Do You Have a Superpower at Work?
What type of work are you uniquely suited to do? Sometimes they are so effortless that you may think of it as play.
I hit my 90-day mark at MasterClass today.
I wanted to share a conversation with Charlene (who loves the Socratic method) and a consultation with my inner voice to make it fun.
Enjoy!
Philosopher: How do you like your new job?
Youth: I like it. I’ve learned a lot over the past 90 days, but I haven’t fully realized my potential at work.
Philosopher: Sounds like you’re not working in your genius zone.
Youth: What’s the genius zone?
Philosopher: It refers to the type of work you are uniquely suited to do and may find in your flow state. Sometimes they are so effortless that you may think of it as play. What is your superpower?
Youth: If I had to guess, it’d be something along the lines of logic, analytics, and optimization.
Philosopher: How does your current job relate to these areas?
Youth: I primarily focus on hiring and building high-performing teams. Arguably they can be framed as optimization problems (e.g., optimizing the hiring funnel and team processes). However, I don’t find them effortless. Maybe it’s due to the lack of a tight feedback loop or measurable data for teams and people. Perhaps it’s due to the limited number of hiring levers at my disposal. While I am solving critical problems, I feel that I may contribute more to growth-related work.
Philosopher: Then you should let your manager know. It’s your responsibility to ask for what you want.
Youth: Wouldn’t that make them uncomfortable? Should I tell them, “Hey, I don’t want to work on your team anymore?”
Philosopher: Not necessarily. How can you do growth-related work in your current role?
Youth: The mission of my org is to move our north star metric—renewal rate—through product development. Currently, we don’t have an efficient way to measure the cause-effect relationship for each feature. For our product, renewal happens once a year, which means that measuring the renewal lift from each feature launch will become a multi-year project. As a result, our features are developed based on judgment calls and other proxy metrics.
Philosopher: Measurement sounds like a high-leverage problem that you’d be interested in solving. What can you do about it?
Youth: It’s on the Data team’s radar, less of my engineering org’s focus. I have been working with the Data team to understand state of the art.
Philosopher: How can you help the Data team tackle this challenge?
Youth: I have been brainstorming with them. We have some excellent ideas, but it’s hard to get them prioritized on the engineering side. We are focused on new feature development at the moment.
Philosopher: It’s your job to help your org prioritize the right things. How can you influence the priorities?
Youth: Now that you asked, I realized this is a key growth area for me. I am proud of proposing new ideas, and it’s easy to get buy-in for ideas that match our exec’s mental models. However, I don’t know when and how to make controversial/unconventional ideas happen.
Philosopher: Sounds like a solid next step. How can you improve on that front?
Youth: Let me get advice from my mentors. I have a couple of sessions in the upcoming weeks. In the meantime, let me ask my manager and skip-level as well.
Have you ever experienced similar challenges at work?
Just hit reply or leave a comment. I would love to hear from you.