How to slowly build-up your A-game at work?
By: Angelus Pereira
Tags: Personal Branding, Gamechangers, Leadership, Personal Development, Success

What does it really take to be a workplace star? A lot of the fancy stuff you read in self-help books, no doubt. It’s common internet knowledge and google throws up a massive list of things you can do to stand-out.

Yet, not everyone is able to apply these at work. Having spent half of my lifetime working with five+ organizations and dabbling in businesses on the side, I decided to sit down one afternoon and make a list of things I did through my career. No promises. Read on.

Workplace success= Individual brilliance+People skills

Photo by bruce mars on Unsplash

Here are my top 7

Contextual note-taking

You learn, when you listen. When you speak, you’re only repeating what you already know. Those words are stolen, the next few aren’t. Anyway, coming back, if you do choose to listen, there’s wealth of information and knowledge waiting to be capitalized upon. That is, if you know how to contextually note take.

I did this unconsciously before I realized. I was exposed to a variety of meetings across the business and some attendees remained constant. Contextual note-taking happens when you are deeply tuned into the spirit and context of the conversation and apply the same learnt context to future meetings/activities/tasks from same members. I saw how I was able to take notes not just from what was spoken in the meeting but what value or belief was exhibited. You start to make a connection when you hear and see a trend in the type of comments/questions being made. I carried a fat diary to meetings. At the end of 2 or 3 months, I had vital data on key stakeholders. What do they like, what buttons set them on fire and a few others… you get the idea, I suppose.

If you choose to take notes, don’t just capture the obvious. Read into the likes, preferences, mind-set, thought process. Its a bit difficult to start with, but gets easier as you progress. If it were easy, everyone would do it.

2. Prescriptive Vs. Corrective:

This is handy especially when you have a new boss or if you’ve joined a new organization. Some bosses can be real pricks. When you ask them, they say — “You take a call, I don’t need to get involved in such decisions” and when you do your own thing and f**k it up, they go — “You could’ve checked with me…?”

One needs to check what’s at stake, before deciding on P Vs. C. No boss will tell you this. If you’re too prescriptive, you’ll be looked upon as dependent. If you’re too corrective, then arrogant — “don’t go on doing your own stuff, did you shit your brains out this morning?”

At certain times take a call, sip the courage coffee and go corrective. You know your hearts telling you, ask and be safe. Here’s something that can help you.

Step 1: Identify which tasks/actions/initiatives can fall under each category without over-thinking

Step 2: Jot down the risk associated with a corrective strategy for a critical task

Step 3: Every once in a while take on the corrective instead of prescriptive. Test the waters

Step 4: Establish a pattern just like how you’d do for contextual note-taking

3. Clarity of thought:

The longest distance traveled is from your mind to your lips. Sometimes unfortunately it takes a detour and passes the by lanes of your heart. We generally associate the mind with logic and the heart with emotion. But what percentage of what we say is from the heart or the mind.

Clarity of thought comes from experience and having full knowledge of the situation at hand. We speak from a place of emotion, when we generally don’t have enough facts or after we’re done blurting out the facts. Facts, as we know are logic. Not the logic that the recipient is obligated to buy. But the logic that you’re obligated to sell.

With over 2billion thoughts per second, clarity is a missing ingredients in most crucial conversations. We may not start with clarity but we seek clarity as we progress into the conversation.

So how do we get the clarity that we need?

Be clear about what you want out of that conversation. And more importantly what do you want the other to do for you.

Give a little. Test the reception. Give a little more. Just like how you’d eat an elephant. If you ever would.

4. Support or respect:

In our race to one-up (wo)/man ship, we often project ourselves as being better, faster and wiser than our peers/circle. Often this invites the ire of our peers. Sometimes it may not be intentionally done, but jealously creeps in.

Now understand jealousy is a natural phenomenon and likely to occur at every success of someone closest to you. Mostly closest to you. You don’t necessarily deal with jealously. It comes to pass over a period of time.

It needs to be addressed that all good ideas aren’t meant to come from you. They can come from others and sometimes people do get ahead of you and at other times you get ahead of people(hopefully you’re no keeping scores). We have to leave the chutiyaas(pricks) out of this game though. People who lie, malign and bring you down as they can’t compete with you, fairly. That’s different and we’ll deal with it separately in another blog.

Peer support is required for you to grow. If you’re in an environment which is not conducive to collaboration, it becomes even more important that you have some level of peer support. Where it is difficult to earn the support of your peers, mutual respect is good enough. How do you get people to respect you? Start by respecting others? Wrong. Start by respecting yourself.

5. Being the voice of reason

You are the sum of 5 of the ridiculous/brilliant people you surround yourself with. You can learn from them both. Quickly. Any unlearning takes years of focused effort.

Speaking of people. Everyone loves to play the devil’s advocate. Especially in important meetings when its time to pee over your territory and signal the arrival of the alpha in the room. Be the voice of reason [VOR] instead.

Being the VOR, you’ll step back and look at the situation objectively. You’ll probably let others strangle each other first (before voicing your opinion). Then try to isolate the emotion surrounding the decision. Table the evidence and logic. Help weigh the pros and cons. If nothing else works, help people picture the consequences from both the offerings. And then let the group continue their verbal, kindhearted wipe out. The important people in the room know who’s made the difference to the conversation. The unimportant don’t care. All they care about is their opinion. A supposed fact that’s paraded around like an airbrushed model.

Photo by Clark Young on Unsplash

6. Confidence:

This one’s probably way down my list. For no reason. I struggled with confidence in my early years as I kept listening to others when all of the answers I needed at that time were with me. From being an instinct player, I switched game and tried to measure every decision with logic, practicality and a safety meter.

Confidence is everything. Anyone can be confident when things are going their way, but it takes a special kind of a person to show courage and character when things go south. Confidence is not just visible in your words but also in your actions. You can smell a confident soul from afar.

Confidence is built one meeting at a time. One little point you make, that sucked up all the courage you had. Like the little persistent drops from heaven that flood the fields. Or the gushing, gentle, resolute water that cuts the rock.

7. Being yourself but evolving

Everyone speaks of being yourself. Self-help screams - ‘help them see your colorful side’. But what if you’re a miserable, selfish, lazy prick?

You can’t help it in the present moment if you are. There’s no flip-switch to un-prickify you instantly. If you are better than this, you have a head start. Congratulations. We can get Cliff Richard sing for you. The point is you can start from where you stand. And evolve. Today. Tomorrow. The day after.

If you are not the 9 things that the brightest spark in the room can be, be the one thing that you are and do it f*c*in amazingly. All life on Earth evolved from a single-celled organism that lived roughly 3.5 billion years ago. There’s hope for you. Look how far we’ve come. We evolved. You are engineered to evolve.

Enough now.

I see people, rushing around, shoving elbows in peoples faces, convinced they’ll make it rich by sunrise. Pip their competitor to that job opportunity, that’s not even announced yet.

Think, dirigible ride. Up, up, slowly now. Success is a slow burn movie. At least the lasting one. No, not lasting. There no such thing. Just bring your A-game. Success will take care of itself. Fire up!