Monday Career Motivation | #29 - What is growth?
A little bit of optimistic motivation for your week!
Welcome to this week's edition of Monday Motivation!
Monday Motivation is a weekly read you can read in less than 5 minutes. It aims to motivate you with one or more easy-to-think-about ideas and concepts to challenge you, helping your career, career development and growth.
Think of these weekly emails as side quests to your development. The suggested action tips can easily be incorporated into your overall system to help you work to your career goals.
Growth is linked to outcomes
“Focus on the outcome, not the tasks”
Ever heard this statement?
A natural thought after you hear this would be, "Well, how can I not focus on what I have to do if I want to achieve it, smart ass?"
Fair point.
This statement requires an explanation and also some rewording.
This one is a bit long, so the TLDR here is you have to think about what you need to do to achieve the outcome, which is to do the following tasks. Still, it's more that you don't get obsessed with the tasks and stay flexible to drop tasks, change tasks, and basically don't get tied to the checkbox and a pat on the head. Stay accountable to the outcome and ask yourself along your journey questions like 'Is this going to be getting me closer to {OUTCOME}?' and 'Is this relevant and required still?" and be willing and capable to pivot.
Pivoting and changing tasks is quite challenging for both work and our personal lives.
Stopping something or changing direction most of the time requires an explanation and, in some way, a reason. This alone can make us look weak and indecisive and give the impression that we don't know what we are doing. We must remember that when we set out to achieve an outcome, we start with point-in-time knowledge, and the journey to the outcome is to gather as much knowledge as possible and keep going to achieve the result. We need to continue moving forward to gather more knowledge, so how do you do that? This is completed with tasks.
Regularly assessing the new information you gain from your FORWARD PROGRESSION from the task you complete is the way to achieve outcomes.
You may receive new information indicating that the task(s) you are working on may not be the best way to achieve your outcome. So what to do? You need to consider changing what you are doing.
Focusing on the task alone is the equivalent of following a GPS into a river.
Let's add another frame to this lens.
You get assigned an outcome in your yearly team meeting or it's fairly common to set a new personal outcome at the start of the new year.
Outcomes can read something like this:
Increase revenue by 20%
Increase the number of promotors by 10%
Run the local 10k marathon
Speak French fluently and confidently
Outcomes are often linked to the why when it comes to tasks. They are also intrinsically linked to growth (growing revenue means the company grows, which means you get a good opportunity for career growth). Outcomes should be measurable and confirmed as being achieved. Avoiding ambiguity is good because when it comes to assessing if they are done or not, it should be based on the data, not on 'confidence' (which changes over time, good and bad) or 'interpretation' (which is different for people)
Often, between an outcome and a task is a hypothesis statement(s), which are thought experiments and ideas about what you believe is or needs to be completed to achieve the outcome. Then, based on that, tasks are often created.
This sounds great, Sarah. So what is the problem? The problem is that from then on, we focus so much on tasks, not the outcome. End of the year comes around and we have completed a bunch of tasks but the outcome isn’t achieved.
How can you turn this around?
When we get to creating tasks, we often scope them according to what we know at the time and our own skills and abilities. To do this, we have to shift focus away from the outcome. Good so far.
Consideration 1: Have you considered other people's abilities and skills when you are in this stage?
So now, you or the team focus, focus, have a set of tasks, a to-do list, some deadlines, and probably some recurring meetings. You meet up, and tasks get completed, but now what? Remember, you are not measured on functions but on outcomes. Did your task move the needle?
Consideration 2: Consider shifting your thinking from completing tasks to the forward progression I discussed earlier. Reframe your questions in these meetings to yourself and your team from 'Have I done X?' to 'What have you learned from working on this?' This helps you change your thought process to the knowledge gained from tasks, pressing you to ask yourself or your team, 'Is the task still contributing to the outcome, and have you done enough of it to move on to another task?'
Considering these two things, you naturally create a loose coupling between task and outcome—it becomes non-permanent and a point-in-time activity that is 100% set to change.
Uncouple yourself from the task and focus on where you need to be
With this mindset, you can and often need to, add another dimension into play, which is usually a constraint, like time.
So your flow can go something like this:
Step 1: Think about the outcomes you have been assigned or want to achieve
Step 2: Consider hypothesis's and ideas of what would help to achieve those.
Step 3: Start creating tasks using a divergent thinking model where you span out, you see lots of options, sort of like an ultimate buffet of food (my go to analogy for most things). This can often be a brainstorm meeting(s) with your team.
Step 4: Consider the outcome, refocus from task to outcome
Step 5: Converge inwards to your outcome with the tasks you have identified, and start to filter them based on additional important dimensions, skills and ability and so on.
Step 6: Once you have a to-do list with ownership at the task level and a regular meeting to check in with your team, when you regularly check in, ask yourself those questions again: 'What have you learned from working on this?' Is the task still contributing to the outcome, and if you have done enough of it to move on to another task?'
What skills do you unlock for yourself?
Some amazing things happen as a result of this:
You are much easier to collaborate with - you are less focused on being right and having all the answers upfront because this is an 'investigation' and a 'testing' of the hypothesis where things will change.
You have a more remarkable ability to work as a team and consider ideas that are not yours because you include other people's ideas, not exclude them.
With this team model, you can achieve much bigger outcomes than one person could ever achieve on their own.
If you get this far, you will begin to reach new capabilities in your career, which can help you break a career ceiling holding you back to being able to drive bigger outcomes.
This shift in mindset unlocks a few things that are hard to practice and remember when we are laser-focused and impatient for results. It unlocks the resiliency, perseverance, and energy to complete the marathon of consistency to stick it out to achieve any outcome, not the task's checkbox.
This is what i refer to as 'career stamina'.
Career stamina influences how your ability to contribute to company outcomes, lead a team, manage yourself, manage risk and deal with degrees of change.
Your career stamina is directly linked to the types of outcomes you can drive for a company
Do you know what else is linked to company outcomes? Your salary, your title, your autonomy and your influence.
You need career stamina to drive outcomes
One final reminder:
Learning animation is not the outcome.
Learning how to dance is not the outcome
Getting fit is not the outcome.
Running workshops is not the outcome.
These are all ability measures, the grey space, the shit in between that help you do tasks.
You may find you can do these things but probably need to be better to complete the task(s) linked to the outcome, yet we obsess about them anyway and think this is the end goal.
We even talk about them in job interviews or have them as achievements - which is completely fine, but they are not the conclusion to the story; they shouldn't be your most outstanding achievement because they helped you achieve something - what did they help you achieve? What OUTCOME did they help you achieve? This is what interviewers want to hear about in job interviews.
For example, to achieve x outcome with x constraint, you should consider doing x task. To do x task, you need to learn some degree of animation, dance, get fit, or run a workshop. Now, what did the journey of that help you change about yourself for the better? How else can that new skill help you? What other outcomes could you get now this is possible for you? What person could you become?
That is growth.
No action tip for today, reaching the end of this post is enough of an action. CONGRATS! & thank you for reading!
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Here is an image for some simple reminders that if you take anything away, it’s this: