5

Competing Successfully Is at the Center of Career Advancement

Success is a result of successfully competing! You might be asking, Why is David stating the obvious? You guessed it; it is not as obvious as one would believe. In my opinion, this is one of the most fundamental observations that at first blush may appear obvious but is not. It is particularly true when one expands this statement and asks oneself, “How do I compete successfully?” Here the answer is not so clear-cut and has many subtle nuances. We rarely take time to think about them. Why should we? Isn’t competing just going out there doing the best we can and trying to do it better than others? Isn’t it completely instinctive to everybody? Yes, kind of—but no, not really.

It is common wisdom in business that thinking ahead is the most important ingredient for a company’s success. Do it well and you measurably increase the probability of success. Do it poorly and the business/company is most likely to fail. Yet few give any serious thought to the fact that the same applies to success in one’s career. Ask successful people to give you the formula for career advancement and you are very likely to hear, “Be competent, be a good worker, and do your best—these are the most critical ingredients for one’s success.” This is the common wisdom imparted from the “wise” to the “less wise,” from parents to children, from teachers to students, from successful people to as yet unsuccessful people, from bosses to subordinates.

It is not that it is bad advice. It is just that, by itself, it is not complete advice, and therefore is perhaps even “poor” advice. Although it appears to be a minor and subtle semantic difference, it is not. It embodies a logical flaw with major implications. This logical flaw is referred to again and again throughout the book. It comprises situations where the facts provided to support some logic and conclusions are perceived to be correct, but, in fact, are incomplete and missing some important additional elements. As such, the conclusions drawn may be insufficient, faulty, or even erroneous to some extent.

The critical logical “flaw” lies in the subtle observation that the elements of the statement are correct, but together they do not guarantee the outcome. In other words, you could follow this advice in a superb way, but still will not have assurances that the outcome will be achieved. In math it is referred to as “necessary, but not sufficient.” The paradox regarding this advice and the lack of a guaranteed outcome reflects the fact that one is given the most important aspects of the advice, which generally are those aspects that if not accomplished will deny success; however, other things might be needed to increase the probability that the expected outcome will more likely follow. Both aspects are needed to change the “necessary, but not sufficient” into what in math is referred to as “necessary and sufficient.”

Outside of the above discrepancy in logic, there are additional complexities. The advice mentioned earlier to be competent and do your best uses conceptual words that provide no specifics to help one decide how to best put it into practice. What does it mean to be competent? How does one achieve competence? When does one know if one has reached it? The same questions apply to being a good worker and doing one’s best. To make things worse, one can think of a zillion specific ways to do things that are consistent with the original advice. A zillion ways to interpret and implement advice is as good as getting no advice at all! This is analogous to thinking about how to be successful in marriage or a successful parent. Ask for advice on what that means, and how to do it well, and you’ll get zillions of different specific opinions. How does one go about deciding which opinions are more, or less, important? It begins with perspective.

The Process of “Necessary and Sufficient” Starts with a Correct Perspective

Okay, back to the main topic: What are the “necessary and sufficient” conditions to succeed in one’s career? Let’s first begin with a conceptual understanding, and then go into the details that give specific information about how to implement it.

Let us follow the four-step “methodology” for insightfulness I introduced earlier. As a first step, we need to identify the correct challenge we must overcome. I suggest that the key conceptual observation is the realization that one must compete successfully to succeed. Think about it: For every single career advancement—from getting the job in the first place through all of the promotions—multiple candidates are evaluated and only one is selected. One constantly competes with others at every step of one’s career. Thus, successful competition is the most critical factor in one’s success. In other words, the best advice one can give you about how to best advance your career is to tell you that you must successfully compete. A subtle difference, but profound.

Note, in one set of advice you are the center of it all, and the focus is completely on what you do. In the other interpretation, you are no longer the center; other people and the actions they take are just as critical. What you do is only meaningful and relevant when compared to what others do. Thus, the new challenge has shifted from a focus on doing your best to a focus on doing better than others (i.e., effectively competing). Directionally, this implies substantially different things. So, now we know what the central objective is and how we need to shift our mindset. (Can you see how insightfulness can lead to an obvious observation that can lead to a different approach to a challenge, and increase the chances for success?)

