Sitting Simply and Getting Monthly?

Every month when I get my salary in the last week, I ask myself a question - "What did I do to earn this?" And then many of the following questions arise.?

Did I create any business impact?

Can you create a business impact while you are one of the 20,000 employees? Recently, when I visited my headquarters, I realized my company was huge. That made me nervous, and I got assured that whatever I do is of a tiny scale and can never create any business impact. When I met leadership teams, I realized that whatever we do, however small, always adds to a bigger dream. My company is an agriculture company that works towards feeding the world. As a passionate programmer who currently writes scripts in R, I always wonder if a small R script can help you feed the world. The answer, of course, is – “most probably not”, but it can become a part of a bigger framework that can help us decide on genes to try out in the field, resulting in a better yield. That script may have a small role in feeding the world, but eventually, someday, it would become a part of a revolution to remove hunger from the world. It’s the impact that matters, not the amount of work.

Did I propagate my company's culture?

One of the differences between the two companies is culture. There could be good or bad culture, but every company always has some culture. The first question is whether I am convinced of the company's culture. If not, why am I here? I don't fit here. Shouldn't I be somewhere else? But if I don't find it right, can I change it? Can I be the change-maker? Being a change maker is always a challenge but possible. Now, even if I like the culture, did I do something to propagate it to my colleagues? One of the cultures in my company is safety. Yes, you heard it right. It is a culture. Only other company that I heard of having safety as the most crucial thing is IBM. There could be many more companies that consider safety as one of the biggest priorities. We start most of our meetings with something related to safety, be it safety announcements or ways to make life safer. Everybody does their bit to propagate this culture to the whole company and mostly even outside the company. For example, I contribute to a?blog?where we report safety issues occurring in our daily life and precautions to take and raise awareness. It may still not make my country the safest country in the world, but hopefully, it will create more awareness in our society and creating awareness is the most crucial step towards safety.

Did I learn something new?

At the job, every day is learning in itself, but some "experiences" add value to your company. Recently I taught R to one of my colleagues. After a few months of learning and dedicated effort, he became quite an expert in R. One day, he made a bold statement in front of me that now he knows R, so I have become redundant. I smiled and kept working on my laptop without showing any sign of disturbance. He got disturbed and asked me why I didn't feel insecure. I asked him a similar question, "I have been working with you for more than a year, and you have been very nice to teach me a lot of biological stuff. Do you ever think that I could replace you as a biologist?" He said, "No". I said, "Exactly." There are certain things that come by experience only. And at the same time, when I was teaching you essential R, I also kept learning more advanced techniques in R. Therefore, in the process, I kept upgrading myself every quarter. I remember one of the best things my youngest brother told me once. He works in an IT company and earns much more than I do. I asked him once that with this pace, one day he might make double of my salary. Doesn't he feel pride (in a negative sense) in that? He told me a simple thing that touched my heart and that I can never forget. He said, "Brother, I can never attain your age even if I start earning 10 times your salary one day." And what he meant by age was a real-life experience.

During Operations Research class, one professor at IIM, Bangalore, told us that experience is a non-moving inventory. And everybody, including me, was pretty shocked. And he clarified that if you keep doing the same thing for years, it doesn't add anything to your experience. It only becomes a non-moving inventory which is a burden for any company. If you haven't up-skilled yourself for a long time, then it may be high time you think about acquiring new skills; otherwise, you will be making yourself a non-moving inventory. And you know that non-moving inventory is a sunk cost for any company. Don't wait until your company starts recovering the sunk cost by selling your experience at a throwaway price.

Did I mentor someone?

