To learn to lead, you need to learn to be an excellent team player first.
When I travel through airports, my favorite alternative to sitting at the gate is wandering around a bookstore. But not a bookstore, really — more like three shelves of books among magazines next to Doritos, charger cables, and other confectionery.
I am reminded of perusing books at airport stores because 1) I am writing this on a plane after doing exactly that, and 2) I am traveling with one friend, among others, who strongly personifies who an Impact Player is — an invaluable team member who takes the lead and multiplies their impact. You can buy Impact Players here.
I don’t always buy books at these stores, but last year, as I traveled from my home in Nigeria to San Francisco for my software engineering internship, performing excellently at work was at the top of my mind.
So I prioritized learning and applying the five habits of high-impact players:
Do the job that’s needed
Step up, Step back
Finish Stronger
Ask and Adjust
Make Work Feel Light
#1 Do the Job that’s needed
Transitioning from college into the workforce, we have preconceived notions of what work we want to do and what the world needs. Both notions are usually wrong, and we can only find answers by engaging in opportunities to contribute. We should instead focus on tasks where we’re needed and learning how our organization works.
Meg Jay, author of “The Defining Decade,” would agree that focusing on the job that’s needed will maximize the Identity Capital you build in your twenties.
Identity capital includes things like test scores, degrees, and jobs, that go on a resume but also includes more personal things like how we present ourselves, how we solve problems, or what our hobbies or life experiences may be.
Moreover, I recently found a collection of essays by Marc Andreessen about careers, entrepreneurship, and more. In “Guide to Career Planning,” he lays out two career planning rules. First, don’t plan your career. The second is to focus on developing skills and pursuing opportunities instead of planning your career.
The reason is that the world is changing so fast, and you don’t have much information, especially when starting out your career.
The pursuit of passion is certainly a sound strategy in choosing a career, selecting the right company to work for, or starting one of your own. But once you’re inside an organization, you need to learn to love what you need to do. Following your passion may do more damage than good. — Wiseman
#2 Step up, Step back
A natural extension of doing the needed job is that you sometimes identify that no one is doing what needs to be done, and it seems someone should step up and do it. The point of this chapter is that that person is you!
In high school, as a junior student, I never got the opportunity to play soccer during Tuesday and Thursday sports time because the senior students were, well, senior, so they got permanent dibs on the limited playing field. This bothered me, but everyone in my class had the same response — that’s just how it is, and we’ll do the same thing when we’re seniors.
It didn’t have to be this way. And when I became a senior and a prefect, I did Step 1: Step up.
But that wasn’t sufficient. I quickly realized that while my peers respected me, it would take more than asking my fellow seniors to share the field with their juniors. They would need incentives.
I took Step 2: Enroll others. I did this by making it exciting. I convinced some friends that we should start a school-wide Soccer league (The Supreme Football League) that came tricked out with a schedule, referees, a league system, and knockout stages — none of which existed before.
I got so much buy-in that it was easy to add rules to solve the initial problem — every team had to have at least three juniors out of 8 on the pitch and one girl (this correlated with soccer demand from girls at my school at that time.)
Finally, I didn’t micro-manage this as my pet project. I allowed it to evolve beyond me, with other seniors suggesting and implementing cash prizes and jerseys, which made the competition way more exciting. Step 3 is to step back.
#3 Finish Stronger
There’s one trait I really love about my friends that I take classes with — they don’t take shortcuts when learning the content. They’re unsettled by gaps in their understanding, likely because of high intellectual curiosity.
Wiseman describes a similar feature in high-impact players — they don’t take shortcuts — which means you can rely on them to get the whole job done, not just some " technically " correct version. They deliver in the spirit of the goals and then some.
And that last part is important: “and then some.” My dad often hammered that “Mediocrity is doing what you’re asked. Excellence is doing more than is required of you.”
Mediocrity is a somewhat strong word, and Wiseman uses a more appropriate “contributor“ versus “high-impact player.“
And the way high-impact players finish predictably and do more than is required is to anticipate challenges. This was the biggest hurdle I faced during the internship, and I’ve come to understand that this is one of the most important ingredients of finishing real-world projects.
If I learn techniques to anticipate challenges better, I’ll write about them, but the best teacher I know in this case is experience.
#4 Ask and Adjust
Before my first internship in college, I believed we had an overcommunication problem in many teams and workplaces. This stemmed from my observation that many meetings were inefficient.
However, my conclusion was wrong, and I realized that lesson from my mentor that summer.
I was used to working in small teams, on carefully crafted projects, with clear and static requirements — school group projects. At many organizations, real-world projects have the opposite of all those features, making it more important to communicate, communicate, communicate.
When communicating, Wiseman advises being unafraid of asking for guidance after doing the legwork, adjusting your approach after feedback/setback, and frequently updating your stakeholders.
#5 is to make work light, but I’ve decided its place is in a bigger post about how Emotion improves Engineering in my experience.
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Every great leader must first be an excellent team player. And you never stop practicing these habits. You only add more as you gain more leadership responsibility.
Do the job that’s needed.
Step up, Step back
Finish Stronger
Ask and Adjust
Make Work Feel Light
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I’m definitely going to apply these to my group works in school.
A good read !