Now that we conceptually understand better what we are trying to accomplish, we can focus and devise ways to get there. The word “compete” conveys a concept only; it lacks the specificity of how to do it well. So, per the insightfulness methodology, we need to translate the word “compete” into a more directional, task-oriented list of subcategories. In fact, please take a moment and ask yourself what specifically one needs to do and accomplish to compete successfully. Make a list of the traits and action steps. I’ll bet you’ll have a hard time wrapping your thoughts around it. You could probably identify a great many specific things, but how are you able to prioritize them and have enough clarity as to how to practically put them to use? How can you tell that, even with a long list of ideas, you haven’t missed anything important? Rather than give you an answer, I will use this opportunity to welcome you to the first step in becoming insightful.

Correct Perspectives Are Driven by an All-Encompassing Thought Process

The first question that comes to mind is, obviously, what does it mean to compete successfully? Can you think of the different conceptual categories that will lead you to the desired outcome?

Let me give you a list that is implied in doing it successfully. Clearly, the first is to have an opportunity to compete. Second, you must be noticed by those who decide whether you are better, or worse, than other competitors. If you are not noticed, you will never be better, nor worse. Third, being noticed is not enough. You had best be noticed for things you are doing better than others, not worse. Fourth, being noticed is “necessary, but not sufficient.” So, what are the critical things that influence the perceptions of those making a judgment? Only by answering this last question correctly will you know what you need to do better. You can also avoid wasting energy on all the trivial things that you might do better but will yield nothing of value relative to what you need to accomplish at the end.

Fifth, avoid major potential mistakes on the path to promotion. Remember, bad mistakes are more costly than great successes (at least in the shorter term). How many times have you heard people say that only a few of the thousands of good deeds one does in their lifetime are remembered, but every single bad deed is? You may think of another question or two, but I think that for the first-level categorization, these are pretty much the primary questions; the rest may come up in the iterative nature of the process. So, let’s stop here and take a tally. To compete successfully, we need to accomplish four things:

1.Have an opportunity to compete.

2.Be noticed. This can be accomplished in three separate ways. I purposely enumerate them in reverse order of importance, just because I want to emphasize the process of thinking and how to make sure it is thorough and more complete. You will be noticed because you:

○have something, wear something, or do something (unrelated to the quality of your work) that will make you different, thereby be noticed.

○do something “stupid” or make a stupid mistake.

○do measurably better in some or all of the things that are being observed.

3.Be noticed for the critical things that matter the most for those who make the final judgments.

4.Avoid major mistakes.

Okay, now you have a complete set of directional, conceptual things that you need to accomplish. I look at the list above and can bring it down to a simple, more elegant, and accurate way to say it all, and in the process use terms that are widely understood in the context of competition: To compete successfully, one must have a differentiation that gives them a competitive advantage and avoid making major mistakes.

Now I can go to the next step and expand each of the above concepts in the same manner into subcategories in an iterative way, until I get to much more specific tasks that I can focus on.

Avoid Superficiality: Thoroughness Is the Key

One last comment about the process/methodology. Note that to accomplish the third item above—be noticed for the critical things that matter the most—you must correctly know the things that will be important to those who will be involved in the decision to give you the promotion. So, you now must understand what the people who decide on promoting somebody look at when making such a decision. Clearly, here you need to look at what they will view positively and what they will view negatively. Get it right and you have just come up with exactly what you need to pay attention to if you want to get promoted. All you will need to do now is execute it well. You may or may not know exactly how your manager decides on promotions, or all that goes into their decision. So, it is appropriate to seek counsel, talk to people who promoted others, and ask them. But make sure you get more than the obvious, or just the most important factors, because there will be other “competitors” who will possess those as well. Thus, seek to understand the “secondary” things that will go into the final selection from the group that will pass the primary criteria. Note the importance of the secondary list; it will become critical at the time when a final differentiation is made of those who passed the initial list. In other words, when you have gotten to understand the decision-making process of those people, you’ll have the real insight of exactly how the final decision for promotion is made!

See the logical progression of how to think about getting your answers? Apply this kind of logical progression and use it throughout your life in all situations, and you will put yourself on a solid path to becoming more insightful.