Revolutionize Your Career with One Simple Strategy: Adding More Value to Your Team!
Some insights from Andrew Grove - 3rd CEO of Intel
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Revolutionize Your Career with One Simple Strategy: Adding More Value to Your Team!
In 1983, Andrew Grove - the 3rd CEO of Intel - wrote a handbook on how to build and run a company. Now, if you read this book, I’ll be the first to admit that some of the ideas are dated (such as dual reporting and matrix organizations). But, there is still much to learn from Andrew and one thing he said that has always stuck with me is:
“The key to survival is to learn to add more value”
On its face, it is a fairly obvious statement, but I’ve found in practice that it is often forgotten.
Adding Value Isn’t Always Sexy
The truth is the work of any role, from time to time, will feel messy, trivial, and potentially even insignificant. Why are you spending time writing unit tests or documenting your code when it would be so much more fun to work on a new feature?
We do this work because it is incredibly valuable to the team. Knowing your code is reliable and sufficiently scalable is critical to customer value (the most valuable features are the ones that are working and available) and allows the team not to be overwhelmed by technical debt as they continue to build out the product.
This is an engineering example, but I am sure you can think of many instances in your role of tasks that create a lot of value for the team, but don’t feel particularly exciting or might not be directly in your job description.
My advice is to not worry too much about whether something is your job or whether a task is particularly flashy, but instead, focus on how much value is this going to add to your team or your company.
And - the opposite is true - when you find yourself spending time in ways that don’t add value, eliminate them! This can be particularly common for managers. If your day consists of just meetings in which you are merely passing information between groups, then you aren't creating much value at all.
Finding High Leverage Work Tends to Maximize Value
In your quest to find ways to add value, I’ve found it incredibly valuable to think about the leverage of my work. A very simple way to think about it is:
Value = Leverage x Effort
So something that is high leverage will create an outsized amount of value for the effort you need to put in.
It is also important to note that some activities can have NEGATIVE leverage. This happens when you put effort towards something that actually produces negative value. An example might be a manager requiring their entire team to be in an excessive number of meetings every day which in turn actually reduces the value that the team can create.
So how do you find your high-leverage work?
The activity that has worked best for me is at the end of every day or every week review what you did. Then actually write down which of those activities you found to be obviously high-leverage and obviously low-leverage (when you first start doing this, some things tend to really jump out). Do this a few times and then review the patterns. This is essentially you collecting some data and insights on how you spend your time.
Next, make a plan on how you will add more of the activities you found to be high-leverage and remove some of the low-leverage activities. It is usually not a good idea to try to change everything all at once, so start with something manageable and build from there.
As you continue this practice over months and even years, you will find you develop a really strong sense of what is a valuable use of your time and what is not. This will in turn lead to a significant amount of your time really creating a ton of value for your company. And adding more value is the key to survival and growth.
Activities I Have Found to be High and Negative Leverage
If you are curious, here are some things I have found:
High Leverage
Delegation - is there someone else more qualified or in a better position to do something (and it fits within their current goals)? If so, this person doing it can create more leverage.
Automation - can you automate a task? For example, use a Slack bot to remind people of a recurring deadline instead of manually doing it.
Process Improvement - do you have processes followed by many in the company? Improving on these can help many people and thus is high leverage.
Intentional Focus - are you spending your time intentionally on what you believe to be of value? Then this is innately high leverage.
Negative Leverage
Bad meetings - these are meetings without a clear purpose or agenda and tend to end without any action items
Letting others control your time - it is usually low leverage if you are always responding to what others want during the day and constantly feel like you are trying to catch up.
Being late - this one might be controversial, but being habitually late to meetings or activities that require you ends up wasting everyone else’s time who is involved.
Analysis Paralysis - taking longer than necessary to make a decision slows everyone down and prevents value creation.
Focus on Value Creation
If you only remember one thing from this article, I hope it is the concept of focusing on creating value in whatever ways you can.
I think you’ll be amazed at how that can transform your work and really allow you to accelerate your growth.