A Golden Rule to Evaluate Your Professional Effectiveness

Most organizations, most workplaces have certain goals they chase. These goals may be around revenue, profits, or growth, for example. But when broken down to the jobs of individuals, the job outcomes and these larger goals may have several degrees of separation. And when you think about the day to day tasks any individual's job entails, the separation becomes even starker. It is usually not possible to judge your effectiveness by trying to observe its impact on the larger goal. Because many people's tasks and jobs have to come together over time to achieve that. This may translate into you not doing your job as effectively as you could, because how would you know? If the task at your hand involved preparing and sending a report, its impact won't show up the next day on the company's revenue. So, how do you know you did it effectively?

Here is a simple golden rule for judging the professional effectiveness of one's day to day work. Anything you do - there is always a user for the output of your task. Ask yourself this - are you making that user's life easier by how you are doing it? Does the output of your task make them more effective in theirs? 

You may not be serving the customer directly. Your report may be meant for the consumption of your boss, your colleagues, or your subordinates. Treat them as your users. Think about what they would use your report for. Then decide what is the most effective way you can prepare the report to make their lives easy. Does it make sense to add a bulleted summary to a detailed report? Perhaps yes - if your users include not just other people in your department who need to know all the nitty-gritty, but also stakeholders in other departments and the senior management. Because they need to know how the contents of the report impacts them, but don't need or want to get into all the details. Does it make sense to report the data in a table or in a graph? If you know that the intended user of your report has a preference for one over the other, use that. If there are multiple users and including both formats has no major downsides, include them both.

This principle can be applied to improving the effectiveness of anything you do at work. Are you sending an industry report to your colleagues? Can you summarize some salient points you think are important? Can you highlight them in the report? If you are using WhatsApp for work communication, as so many people are doing these days, can you perhaps post screenshots of the relevant portions of the report directly in the chat, instead of expecting them to download a PDF and find it for themselves? 

Are you asking for your boss' approval for an expense? Is it something they have to regularly approve? Then tell them if something is different from the last time which they should particularly look at. Give the context for the difference. If nothing is different, mention that this is exactly what they had approved the last time.

Are you forwarding a long email to someone "just FYI"? Don't just write FYI in the body. Give a two-sentence summary of why that information is important to them. Perhaps even paste the most relevant extract from the long chain for them to look at quickly.

Are you sending three designs to a colleague to choose from? Include not just the designs, but also your thought process behind them. Mention what are the pros and cons of each one of them. Ease their decision-making.

Sometimes this may even mean questioning if you should be doing exactly what you are asked to do. Do you know the purpose of the person when they assigned you a task? Would your doing that help them achieve that purpose? Or should you be doing something different? If you should be, get back to them with your rationale and proposal.

Even the most mundane task you can think of can become more effective if you do it keeping the user in mind. And doing things right can bring immense job satisfaction.

So, don't forget to ask this the next time? Is the task you just finished doing the best job of making someone's life easier? If so, congratulations! You have been professionally very effective.

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Photo by kate.sade on Unsplash