Becoming an Organizational Superstar

On her blog and in an “Information Week” column, author Penelope Trunk (The Brazen Careerist) offers five steps to being a workplace superstar. They are all very provocative ideas, with a helpful message in there somewhere between the lines (with the exception of “start a side business” — this may be good for your career and your life, but it won’t necessarily make you a superstar at work).

I’d like to suggest five additional ways to shine brightly in the workplace, particularly for twenty- and thirty-somethings, but also for anyone looking for a path to accomplishment, accolades, control over your life, and value:

1. Build Yourself. You cannot spend enough time seeking mastery of not only your technical skills, but your personality/behavioral/leadership skills as well. Find out how the most effective leaders you know behave and treat people, and work exceedingly hard to become just like them.

2. Build the People Around You. Do you make everyone around you great at what they do? Coach, teach, encourage — that’s what a true superstar does.

3. Never Take Any Job You Are Not Matched For — one whose problems and challenges you don’t have a deep passion for and enjoyment of. You will suck at it or, at best, be mediocre and waste precious time in your one turn at bat on this planet.

4. Fight for Margin. Margin is the space between your limits — physical, time, financial and emotional — and your life’s workload. Superstars have margin, lots of it. They have the energy to work hard, the time to think, the financial security to say “screw you” if need be, and the relationships that give support. Also, all the great things you will do in your career will flow from margin — building yourself, building other people, and building a business.

5. Be Truthful. The biggest enemy faced by senior executives and CEOs is that no one wants to tell them the truth. There are two types of people who are useless in the workplace: those that can’t (or won’t) tell the truth, and those that can’t (or won’t) listen to the truth. Want to be a superstar? Be someone your leaders can count on for frank and candid insight, advice and feedback, offered genuinely and without agenda.

Superstars are superstars because the things they are good at are very rare. My experience is that these five things are among the rarest behaviors in any organization.

The Sponge vs. The Hose

My job requires me to give people advice occasionally. Every so often, someone actually listens. I gave a group of managers this advice recently:

“Be a sponge, not a hose.” In other words:

• Stop spewing all over everyone around you. Stop trying to be heard, and instead try to understand. Be just a little less enamored with the sound of your own voice, and the beauty of your own opinions and ideas.

• Start absorbing, listening and learning. Ask questions; seek the truth — about yourself, your behavior, your environment, your customers, the world around you. Think, then speak. Attract and nourish talented, creative people; go out of your way to find people smarter than you. Figure out where the gaps are in your knowledge and skills, and get to work eliminating them.

In my experience, most managers are taught to be a “hose,” if you will. Daily managerial life can be a struggle for attention and affirmation, and against overload,  as well as a competition for scarce resources (material and psychological, like power, influence, titles). Generating attention and noise, and spraying a command-and-control attitude, then, are thought of as survival skills.

Truly great leadership goes beyond mere survival, doesn’t it? Mastery flows from clarity of purpose and mission and a form of humility that, paradoxically, grants you a quiet confidence that liberates you to listen, learn, and absorb.

The “hose” repels; the “sponge” attracts.

The “hose” belies an insecurity; the “sponge,” a confident pursuit of mastery.

Mastery: A Perspective

Leaders are able to improve the performance of their organizations when they grasp the concept of mastery. The best definition of mastery I’ve ever heard came from a man who has made mastery a fundamental responsibility of hundreds of thousands of leaders, Dr. Gerald Bell.

In an interesting interview with Guy Kawasaki about his new book, The Dip, marketing guru Seth Godin puts mastery in an interesting context when discussing whether or not to quit or stick with something:

“Mastery is an addiction. Most people never master anything and never experience the thrill of being on the other side of the Dip. As a result, they don’t seek out new opportunities for mastery. I hope that as parents, we can do a better job of teaching kids this habit.”

He’s correct, of course, but I wish he had done more than just skim the surface.

My guess Seth is talking about mastery in the context of a love of improving, of learning, and of pushing through a challenge or problem in order to do as well as is humanly possible — not be perfect — but to strive for excellence without being necessarily derailed by obstacles, disappointment, and so on.

Really effective people are highly focused on mastery for mastery’s sake; that’s why it’s an addiction, a reason unto itself.

Unfortunately, Seth then proceeds to kind of, sort of just breeze by the role of passion in mastery. It’s not the point of his book, I realize, but I wish he would have discussed passion, or love of a job, mission, challenge, etc., as crucial to mastery and, therefore, an important part of pushing through, around, or away from the Dip.