4 TIPS TO WORKING STRATEGICALLY: BASE WORK V/S BREAKOUT ACTIVITIES

 

“I don’t understand why I’m not more successful.  I do everything they ask of me.”  It’s just a matter of time in the corporate world until you hear something like this.  Espoused from a lost corporate soul trying to explain the relative success of their peers unable to understand why their career is stuck or back sliding.  They fail to grasp this simple corporate truth: regardless of efficiency humanized automatons do not find advancement.  To better understand why just doing what you’re told isn’t enough I’ll introduce the concepts of base work and breakout activities.

When you take a new job opportunity or a new assignment within an existing company, someone describes the scope of your work responsibilities.  This would include description of what you will be doing and what applications you are expected to use and processes you are expected to follow.  The person may tell you about the team you will be working with or the key contacts that you interface with.  Everything described in one of these early job meetings is your BASE WORK.  Base work is the scope of what you will do each day that is not defined by you.  Base work is defined before you got there, and the scope of the work most likely served as the original justification of the creation of the position.

Usually, this defined scope of work will not be the foundation of what makes you special, what makes you stand out among your co-workers.  Commonly, the work that makes you stand out will be work defined by you, structured by you, and justified by you.  It will be of higher recognition value than the base work, and it will make you stand out among your peers that only complete their respective base work.

Many challenges in organizations is that the individuals in highly influential positions that design organizational structures and processes can be too removed from the day to day work activities to discover inefficiencies and thus specific opportunities for improvement in work processes.  This creates and opportunity for you to find BREAKOUT ACTIVITIES.  Breakout activities are not a part of your defined scope work.  With your effort and focus, a breakout activity could be a part of your replacements base scope of work when you are moved to another position in the company.  The value gained from a successful breakout activity can reshape your work role and help start creating a professional legacy of finding value add activities.

But warning: do not neglect your Base Work.  Completing your base work is your ‘license to operate’ or in this context ‘license to innovate.’  This is where hard work … meaning a lot of work is key.  As you develop a better sense for what in your base work is the most important and what can be minimized, you can commit extra time to breakout activities.  Be critical of your base work activity, and be smart how you spend your time.  Don’t let your base work expand unnecessarily to consume all of your time.  Ascertain ways to find time to locate a breakout activity.

Helpful steps for a successful breakout activity:

FIRST: Find out what your boss cares about.  In almost all job positions, the scope of what your direct boss manages is much greater than just your work.  Find a problem that your boss can’t manage, and if this problem was solved, the solution could reduce time or effort for your boss.  This problem can be very close or even just remotely related to your base work.  If there is nothing obvious, you can try to find a challenge in your job assignment or in your work group that you believe should be on your boss’s radar that is not.  Find something that you believe can be resolved with your focused effort alone or with a small group without a large commitment of resources.

SECOND: Find an area with low political resistance.  Find the history of the problem and find the stakeholders that would be impacted if things were to change, and then start a non-formal dialogue.  As you are entering into a new organization, you have very little reputation or ‘political capital’ to spend pushing a massive change that could impact several stakeholders.  Ensure your identified opportunity would be perceived as a win for your boss and your boss’s organization.

THIRD: If you meet significant resistance, find another opportunity.  There is no need to assign your name to an activity and have it fail because you could not garner enough political support.  If you do walk away from it due to lack of support or resource limitations, it is important that you do such before you are committed to a specific deliverable.  If you can do this properly, the failure of the breakout activity will not be negatively assigned to you, as it was not a part of your base work activity.  Predicting the reactions of others before pushing any change is critical in the success of the breakout activity.

FORTH: Make progress on the opportunity before asking your boss for notable resources or commitment.  The cheapest resource you have is your time, while the most expensive is your boss’s time.  Look to invest your time to develop the idea with the goal of lowering the time or level of commitment your boss will need before agreeing to support the breakout activity.

Keeping your head down and getting your base work completed will not result in notable advancement.  You will need to find breakout activities that redefine your role within the organization to something of higher value.  Think strategically, focus on easy wins and find something that your boss will have a trouble not green lighting.