Hard Work Is Not Enough

The Surprising Truth about Being Believable at Work

Jeff Shannon

• Publisher: New Degree Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781637304907
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Careers

More technical skills aren't what you need.

If you're like most people, your formula for career success is to be an expert and work hard. It's a great strategy when starting your career, but are you as influential as you would like to be? If the answer is no, then it might be time to change your strategy.

Hard Work Is Not Enough reveals the essential soft skills required to be more believable at work. It's the skills your manager wishes you had but doesn't have the guts to tell you to your face.

Inside this book, you will learn:

• How to go further upstream if you want people to trust you
• How to avoid the behaviors that hurt your believability
• How to be more strategic in how you think and act

Hard Work Is Not Enough is a straight-talk career conversation about the skills that will make you believable, strategic, and influential. It isn't for everyone, but it is for those who aspire to make a meaningful impact on people, teams, and organizations.

Chapter 1

Go Further Upstream

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You hear a knock at your door. It’s 9:00 a.m. and you aren’t expecting anyone. However, a man you don’t recognize is at your door. Could this be one of those fast-talking guys who want to sell you something? Do they work for one of the political parties or religious groups going door to door? Why are they here so late? Will you have to wait for the perfect time to interrupt their speech to tell them you’re not interested?

The amygdala is the almond-shaped part in the medial temporal lobe of the brain. It enables you to feel certain emotions and to perceive them in other people. It seems to modulate our reactions to events and stimuli like eating, drinking, sex, and addictive drugs and is considered an essential part of our threat detection systems.

When you open the door, your body is sending around eleven million bits of information to your brain, and your amygdala plays a role in processing the information. It is always on and always processing information about your environment. For example, one of the questions it asks is, are they a friend or a foe? In other words, can I trust this person?

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“We need more trust,” says Barb to a room of thirty-five people who work together to put on the College World Series. Barb is a participant in a team alignment workshop I’m leading for the NCAA, and she is summarizing her small group assessment of why the team feels so much friction. The workshop was designed to help three different organizations work better together in producing one of the most exciting two weeks of sports that Omaha, Nebraska, has to offer. The CWS, as fans know it, is the men’s Division I college baseball championship and has been in Omaha for the past seventy years. This event attracts 332,000 attendees and generates an estimated $74 million in just a couple of weeks.

According to the global survey of approximately 9,800 full-time workers on trust conducted by EY, Barb is not alone in her view. Only 49 percent of full-time workers responded they had “a great deal of trust” in those working above and alongside them. This means the other half of the survey respondents feel they don’t have a great deal of trust! “We need more trust” is also one of the most common refrains I hear from teams looking to operate at a higher level.

Working within an environment of trust can be a compelling experience. For example, Steve Booker, now president and CEO of SK Food Group, described a moment for me when the frozen foods business he led faced extraordinary cost inflation and profitability challenges. When asked how he overcame the obstacles in an interview, he said, “None of us within our team claimed to have all the answers. Instead, we recognized every one of us had a different view of the field we needed to understand. We created a culture where each team member felt free to share their view and related opinions. This enabled us to more accurately define our current reality and develop more effective action plans.” He attributed the team’s success to a feeling of trust among the team members that encouraged them to speak up, challenge each other, and act decisively.

In his book Herding Tigers, Todd Henry describes the feeling of trust well when he writes, “Trust is not like a bank account where you can make deposits and withdrawals. It’s like a water balloon; one puncture, and you lose it everywhere.” Almost everyone understands how important trust is to a relationship and to working on a team. Still, when pressed, most people have difficulty describing trust or knowing how to create it when it’s lacking.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines trust as a “firm belief in the reliability, trust, ability, or strength of someone or something.” The most important word is “belief,” defined as something one accepts as true or real, a firmly held opinion or conviction. When someone says “we need more trust,” what they mean is they want to believe in their colleagues’ ability to do the work and have their backs. Steve’s team believed in each other enough to share different perspectives, even competing views, when working together to overcome enormous obstacles.

Steve’s team trusted each other, but that trust was a vehicle to something even more important: results. That year, Steve’s team delivered record profitability despite an environment of unprecedented inflation. At the company’s annual awards event, the team was recognized for their extraordinary results with the Brand Team of the Year, Innovators of the Year, and Culture Creators of the Year awards.

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Trust is an essential ingredient for any working relationship. If you were baking a cake, trust is like flour; it’s indispensable. Try and offer someone a cup of flour to eat at your next party and see how many takers you get. Flour needs to be combined with eggs, sugar, butter, and baking soda before it’s cake batter. Even then, it still needs to be baked and frosted before someone can enjoy it. In other words, the flour needs to be activated before it turns into a cake.

