Are You An Overachiever?

Overachieving increases your influence; underachieving decreases your influence

By going that extra mile and putting in that bit more effort, you will overachieve. When you overachieve, these things get noticed. Hence, you get noticed.

A lot of people don’t think that they should take pride in their work because it is “only a job” or they’re “being paid”. The fact that you are being paid to do the job should fill you with more pride than if you were not being paid.

When you take pride in doing the best work you can, it shows your boss and your team mates that what you’re doing is “important to you”. It also builds trust and increases your influence.

By increasing your influence through overachieving, this says to people that you are valuable, and that you value the work that you are doing. Remember that you don’t work for your boss, you work for yourself?

Well, overachieving can definitely increase your marketing with people spreading the word about your overachievements.

Even if you are not too happy with how you or the team are being treated, don’t let it bother you. Your motivation is to increase your influence through working for yourself.

Taking pride in your work and overachieving will reflect the quality of work you do, and also your character. Being driven to add value to the team by overachieving, and taking pride in your work reflects who you are.

To help your team overachieve too, you must first work on developing yourself, and help your boss.

You can do this by recommending improvements to the current ways that the team work. Or, you can recommend improvements to the current processes that the team follows.

You will be well on your way to becoming an excellent team member, and not an average team member like we discussed earlier. Basically, you will become the leader within your team, even though you are not in the leadership position.

After a period of time, your overachievements will become the new standard for everybody else to meet. Then, because the standards have altered, so will the processes that your team and all the other teams in your department follow.

When improving processes in any department, it’s a huge change. Most of the organisations I have worked in actually expect process improvement from the team members, but it’s rare that it actually comes from them.

It usually comes from consultants that have been hired in. An excellent team member is more than capable of improving the working processes. This could be you, and you can set the new standard.

All the best,

Tom Lawrence (Highly Effective Leader)