Take Responsibility, Solve Problems

In any working environment, you will be surrounded by problems*. This is a good thing. If there were no problems for you to solve, there would be no need for you to have a job. In general, as you advance in your career, you will solve bigger and bigger problems. You might progress from an account manager role trying to keep a handful of low level clients happy, to working on more strategic clients, to managing a team of account managers across hundreds of clients. At each stage, you will always spend your time solving problems, but the problems grow with your role.

When you are junior in your career, you might interpret the cause and effect in this way:

I can’t wait until I get promoted, so that I can work on bigger and more important things!

In reality the causality goes the other way. Once you start working on bigger things and solving bigger problems, that’s when you get promoted. As a generalist, it’s critical that you understand this cause and effect and start to look for and solve progressively bigger problems at your company. This is called Taking Responsibility.

“Take” is an action verb, and this is an active step that you have to do. You’re not in school anymore. It’s no longer enough passively complete all the assignments and quizzes you get and expect to be “promoted” to the next level at the end of the year. In a job, you have to go out of your way to identify “next level” problems and then solve them.

FIND A PROBLEM TO SOLVE

For every one problem that you or your team has identified and prioritized and is actively working on, there are 10-20 more problems going unaddressed. Your job is to find a big problem and solve it. This is always true.

If your team is strong, the list of problems may be well documented and prioritized. This makes your job easy - pick the next one on the list that you can handle given your resources, and solve it. However, if there is even a little bit of disfunction at your company (and there probably is), there are likely to be un-identified problems that *should* be a priority but are not. This happens all the time at growing companies - systems that have worked up until a certain point in time break down, and people are too heads-down to notice the issue. Or a combination of internal and external movements have created an opportunity, but nobody sees it yet.

As an example: imagine you are that junior account manager, with 30 small clients to look after. In this role, you are in prime position to notice patterns and trends across these clients, and you identify that most clients are having an issue onboarding their teams onto your company’s product. Historically, this was solved by people in your role doing lots of phone call, but what’s different now is that your sales team are selling too well (hah), and you are under water. This is a problem, and you can take responsibility for it’s solution. Maybe you will gather feedback and make a recommendation to your product team to improve the onboarding flow, maybe you will host a weekly or monthly webinar for new clients to get them onboarded, or maybe you will create a self-onboarding guide that reduces the need for personal calls. In any event, you are the one who identified the problem and took responsibility for it’s resolution.

As a generalist, you should have a good understanding of what is important and why, and use that to find what others do not see. Identify problems, and solve them. Taking responsibility is one of the biggest skills you can practice as you think about your career progression.

USE IT TODAY

As an exercise, find three things at your job that no one is responsible for. A good place to start is to look for things where “everyone” is responsible for it (because that really means no one is). What would it look like for you to take responsibility on these?

*One thing to note is the old problem/opportunity duality (i.e., one person’s problem is another person’s opportunity). I use “problems” in this article for simplicity sake, because even for something that is obviously an opportunity (i.e., “Let’s expand into this great new market!”), the work of getting it done amounts to solving problems. (i.e., “How much money can we make in that market? What’s the right way to launch? How do we address any interference or distraction from our main business”).

Further, if you abstract your work away to the level of you generically solving problems, it helps you mentally get used to the idea that you always have to be figuring something out or fixing something that “is wrong.” Many people don’t like the feeling that things are broken or something is wrong, and the discomfort in that environment can become a blocker to their own happiness and success. But in reality, if you get comfortable with the idea that things are and forever will be in need of improvement, you can avoid the internal drama of feeling like you’re failing or something that is wrong, and realize that this is, in fact, normal