If trust is the flour and results are the cake, then influence is the catalyst. Influence is the capacity to influence the character, development, or behavior of someone or something. Therefore, if you want to achieve results, especially with others, you will have to become more influential.

Humans have attempted to influence each other for thousands of years. The earliest recorded example is from forty-five thousand years ago when early Indonesians painted human-like figures hunting warty pigs and dwarf buffaloes on cave walls. I can only assume they were leaving a record of their accomplishments to influence the next generation. Perhaps they were saying “do it like this if you want to survive!”

The world has become more sophisticated since our days hunting with spears, which means it takes more than finger painting on cave walls to influence others. As a result, I’ve witnessed two approaches emerge when it comes to influencing. First, I introduced the “hard work and expertise” approach in the previous chapter and the method I tried with limited success. The second approach is the “personal branding” method. Unfortunately, neither of these approaches hit the sweet spot when it comes to genuine influence.

Why the Hard Work and Expertise Approach Doesn’t Work

In 1991, I had a huge crush, but it wasn’t on a classmate. Instead, it was on Mrs. Troyer, my algebra teacher. I was so head over heels, I purposely earned detention to spend time in her classroom after school. (Oh, the logic of a fourteen-year-old boy!)

One of her lessons that has stuck with me to this day was a little game we played to maximize revenue dollars generated from selling pretend widgets by setting the optimum price. When we completed the exercise, she showed us revenue was a bell curve. The line went up as you raised the price, but it began to come back down again when the higher price reduced the total units sold. This paradox of the bell curve is something that has fascinated me ever since.

Before we get into the paradoxes of hard work and expertise, we need to talk about judgment. More specifically, we need to talk about other people’s judgment of you. We know people shouldn’t judge, but the fact is they do. Other people form opinions about you based on very little information, affecting your success at work. It’s ugly, unfair, and can be hurtful, but it’s a lot easier to accept it and devise a better strategy than hoping people won’t judge you.

On the bell curve of hard work, let’s call the x-axis effort and the y-axis influence. The far left of the curve represents what everyone wants to avoid, which is the perception of being lazy. You probably intuitively recognize you have little or no influence if others perceive you as lazy. If you increase your effort, you will see your degree of influence begin to rise and peak and begin to come back down. The reason for the peak and decline is because expectations (the z-access) are also increasing. What was once a differentiator is now expected. At a certain point, working too hard and too long begins to be perceived as someone who can’t be strategic, can’t prioritize, or is ineffective.

The same bell curve also applies to subject matter expertise. In the beginning, more expertise in a field differentiates you from your peers. Your early success raises expectations to new and higher levels. Here being an expert on a single topic leads people to perceive you as one-dimensional. They assume your depth makes it challenging for you to see the bigger picture or to connect the dots to the larger organization. The translation is you’re so good at a narrow and deep topic, how could you possibly be good at context and strategy across other functions?

Are there exceptions to this rule? Yes! Some people who can overcome perception and bias. Hat’s off to you if you are one of those lucky individuals. The thing about exceptions is they are rare, maybe one in a thousand. Are you going to bet your career on being the one in a thousand?

If yes, it’s here where I wish you good luck and godspeed. However, if you’re like me and didn’t win the talent lottery, there is more to do to be more believable. Let’s quickly explore why personal branding doesn’t work before we get into my recommended approach.

Why Personal Branding Doesn’t Work, Either

I’m often asked to lead training on personal branding or to coach someone on executive presence. Well-intended managers want me to help make their team members more influential. They describe their employees as hardworking and highly capable individual contributors and managers who struggle to present themselves and their ideas. They hope a workshop on personal branding will do the trick.

A quick Google search of “personal branding” results in thousands of articles and blog posts with titles like How to build your personal brand without the cringe or 3 Reasons Why You Should Cultivate a Kick-Ass Personal Brand, encouraging readers to build their brand. Medium, a popular digital publishing platform, has an entire page dedicated to the topic of personal branding. What exactly is personal branding? According to Influencer MarketingHub, your personal brand is how you promote yourself. It is the unique combination of skills, experience, and personality you want the world to see.

Dwayne Johnson is an excellent examp...

Table of contents

• Introduction
• Chapter 1. Go Further Upstream
• Chapter 2. Don’t Give Away Your Power
• Chapter 3. Drink the Ants
• Chapter 4. Let Some Fires Burn
• Chapter 5. Act like an Owner
• Chapter 6. Never Skip Leg Day
• Chapter 7. Become the Mountain Climber
• Chapter 8. See like the Hummingbird
• Chapter 9. F.O.C.U.S. On Decisions
• Chapter 10. Get Out of the Way
• Conclusion
• Acknowledgments
• Appendix