By Bruce Tulgan
If you only work hard, you’ll only get overcommitted, resentful, tired, and under siege. That’s no way to be a go-to person. So, you’d better work smart:
- First, professionalize whatever you do. Whatever your job is, make sure you do it really, really well. Some organizations have effective, timely training to prepare you—and good systems and tools to support you—for every task, responsibility, and project you might undertake as part of your job. If your employer does not, then you’d better create your own.
- Second, specialize in whatever you do best. That means focusing as much of your work time as possible doing the things you already do really well. That’s why, ironically, there is actually a lot of wisdom hidden in “That’s not my job”—despite the phrase’s bad reputation. Know what specialties you want to be known for. The more work you do in your specialties, the better your outcomes. Every minute you spend on the things you do very well adds more value than a minute spent on something that is not your specialty.
- Third, keep expanding your repertoire. Sometimes, as Petra advised Michelle, it’s wise to consider doing the thing that’s “not my job.” After all, you don’t want to specialize so much that you get stuck in a pigeonhole. So be on the lookout for opportunities to add a new specialty.
Let’s take these one at a time.
Three Keys to Professionalization
To professionalize any task, responsibility, or project, do these three things:
- Identify, study, and follow the proven best practices in your field and in your organization. Turn them into standard operating procedures.
- Bank and reuse repeatable solutions, rather than reinventing the wheel every time. These are the solutions to recurring problems that naturally emerge when you regularly use your standard operating procedures.
- Use whatever job aids you can find—such as work instructions, checklists, templates, and prior work products. These are the things that will help you systematically follow those best practices and use those repeatable solutions. Once you get comfortable with the basics, build some job aids of your own.
Specialize in Whatever You Do Best
Put a laser focus on what you do best.
Do you have a specialty? What do you do best? What are those tasks, responsibilities, or projects that are really in your wheelhouse? This is the work where you know just what to do and just how to do it, and what might go wrong and how, usually, to avoid it. You also know on a deep level what it takes, in the microcosm of your specialty, to ask others to “help me help you help me.” You know how to optimize your productive capacity, maximize your impact, and dramatically increase the ROI on your work.
What’s more, you are pretty certain that every minute you spend on one of your specialties, you will add more value, better and faster, than someone who doesn’t have your specialty—or than you would by spending any particular minute doing some- thing that is not one of your specialties. That’s true no matter what your job is.
If you are a specialist, you also know how to use your standard operating procedures, repeatable solutions, job aids, and prior successful outcomes in order to teach the colleagues with whom you collaborate enough about what you do to help them help you help them. Meanwhile, do not fall into the trap of being great at just the aspects of the job you like and slacking on the aspects you don’t like or consider ancillary.
Keep Expanding Your Repertoire Even When “That” Is Not Your Job
Despite all the advantages of adding to your repertoire, you still need to choose very carefully before saying yes or no to a new task, responsibility, or project.
Sometimes it really shouldn’t be your job. Not all opportunities are equally promising. The least promising fall into two main categories:
- The wild-goose chase. These are fruitless tasks that are often time consuming and sometimes difficult, time wasters that are usually not even much fun. Keep your eyes peeled for the wild-goose chase and do whatever you can to avoid it.One shortcut might be the reputation of the asker. Has this person wasted your time before? Or that of others? Still, prejudging a colleague’s requests based on reputation or even your own experience with them might get you a reputation for being uncooperative or cliquish (as in, “I won’t work with certain people”). And you might miss out on a great opportunity.The number-one common denominator of the wild-goose chase is the half-baked ask: if the request comes in early and then gets changed over and over, then you are likely to do a lot of work without accomplishing much.
- You are really the wrong person for this task: In some cases, it would be ridiculous for you to try to do the task yourself. But the great thing about go-to-ism is that, increasingly, if you are a go-to person with real influence, then you have a lot of good customers, and you know where to find go-to people or potential people you can nurture. You know who’s who and where to find them, so you can make the introduction and be the connector, which by itself is a service.
Sometimes maybe it should be your job. What about times when, yes, you’d probably do well to decide that something seemingly outside your job actually should be part of your job? There are three primary instances:
- Somebody’s got to do it—and it might as well be you (at least sometimes). I’m not talking here about tasks ancillary to your primary responsibility but still part of your job, like the heavy machine operators’ safety checks and shift handoff checklists, or the neonatal surgeon who washes her own hands.
I’m talking about the tasks that come up regularly or every so often that belong to no one, but somebody’s got to do it—one-off errands. The reasons to sometimes do the occasional one-off errands: good workplace citizenship, teamwork, humility, and sacrifice. And don’t forget relationship ROI. People notice, and they appreciate and remember it. For example:
- Not repairing equipment, but knowing how to troubleshoot common problems
- Not being the manager, but bringing in the mail or opening a box of supplies when you see them
- Not being a trainer, but taking the time to teach a colleague how to do something new or better
Do be careful: you do not want to become that would-be go-to person who jumps at every chance.
- The job is a close cousin to your specialty. These are often the most natural and easy opportunities to add to your repertoire. These are the jobs that are usually a good fit with your other responsibilities and relatively easy to add to your repertoire of specialties. It makes sense to do them.
- The job presents a brand-new opportunity to truly expand your repertoire—or even take on an additional career or change careers. It’s always a good idea to branch out and build new knowledge, skills, wisdom, relationships, experiences, best practices, tools, work products, and repeatable solutions.Mastering brand-new specialties is how you truly diversify your opportunities to add value. Some new specialties are easier to add than others. Most require some amount of up-to-speed training. Some require going back to school.
Working Smart—And Even Smarter
As you build each set of best practices, repeatable solutions, and job aids, you are building your repertoire of services and products—your specialties.
The skills you have the most experience with are those you are likely to do the fastest and best. These are the skills and services you’ve had a chance to road test. These are your specialties, the ones you want to be known for as you build your brand as a go-to person.
When your repeatable solutions become the established solutions, and you are clearly happy to see them proliferate, you will find yourself becoming a de facto leader of an organic team forming around you and your repertoire. That’s a good thing for your superiors to notice: it’s often the path to a swifter promotion and more official authority.
This is an adapted excerpt from Bruce Tulgan’s new book The Art of Being Indispensable at Work, due for release July 21, 2020 from Harvard Business Review Press and available for pre-order now from all major booksellers, including:
Bruce Tulgan is the best-selling author of It’s Okay to Be the Boss and the CEO of RainmakerThinking, the management research, consulting and training firm he founded in 1993. All of his work is based on 27 years of intensive workplace interviews and has been featured in thousands of news stories around the world. You can follow Bruce on Twitter @BruceTulgan or visit his website at rainmakerthinking.com.
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