Want to Succeed at Work? Focus on Becoming Valuable.
It was my last day of work at this company, and I felt an array of emotions.
On the one hand, I was exhausted from the tough 2 weeks I’d just had, which featured everything from writing up the standard comprehensive handover note to creating an entire Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) for my role to dealing with the emotional toll of saying goodbye to my colleagues, most of whom I’d worked with for the last 5 years.
On the other hand, I was excited. Excited to be starting this new phase in my life.
No, I did not leave to start a new job. Instead, I did the unthinkable in today’s economy and left my 9-5 to build my skin care brand!
Was I a little anxious? Yes. Was that enough to stop me from moving on? Absolutely not.
As I sat at my desk at the end of the work day, clearing my desk and piling up my things into my box, I started to feel something different. It was very familiar, and I’d felt it throughout my journey at this company. I decided to do some last minute journalling to put my feelings into words, when a colleague came up to me.
Caleb was one of those people who I spoke with occasionally, less for work, and more to chat about the deeper things in life - family, legacy, financial investments and so on.
I assumed that he wanted to have one last chat before my final exit. Instead, he told me how much he admired me, especially because of all of the success I had in my career journey within the company.
Then he asked me this question: “What 3 things would you tell someone who is looking to become successful in their career?”
As I pondered on the question, simple as it seemed, a moment of imposter syndrome washed over me as I wondered what possible advice I could give him, let alone 3.
I thought about all the books and articles I had read, and all the Ted Talks I had listened to but I could not remember any of that at the moment. I decided it was best to be authentic and I searched my mind for the best way to summarize my experiences so far and I came up with the following:
The 3 Things I told Caleb on the ways to be successful at the workplace
- Become a person that adds value
- Do not hide the valuable things that you do
- Learn new skills/improve on the old to become even more valuable than you are
What you absolutely want to be in your career journey is a person whose value becomes a strong currency at the workplace.
As an employee (and now a business person), I never shied away from any work that I thought would add to my currency, no matter how much or little the task was. I must mention here that I was also really good at negotiating deadlines, if it could be helped. But I made intentional efforts not to do any work that would harm either my physical or mental wellbeing, and you shouldn’t either. I learned so much about the company, I joined projects, I took the initiative to lead, I took on a few responsibilities that others considered beneath them but if it was something I had not done before and could be beneficial to me in the future, I jumped on it.
And I definitely advertised my wins. If I was part of a project where I did most of the work, be rest assured that I sent the email on the task completion to the receiving Leadership team member and copied my Manager and answered questions letting them know that I did the work. In fact, I said thank you to myself and followed that up with a little treat and expected my workplace to note in their records (both documented and in their minds) that I was the type of person who delivered.
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Then I made sure to learn more. Learn new skills and if there is a skill that you have that needs improvement, get on it. I worked in Human Resources, and I was very interested in people analytics. After mentioning this to my manager, I somehow became the person responsible for creating and sharing our reports. Then one day, out of the blue, she asked me to build a live dashboard where she could check on some stats. We did a few things manually at the time, so this request made sense. We had a data team who could do this easily, but I decided to learn how to build a dashboard on Microsoft Excel and honestly, I cannot convey how good I felt when I finished.
Bottomline, never stop learning.
In hindsight, I did not realize the cycle these 3 things formed until now. While I do hope that Caleb took these things to heart, I am glad that I can share them with you.
I remember going back to my journalling after Caleb and I finished talking, to document the familiar feeling that I felt - gratitude. I was grateful for the successes, learnings, arguments, tears, laughter, and everyone who believed in me. I was grateful to myself for not giving up on me and I cheered myself on for the bright future ahead.