Avril David

Avril David, Contributor

2/04/2010 @ 3:51PM

The Three Qualities You Need To Get Ahead At Work

In my article “How to Rise Fast at Work” I told the true story of two first-year analysts at a small investment firm who took vastly different approaches to getting ahead at the job, with vastly different results. Mark focused on learning about his organization from top to bottom, helping to bring about meaningful change wherever he could and developing his skills beyond what his job required so he could address needs he discovered at the organization. Ted, meanwhile, concentrated on doing his work faster than others, speaking regularly to important people in senior management and making himself and his abilities known at every available opportunity. Mark shot ahead; Ted languished.

Mark and Ted’s stories confirm that competence at one’s assigned tasks is hardly all it takes to achieve success and become a leader. Mark and Ted are both very bright, but Ted chose to put all his energy into being competent–that virtue we spend 12, 16 or even more years learning in school. Do your homework, study hard for the test and get an A. Mark displayed not only competence but also right attitude and high potential. His experience shows how you need three essential characteristics–I call them “CAP,” for competence, attitude and potential–to rise within an organization. You need much broader strengths than just competence alone.

Let me explain what I mean. First I’ll discuss attitude, then potential. What exactly is the right attitude? It can’t be measured, but you can see it clearly through the lens of what is called emotional intelligence.

According to Daniel Goleman, the author of Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ, emotional intelligence is the ability to “motivate oneself and persist in the face of frustrations; to control impulse and delay gratification; to regulate one’s moods and keep distress from swamping the ability to think; to empathize and to hope.” In other words, it’s the ability to maintain a positive attitude and emotional control in the face of what life throws at you. Mark showed plenty of this kind of intelligence in his brushing off of snide comments from colleagues. Goleman argues that intellectual ability, or competence, can’t by itself predict success. Intellectual ability plus emotional intelligence is what it takes. Failure to manage your emotions appropriately can both stunt your ability to learn and impede your ability to make use of what you do learn.

What I call potential is a matter not of emotional intelligence but of what you could call organizational intelligence, meaning understanding the moving parts within an organization and being able to function at peak capacity across a variety of organizational settings. It means comprehending the knowledge chain of information in the organization, people’s roles and responsibilities, how they get their jobs done and the organization’s overall mission and goals. Having a deep understanding of your organization as well as your place within it enables you to identify gaps between its goals and reality, so you can work to help it reach those goals. In so doing, you usually develop new skills and responsibilities that make you a more valuable employee and better positioned for career advancement.

Here is another true story, from the health care field. After 20 years as a registered nurse Abbey (whose name I’ve changed) began to get bored. She didn’t want to commit the time or resources to go back to school to receive another medical degree, but she did want to take on more authority at her hospital. She wanted to get ahead, but she didn’t want to play all the organizational politics it might take. She liked most of her co-workers, and she didn’t want to put others down as she rose up. Essentially, she just wanted to feel more valuable to her organization.

Abbey began to consider ways she could make herself a greater asset to her hospital. Two obvious simple answers: Try to do her existing work better and faster, and take on more work from her co-workers. The former might be possible, since she did have high confidence in her abilities as a nurse, but given the youth of some of the newest nurses, she imagined they could be faster on their feet. As for the latter option, she had absolutely no desire to simply spend more hours at the same work, especially if it meant taking away duties from her co-workers. She didn’t want to step on their toes or overwork herself. She simply wanted to be more valuable.

Instead, she decided she would try to find ways to help the hospital run better. As a nurse herself, she figured she would start with the nurses. She began to research training courses for nurses, figuring they could be useful for all the nurses. She launched an effort to get every nurse to take one new class every other month. On the off months, the nurses could hold discussion sessions about the classes they had taken and talk about how the classes could help them improve their day-to-day work.

Proud of her idea, she decided to run it by the other nurses once she had collected a list of training courses, their prices and the potential benefits. The nurses liked it all and thanked her for consulting them before taking the idea to management. Management then went for it too and asked her to get it going and organize groups of nurses for the training sessions. Suddenly she was in charge of her own initiative, something that had never happened before in her 20-year career.

As a result of the training sessions Abbey organized, nurses became more skilled and the hospital as a whole gained a better reputation. Better nursing meant the doctors could do their jobs better, too, so productivity and quality of care increased even further. Abbey gained recognition from superiors and found herself not only an invaluable member of the nursing staff but also a potential asset to any other hospital, with her newfound expertise.

Let’s examine what Abbey did right, according to the CAP way of looking at it.

Competence: With 20 some years of experience, she knew what she was doing as a nurse. She also knew that there were likely things that she and possibly the other nurses didn’t know since leaving nursing school. The new training courses complemented her existing experience and enhanced her overall competence at her job.

Attitude: Once she recognized where she could improve her skills, she worked adeptly with others to make her goals for herself and the hospital a reality. This willingness to reach out to others and to act on her desires exemplified a healthy attitude and strong emotional intelligence.

Potential: Before acting on those desires, she first identified what could be improved and worked out a plan based on her organizational intelligence. She needed to understand what management and the other nurses would need to know, such as costs and timing and so on, before they’d give her the go-ahead to execute her plans and achieve the success that she did.

Abbey brought together the elements of CAP–competence, attitude and potential–to rise fast at work. Her competence came from her years of experience and her new training; her attitude revealed itself in her willingness to recognize areas for improvement in herself an others; her potential emerged as she identified needed changes at the hospital and navigated within the organization to bring about those changes. The end result of it all was a promotion to floor manager and an overall increase in the quality of care for the hospital’s patients.

Abbey’s story shows yet again that you can rise fast at work by creating new value instead of fighting for it and by becoming invaluable to your organization instead of just trying to win.

Avril David is an energy and environment analyst for Project Performance Corporation, a global management consulting firm, and a freelance writer on topics related to careers, energy, climate policy and green business.

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