Moving away from "Give me work, I will do it..."?
Dear Friends,
Greetings!
Hearty welcome to my new blog. This is the first post written on this blog!
Few days back, at my workplace, during tea break I got into an informal conversation with my colleague Ritesh (name changed). During the conversation Ritesh started discussing about his performance review meeting, He was not happy with his appraisal because his manager had felt the former had not contributed anything additional to the assigned work. As per Ritesh's argument, he had completed all the assigned tasks well ahead of time and was waiting for the work to be assigned from his manager. He quoted "Without someone giving me work how I could I do? Give me work, I will do it better than anyone. Last year for the same work I had got better performance rating".
I believe some of you might have come across such conversations or situations. What do you think? Is Ritesh's concern valid? Or is Ritesh's manager demanding something unreasonable? In normal circumstances, one may choose to advocate for Ritesh. After all there should be some work and it needs to be done. If the work is in new area and involves special and niche skills, the argument holds perfectly good as there might be very few persons who could do that work and the argument becomes even more valid if the work requires too much of time and effort to get a chance to do some additional work. But as the time progresses, the same work might get familiar and easier with addition of newer techniques to get it done. Also there might be more and more persons emerging who could do the same work. And this is an usual thing in the ever changing competitive world. The same work which was unique few years back could become a routine job. The skill set of person who is doing the job might get downgraded from special to normal. Though the person still can do the same work efficiently and finish it well ahead of time, his/her performance on that work will be regarded as "Met Expectations" or "Average". This might have been the case with Ritesh also where he might have done his work efficiently and well ahead of time but the work had become a routine one. Also he has not shown any pro-activeness in getting more work, he was simply waiting for the work to be assigned.
The world is getting more and more competitive. Waiting for the work to be assigned, and completing the assigned work efficiently has become an old order. The attitude of waiting for the work to be assigned is termed as "Order taking" and persons like Ritesh are called "Order takers". The importance given to an "Order taker" in the new world is very less. This is the time to go beyond "Order taking". The current trend is to come up with new ideas or look for newer opportunities in the existing setup itself. The order of the day is - Persons like Ritesh (including humble self also) need to be on toes always and look to explore newer and useful things (process or techniques or alternate ways of doing work) in the work they are doing. Not only that, they need to learn to articulate their findings in a manner which will be useful and convincing for the stakeholder they are working for. The usefulness of the new finding could be small but it should be incremental. And this is not a one time activity, the process of exploring, articulating and executing new ideas needs to be repeated or iterated again and again and slowly it should become a working way of every Ritesh. It will help transforming Ritesh from "Order taker" to "Innovator". I believe there is no need to explain on how innovators always holding edge in all walks of life. Similarly Ritesh also will hold an edge every time and call his shots whenever he gets into his appraisal discussion.
So it is time to move away from "Order taker" attitude to become an "Innovator".
Thank you for reading. Please feel free to post your comments on the article which will help me improve and innovate in my writing skills :).
Regards,
Chetan
Greetings!
Hearty welcome to my new blog. This is the first post written on this blog!
Few days back, at my workplace, during tea break I got into an informal conversation with my colleague Ritesh (name changed). During the conversation Ritesh started discussing about his performance review meeting, He was not happy with his appraisal because his manager had felt the former had not contributed anything additional to the assigned work. As per Ritesh's argument, he had completed all the assigned tasks well ahead of time and was waiting for the work to be assigned from his manager. He quoted "Without someone giving me work how I could I do? Give me work, I will do it better than anyone. Last year for the same work I had got better performance rating".
I believe some of you might have come across such conversations or situations. What do you think? Is Ritesh's concern valid? Or is Ritesh's manager demanding something unreasonable? In normal circumstances, one may choose to advocate for Ritesh. After all there should be some work and it needs to be done. If the work is in new area and involves special and niche skills, the argument holds perfectly good as there might be very few persons who could do that work and the argument becomes even more valid if the work requires too much of time and effort to get a chance to do some additional work. But as the time progresses, the same work might get familiar and easier with addition of newer techniques to get it done. Also there might be more and more persons emerging who could do the same work. And this is an usual thing in the ever changing competitive world. The same work which was unique few years back could become a routine job. The skill set of person who is doing the job might get downgraded from special to normal. Though the person still can do the same work efficiently and finish it well ahead of time, his/her performance on that work will be regarded as "Met Expectations" or "Average". This might have been the case with Ritesh also where he might have done his work efficiently and well ahead of time but the work had become a routine one. Also he has not shown any pro-activeness in getting more work, he was simply waiting for the work to be assigned.
The world is getting more and more competitive. Waiting for the work to be assigned, and completing the assigned work efficiently has become an old order. The attitude of waiting for the work to be assigned is termed as "Order taking" and persons like Ritesh are called "Order takers". The importance given to an "Order taker" in the new world is very less. This is the time to go beyond "Order taking". The current trend is to come up with new ideas or look for newer opportunities in the existing setup itself. The order of the day is - Persons like Ritesh (including humble self also) need to be on toes always and look to explore newer and useful things (process or techniques or alternate ways of doing work) in the work they are doing. Not only that, they need to learn to articulate their findings in a manner which will be useful and convincing for the stakeholder they are working for. The usefulness of the new finding could be small but it should be incremental. And this is not a one time activity, the process of exploring, articulating and executing new ideas needs to be repeated or iterated again and again and slowly it should become a working way of every Ritesh. It will help transforming Ritesh from "Order taker" to "Innovator". I believe there is no need to explain on how innovators always holding edge in all walks of life. Similarly Ritesh also will hold an edge every time and call his shots whenever he gets into his appraisal discussion.
So it is time to move away from "Order taker" attitude to become an "Innovator".
Thank you for reading. Please feel free to post your comments on the article which will help me improve and innovate in my writing skills :).
Regards,
Chetan
Comments
Post a Comment