Your technical ability and experience do not equate to your impact. Impact is composed of two main elements: effectiveness & efficiency.
The more important and first component of impact is effectiveness. Effectiveness is working on the right things. This is critical approach to work involves a conscious alignment to your core objectives, and understanding of where your efforts can have the most substantial impact. Start this approach by asking yourself the following questions:
- What are your customers talking about? Customers are the backbone of any business, and their satisfaction is key. Their conversations, complaints, and commendations are invaluable in indicating what needs immediate attention, what can be improved, or what is working perfectly. Understanding their needs and expectations not only guides you to work effectively but also improves your service delivery, thereby boosting customer satisfaction and loyalty.
- What is your CIO/CTO talking about? Your company's technical leaders often have a broad perspective on the organization's goals and the strategic approach to achieve them. Listen to their concerns, their vision, their priorities. Aligning your tasks with their discourse can greatly enhance the relevance and impact of your work.
- What is your industry talking about? Stay updated with industry trends, disruptive technologies, or best practices. Are there new regulations, emerging markets, or technological advancements that your industry peers are discussing? Keeping your finger on the pulse of industry chatter helps ensure that your work remains relevant, competitive, and innovative.
By constantly exploring answers to these questions, you can effectively align your efforts to customer needs, corporate strategy, and industry trends. This will not only ensure you are working on the right things, but also increase your overall effectiveness of your work.
The second component of impact is efficiency. Efficiency is working on things the right way. Optimizing how your team/company work can save time, resources, and can lead to higher-quality output. By improving the work processes, your team/company can do more with less while also reducing stress and creating more opportunities for innovation and growth. Start by examining the following key areas:
- What's holding your customer back? Investigate the obstacles and pain points your customers encounter. Are there frequent complaints about a particular product feature? Or perhaps there's a service that isn't meeting their expectations? By identifying these obstacles, you can streamline your work to address these areas, enhancing efficiency and simultaneously increasing customer satisfaction.
- What's holding my team/company back? In the realm of internal operations, inefficiencies often arise from outdated processes, poor communication, or misaligned goals. Evaluate your current practices critically. Where are bottlenecks or delays most common? By finding the answers, you can work to improve those processes, fostering better cooperation, increasing productivity, and ultimately driving your team or company forward more efficiently.
- What's holding me back? Self-reflection is a critical component of personal efficiency. Are there tasks that take you much longer than they should? Do you struggle with procrastination or time management? Identifying your personal obstacles can help you implement strategies to overcome them, whether that's better organization, further training, or simply delegating tasks that aren't suited to your skills. Notice that in the introduction paragraph the focus on efficiency is focused on the company or team. This is critical senior engineer's scope is at this level so be thinking of how these self-improvements will flow to the team.
By answering these questions, you can identify the roadblocks in your path, helping you to focus on "working on things the right way". Optimizing the efficiency of your work is not a one-time event but an ongoing process of reflection, revision, and continuous improvement.
You may have noticed the pattern of customer to company to yourself when determining how to increase both effectiveness and efficiency. This isn't an coincidence. Oddly enough the best way to increase your impact is to focus your attention outward not inward. If you can elevate your customer, team and company then you are on the way up! To do this requires you to break out of the normal routine and be (at times) uncomfortable.
