What is Your Contribution?

“Contribution is the product of what grows when you’re gone” – Tom Rath

Recently, I wrote about a conversation I had with Tom Rath, the New York Times bestselling author of How Full is Your Bucket and Amazon's top selling non-fiction book of all time StrengthsFinder 2.0 on my Disrupt Yourself podcast. 

We talked about how, perhaps, the best way to climb the S curve is to discover how you can best contribute. I wanted to go further into that conversation today. 

In Tom’s latest book, Life’s Great Question, he asserts that we should spend more time thinking about what the world around us needs and how our strengths might be used to benefit others, rather than how we can pursue our own passion or find our purpose. He suggests we start by taking a good look at the world around you. What does your family need? What does your community need? What do your customers need? What problems are they facing? 

If that is too daunting, then you may want to start small. Each morning since I interviewed Tom, I’ve been asking myself, “How can I contribute today?” It’s a great question—and one that is helping me show up differently.

Not only is questioning how you can contribute in alignment with how to best serve the world, it also makes a lot of sense from a personal disruption perspective. This way of thinking employs the first two accelerants on the seven-point Framework for Personal Disruption?, take the right risks and play to your distinctive strengths. 

First, there are two types of risk, competitive risk and market risk. Instead of taking on competitive risk (head-to-head competition), disruptors take market risk. Market risk is assumed when someone takes on a task or job that needs to be done that no one else is doing, it is a response to an unmet need. When you start with the needs of the world, you inherently align yourself with taking a market risk. 

Second, play to your distinctive strengths means that by pairing your unique strengths with problems and needs, you can generate the needed momentum to move up the S-curve. Identifying the need is only half the equation, a clear understanding of the strengths you bring to the table is equally as important. Sounds a lot like identifying how you can contribute, doesn’t it?

In addition to being a key to personal disruption, a contribution mindset will significantly enhance the effectiveness of a team. What if, instead of jumping right into a project or a job, teams took the time to say, “Here is who I am. Here are the experiences that have influenced me. Here is how I think I can uniquely contribute to what this team needs to get done." Too often, we run into a challenge or problem on a project and realize we should have better understood our new roles on the team earlier. We should have stopped to make sure someone was operating and executing, someone was building stronger relationships, and someone was anchoring us to a vision. 

So, how do we put this into action in our own work and teams? Aside from taking time to reflect on our distinctive strengths, Tom created an assessment to help us understand not only what the world needs, but also how we might contribute to a given team or project. In order to determine the needs of the world, he looked at thousands of job descriptions and tried to identify 50-100 things that people do that are valued in our society. From there, he narrowed it to 12 specific contributions that fall into three categories: create, relate, and operate.

I was intrigued by how Tom codified the different ways we contribute - create, relate, and operate - and how those come into play depending on the team we are on. Tom shared that, of the three, he would encourage leadership to spend more time focused on relate. Based on his experience and research, there is nothing “that creates more speed and energy and engagement among the team than if that team has a really strong increase in relationships.” Hearing this, coupled with the knowledge that we tend to underestimate the relate area, has made me wonder how I can leverage my strengths of empathy and relating with my own team.  

On a macro level, to live a life of contribution is to live a life of meaning. As Tom so beautifully stated at the end of our conversation, “When you orient your day toward the contribution you make to the life of another human being, it just makes everything easier and less stressful as you move through a really busy world today.” 

How will you contribute today? 

What are your strengths, and how do they align with what the world needs?