There could be nothing more satisfying than mentoring. I always wondered how parents spend many meaningful years bringing up their kids. But later, I realized that seeing your kids grow (physically, mentally, emotionally or intellectually) is a heavenly feeling, probably indescribable. Similarly, the day you find happiness in seeing your colleagues grow, you will start finding success. When your team succeeds, it automatically becomes a part of your success, provided you have done your part of mentoring. Investing in people is always one of the best investments you can make. However, it is a different investment that doesn't multiply but adds up. Try to find out whether you can help your colleague in any possible way. One of my colleagues in Spain always used to wonder about programming. One day he told me how fascinating he finds programming and the people who do programming. He was a pure experimental biologist and felt he couldn't learn programming. I also felt the same, but one thing that always excites most people like us, i.e. engineers, is the word "impossible". One of the positive things which helped me was his desire to learn, and with a strong desire, nothing is unachievable. So the first thing was to pick a programming language, and what better than Perl? as it was biologists' favourite programming language. He picked it up quickly and later learned the most advanced things, such as CGI in Perl and connecting to MySQL RDBMS using DBI in Perl. He also wrote an article related to a database that used CGI in Perl for a web-based interface, MySQL for a relational database and LaTeX for typesetting. It was published in the best bioinformatics journal in the world.

Did I give or take feedback?

One of my colleagues must have told me hundreds of good things the whole year. He had appreciated me in front of the entire company multiple times. At the end of the year, as a formal process, I asked him to write feedback about me so I could pass it on to my manager. And to my surprise, he gave me negative (some people call it constructive) feedback; of course, after many positive comments about me. He thought I didn’t give enough importance to short-term business goals (read low-hanging fruits). Negative feedback always hurts, but how could I forget those hundreds of good things? If someone gives me a negative comment after hundreds of positive comments, can I afford to ignore him? Absolutely not! When I thought about it carefully, I felt he was right, so the following year, I took even smaller tasks quite seriously and won me a couple of awards. Another colleague told me that I was not agile at all. Anyone who has worked with me for even a few months will realize how agile I am, so it was a complete shock to hear this from her. So I approached her and wanted to know what could be the reason. One of the reasons was that I favoured web-based project management tools instead of stand-alone project management tools. She thought I was good at one tool, and I didn’t want to learn any new tool, which was wrong. My approach of choosing a web-based tool was completely rational. It is essential to discuss and understand those negative comments. Sometimes those could be personal opinions, and it may be worthwhile to ignore them.

Did I appreciate people?

Every week, month or quarter, you receive help from many people in your organization. You may need to realize that everything counts as far as your success is concerned. Think about people who contributed to your success or failure because it tells you what you shouldn't have done. Who were your partners in your success? One of my companies used "Thank You" notes where you give a token of appreciation to the person you want to thank, mentioning the reason. The other company provided Focused Recognition to people who showed certain traits to impact business deliverables. It may not require thank you notes or focused recognition, etc., all the time; an appreciation could be in any form. Appreciating someone orally for his contribution also works many times. The most important thing is whether you feel thankful to someone and consider them a part of your success. Last year when I automated one of the processes to save hundreds of hours for a customer, the customer challenged the algorithm. He even came with test data showing that the results were wrong. He had already helped me identify a few minor bugs, so I didn't want to take him lightly. It took me some time to find out that there was an issue with his approach. He did not consider one of the conditions, so the results were different. Though it could be regarded as one of the rarest opportunities where your customer is wrong, he was courageous in telling me that automation was implemented wrongly. I liked how he executed all the steps and prepared test data. I appreciated him a lot for his daring to challenge me and gave him a token of appreciation. You may demotivate your colleagues or customers for their mistakes or failures, but then they may not be honest with you next time.

Most of these questions disturb me every month, but if none of the answers to the above questions is yes, then I don't deserve my salary and may be sitting simply and getting monthly.

So next time you get your salary, ask yourself, "Am I sitting simply and getting monthly?" And if your answer is yes, you need to think about it.

Disclaimer: Opinions expressed are solely my own and do not express the views or opinions of my current or previous employers.

PS: Thanks to Lakshman Teja G. for motivating me to write my first article on LinkedIn.