is your first time doing this, start small by creating a recap of a recent project, and sharing it internally with some peers who would benefit from it, or do a lunch and learn that chronicles some of the lessons you learned, and ask for feedback. These are opportunities that drive mutual value for you and those who are viewing it.
In each of these activities, there is a certain amount of “slowing down to speed up” which needs to go on, meaning the actual activity requires you to think or reflect creatively before taking action. Finding the time and space to do this can often be tricky in today’s always on productivity driven world, but you can always start small and grow over time.
I never became a GM, SVP, Partner, CEO, etc at any company I worked at, but even in large massive organizations I still found ways to drive impact. If you’re one of those people who is looking to make a bigger impact in the work you do and aren’t sure how to stand out, try these suggestions and see how it goes. I’d love to hear how it works.