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To understand and improve your effectiveness, consultant Melissa Swift asks you to think of a two-storey house – your effectiveness architecture. On the ground floor are two capabilities: knowledge and methods. Above that, on the second floor, are people and technology.
“Your ground floor capability is most essential, and your second-floor capability helps you to do everything well,” she writes in Effective.
The ground floor ensures you properly know things and also have a systematic approach that knits everything in your work together. That includes being able to work with people and technology. Working with people, she says, helps you go far. Technology helps you to go quickly.
“If your strength is knowledge, you navigate each day differently than someone whose strength is technology – and your career will also play out differently, calling for you to make different moves. Understanding where you find challenges also gives you good clarity as to how others may perceive you,” she says.
While each of the four elements is important, she stresses you won’t be equally adept at each nor able to allocate limited time and energy evenly between them. A fine balance must also be found between being strong across the whole effectiveness architecture and leaning into your strength. In general, she recommends focusing on your strength but being aware of weaknesses.
For every kind of work, you need to know something. That knowledge, she advises, must not be static: “Part of really knowing things is knowing when and how things change, and having great mental systems in place to learn more and build your understanding further.”
To get a handle on your knowledge, she recommends dividing a sheet of paper into four sections. Going side to side, label one half explicit knowledge and the other tacit knowledge. The top half of the page will be for what you know and the bottom half for what you don’t know. Then fill out each of the four quadrants with a few bullet points – no more than five – that serve as an inventory of where you stand and where you must head.
When you watch someone good at the job, she notes it can seem magical – a flight attendant deftly steering hundreds of people onto a plane or a teacher shepherding unruly third graders around a museum with grace. But it’s not magic; it’s methods – a system. You need one, whether wholly of your own invention or learned and borrowed from someone else to be effective. It should not be set in stone, however, but be adaptable.
It’s your secret ingredient for success and to capture it again she recommends an exercise on a sheet of paper with four sections. The first is your underlying world view: What do you think you’re meant to be accomplishing in your work and how are you accomplishing it? Next, look at the different pieces of your job and how they relate to each other. The third part is the limits of your job – what does your job not do? Outlining what’s out of bounds helps you to focus better on what is essential. Finally, because strong systems are adaptable, write out what you do when things go wrong.
Moving on to the second floor, she recommends looking at these vital dimensions of your people mosaic: The number of people in your interactions, the people dynamic and the emotions. For the number of people, ponder how you interact with them over a week, from one-on-one meetings through to small groups and big meetings. What are the relative power positions of folks in those various interactions? How emotionally charged are those conversations – and what emotions, such as calm/neutral, joy, fear and anger?
Working well with technology involves a mix of optimism and pessimism. She says you must be curious and playful with technology to learn how to use it to the fullest extent but also understand its limitations so you don’t get carried away.
Knowledge. Methods. People. Technology. Together, they determine how effective you will be.
Quick hits
- Are you nearing the end of the week on Thursday afternoon or only halfway through? Productivity writer Laura Vanderkam says the attention we apply to the week’s first few days gives us a sense it’s almost over by Thursday afternoon but a lot of joy will be found in your life by embracing the second half of the week just as fully.
- David Fischer, former chief revenue officer at Meta and now a consultant, says good salespeople pitch the product while excellent salespeople can do the customer’s job with the product. Good salespeople nurture every lead while excellent salespeople fish for a “no” early.
- Success makes you underestimate your need for growth, warns executive coach Dan Rockwell.
Harvey Schachter is a Kingston-based writer specializing in management issues. He, along with Sheelagh Whittaker, former CEO of both EDS Canada and Cancom, are the authors of When Harvey Didn’t Meet Sheelagh: Emails on Leadership.