Attitude for Growth

I see a lot of people in the team are clueless about how to grow in the team. I have created this blog to guide people on how to grow their career in MyOperator, it should apply to other companies too. This is a guide to a different perception that I practiced over the years and has been working for me. Most of the things here I have learned by experience, experimentation, and reading a lot. I hope this helps people in developing their careers.

1. Choose Skills to Develop

Learning is a lifelong process and there are thousands of things that you can learn related to your career. But if you learn things that are not related to the profile you are currently working on, you will not get a chance to practice it and your hard-learned skill will be forgotten. Try to pick things that your team needs, discuss this with your manager and team. If you find something that you like, learn it and surely you will get a good chance to practice it.

For example, if you already know React JS, don’t go deep into Angular JS or Vue JS get a basic understanding of architecture and functionality, but don’t spend much time. There are other important skills, which are very important to grow your career like writing skills, unit testing, performance optimizations, etc. Understand which skills are required in the team and company, learn them.

Alternatively, if you are very early in your career or you cannot find anything to learn in a team, don’t sit idle, learn anything. Also, keep building your old strengths.

2. Communicate Better

The most underrated skill and the reason behind 90% of the problems in the team/company is communication. If you dig deep, the real reason behind most of the problems is either miscommunication or no communication. Do this, try to think of any problem you had recently with the team, and imagine what you should have communicated to avoid this problem, you will surely find a way to better communicate, try to use it in the future.

How and what to communicate is also a skill that needs learning and practice. As a team member, you can do two things to make communication within the team better.

First, improve your skills to communicate better. Take your time but try to communicate in a way that everyone could understand easily, whether it is verbal, chat, emails, documentation. improve all those in the same way.

The second part is to help the team get better by participating in feedbacks and discussions. Give your honest opinion and discuss issues with processes, systems, architecture, teams, etc. Give your opinion and suggestions even when they are not taken seriously, get information where your suggestions are lacking, improve them as a skill going forward.

3. Think Ahead, Think Deep

Dedicated time should be spent digging into problems that you and your team are working on. Do some digging in understanding the problem, talk to people or go through some data to get more information and clarity on the problem. Think ahead of the problem, plan your meetings before they happen, visualize doing your work before you start working on it. Try to find problems and loopholes way ahead of the implementation phase.

If you continue working shallowly, there is a good chance you will get bored doing the same thing over and over. Dig into architecture and processes on how to make them better. Work gets interesting when done with deep involvement and you will also get the joy of implementing a new thing in your team or project.

4. Be Visible

If a team is big, it is important to make your work visible. You should look for the opportunity to make yourself visible, the best way to do it is by showing your work, give it to other people for feedback, highlighting the problems, making suggestions in the meetings, getting involved in team discussions, etc. Remember, Humans have the tendency to favor the known.

Don’t hide behind your manager, your manager’s responsibility is to push you in the right direction. Observe if you are given the credit for your work or not. If you do not feel well about something, communicate with your manager.

5. Stay Humble, Honest, Helpful

Opinions given aggressively will never get good feedback or it may get rejected by the ego of other people. You should be humble about your opinions, don’t ignore people’s opinions with a straightforward reply, first try to think from their perspective, what they are trying to communicate, ask questions to understand their perspective. If you think a discussion is getting heated up, try to diffuse the situation by cracking jokes, or asking people to calm down. If you made a mistake, admit it, think why u did it, try not doing it again.

Being honest is hard, but they are the first people to be rewarded. The team does not need “yes man” people, a great team needs problem solvers, who can find problems and provide solutions. Help other people in the team to solve their problems, this will help you build a reputation in the team.

6. Finish the Job

If you pick a task or initiative, take it to the end and finish it on time. Not finishing up what you started will badly hurt your reputation, this might create problems in getting high-value projects in the future or may affect your opportunity to grow your career. If somehow, you don’t feel the project is not worth your time, discuss this with your manager and he might transfer it to others.

When picking an initiative, think if you have time to finish it. Don’t pick it if you can’t finish. Picking things is easy, but the execution and effort required in taking it to the finish might be very different.

Think of yourself as a product

While writing this blog I realized each one of the sections here will help make you a product.

A product provides a solution to customers’ problems, and you as a product provide your skills to solve team/company problems.

A product can be improved by doing research, improving solutions, improving user feedback, building a reputation, etc. A product makes itself visible through marketing. The same principles can be applied if you think of yourself as a product. Always, Remember, building a product takes time.

Above points in product perspective

Choose skills to develop ( Research )

Communicate problems (User interactions, Feedbacks)

Think ahead, think deep ( Developing a Solution )

Be visible ( Marketing)

Stay humble and helpful ( Buiding Reputation )

Finish what you started ( Developing a Solution )

Please feel free to give feedback, suggestions on improving this article.