How taking on a job shadower can help your own career

As part of a project with the local chapter of IABC, I recently invited a graduate student in communications to my office for a week of job shadowing. Before he arrived, I was patting myself on the back for offering such a great career opportunity to someone just starting out. What I wasn’t prepared for was how the experience would be a career opportunity for myself.

To make the shadowing exercise work well, I had to do some advance preparation. I had to plan out a week of activities for him, and set out concrete tasks that could be done within a week’s time. This was an excellent reminder of how useful structure can be: normally, my team members operate very independently and this works well, but the potential downside of very-independent team members is that there is a risk that they can feel “abandoned” by their team leader.

Furthermore, I had some of my team members oversee some of my shadow’s smaller projects, who in turn got a level of input from me that they don’t always get, combined with some practical experience in supervising.

Taking on a job shadower turned out to be an opportunity to revisit my own work habits - both positive and negative.

I left a good portion of time available for pure shadowing: to allow him to look over my shoulder and see how I managed my daily work flow. How did I deal with the incoming fire-hose of emails? How did I transform vague suggestions into concrete actions? How did I determine what was a priority and what not to respond to? How did I treat incoming sales calls (politely, quickly, and unambiguously)? In the process of explaining to my shadow why I made these hundreds of micro-decisions, I came to the unhappy realization that in many cases, they were not conscious choices. But through this dialogue, I was able to examine a number of my bad work habits, and come up with a personal reform plan to address a number of these issues.

For example, even though I am in communications, it’s not an easy task to get across the complexities of a global, B2B company whose products are used in almost all industries. Having an outsider at hand forced me to put myself in the shoes of our stakeholders and explain sophisticated concepts about the chemical business in clear, direct language.

My shadow had to sign a comprehensive non-disclosure agreement, just as he would in any ordinary job contract, to ensure that he would not be stuck in a meeting room for a week reading publicly disclosed information from our annual report. This was also a great chance to reinforce to my team the different information security levels we have at the company – how to treat internal, confidential, and strictly confidential information.

One final, unexpected result was productivity. Having to constantly set a good example was a great way to remind myself not to waste time!

After this very rewarding week, I would highly recommend to team leaders like myself that they take on a “shadow”. I’m also interested in the potential of this technique for people in other roles: aspiring leadership candidates, salespeople, higher-level leaders. What could your shadow teach you?