In my current company, there is a value that all employees are encouraged to pursue: Try to take ownership of something over our role. We are suggested not to limit our willingness and curiosity on our title & job description (what we get paid to do). We are free to offer our help for something not in our professional, with support & advice from experts in that matter.
When I heard this value in the onboarding session, my memory recalled a debate among postgraduates (including myself) about career development strategy: Should we always be willing to take works over our role to climb up the ladder in our career? In other words, should our over-role performance be grounds for our promotions or vice versa? This kind of “egg and chicken” debate question is a big concern for young employees every time they want to boost themselves for a raise.
Although there is no perfect answer for this question that suits everyone in every situation, I would say that this mindset should be taken into consideration when we want to build our career development plan. As my experience in my IT career, it’s especially important in fast-changing industries such as Software Engineering or Business.
So, why do we need to do extra work over our role to climb up the career ladder?
The answer is simple: We all get paid to perform our job well! So, simply completing our tasks is not grounds for promotions. As an employer, I would ask why I need to pay someone an extra just because that person has done “just good enough” what I expected him/her to do by receiving this payment?
Extra value added by our over-role performance would be a good answer to this question. It’s a concrete example to prove our worth, and to show to the managers how promoting us helps the organization. Would our new position with our new value help to bring more prosperity to the company? Would it help to reduce headcount, or increase our team/department efficiencies/performance?
If we want to convince someone, we need arguments. Extra-value is a good argument for the negotiation of promotion.
Wait, but should we always be willing to take ownership over our role?
My answer is NO. Willingness to do extra work is a good attitude, but ALWAYS be willing to do everything will destroy our career. It would turn you into a “people pleaser”, and it would completely eliminate our career development direction and strategy.
So, when and what kind of task should we take ownership over our role?
- Something could support our main profession: For instance, as a software engineer, I need to monitor our applications’ performance. This task requires data collecting and data analyzing skills. So, I took the task of creating a web performance report for our monthly deck meeting in my value stream. The task supports me to understand how well the system is and provides more insights for the improvement plan.
- Something could help to strengthen our knowledge: One thing of mine could be an example is when one of my colleagues in the Product Development team asked for help to collect some data for him because he was new in this domain. Although it’s not relevant to my work, I still felt comfortable helping him since I know the concept of this task and could write automation scripts to get the data instead of getting it manually. It helped me to sharpen my skills in using Python programming language, the one I used to write the script.
- Something could help the other teams/departments to boost up their efficiencies: It might sound weird, right? Why do I need to help the other teams to improve their performance? Would It help us boost up our own career? Yes, it would. Helping others to improve their performance could result in the development of the whole business. Our prosperity is tied to the wealth of the organization that we are working with. How could we expect the company to increase our salary if they even could not increase their revenue? So, in business relationships, helping others is helping ourselves. It’s a win-win situation.
- Last but not least, something could help us to broaden our social relationship: Helping people makes friends, in most cases (smile). We might not know that the one whom we help to get the necessary information today could introduce us to the CEO of our dream company in the future. So, why do we not offer our hand?
Hold on a second! So in what situations should we consider saying NO to take extra work?
- Something totally irrelevant to our role and out of our capabilities: Sometimes, do nothing is more helpful than messing everything up. If the task is not relevant to us and we are not qualified to do that, leave it for experienced people. We could learn if we felt interested in that domain, but it would be a bad idea to take ownership of what we are not capable of.
- Something repeating: It’s not a good idea to spend extra time/capacity to do repeating things, even if these tasks are in our role. Instead, we should spend time to figure out how to make it faster, or automate it.
- Something could be done better and faster by other individual contributors/teams: Don’t be fooled by the idea of an “ideal employee” who is always willing to do everything. We might make everything worse by doing something that we are not good at.
Okay! What if, after we have done everything we can to bring extra values over our roles, the organization still refused to recognize our contributions?
This is an interesting question! Actually, this is also a concern of a lot of young employees. Would our effort and time wasted in vain if the company refused to pay us for our extra value? I knew quite a number of people who have been blocked from starting to give more because of this fear.
Firstly, we should consider what values we have brought by doing extra works. It’s not about bringing more values. It’s also about aligning our values with the organization’s values. The company refused to give us a promotion not because they are greedy, but maybe because they don’t see the value they need. If our generated values do not match with what the company expected, there is no reason for them to share the outcome with us (via a promotion/salary increment).
In this case, understanding the company’s values and strategy is the most important thing we should take into account before building our career development. What we could take into action should align with this understanding.
Secondly, there is an ugly truth that some individuals or organizations are always want to maximize their income while trying to minimize as much as possible what they need to give in return to those who have brought prosperity to them. It’s hurt, but it’s a reality. We would expect to experience this situation at least once in our whole career.
So, what could we do to overcome this fear? I can say, from my experience, let’s consider the term “value” in more different meanings.
The most popular meaning of “value”, to most people, is money :). However, “values” could also be our experience, our knowledge, our social relationship, or even simply our sense of success. If the company refused to promote us, they only refused to pay us more money. We could still earn from taking ownership of tasks over our role in terms of experience, knowledge, and career opportunities. All of these outcomes could result in our money income in the future.
Experience and knowledge could help us to get better jobs. The social relationship could bring us new promising career opportunities. A good sense of success could strengthen our mental health, which is a very important factor that contributes to our health status. If we were not healthy, how could we earn money? How could we enjoy what money could bring, right?
If you are good at something, never do it for free — Joker
But the price is not only about money :)
Something to take away
- “Taking ownership on the task over our role” could be a strategy in our career development since it would increase our worth and help to prove our values to the organization.
- We should consider the balance of what we give and what we would get in return. Doing business is a win-win relationship. It makes sense if we give more at a moment, then expect to earn back later. But if we were always the one who gives everything and receives nothing, it could not be the case. Except for family, the one-way giving relationship is toxic.
- Don’t be confused between extra works over our roles and extra time to work. If we need extra time to complete our in-role tasks, it does not prove our values. It’s our problem of time and task management.
- Try not to step on the trap of being a “people pleaser”. Doing extra work over our role could be a good way to prove our developing values, but it could also lead people to misunderstand that we are the ones who could do everything. Let’s try to set a limit for what we are able and willing to do.
Happy working :)
