Get in sync on what is important and why
The best skill you can have as a generalist is the ability to understand what’s important (and why) and share that information in a way that gets everybody aligned. If you do this well you will become known as someone who “gets it.” This is hard to do.
The penalty for not developing this skill this is harsh, and you’ve probably already seen it in action. Working with (or worse, working for) someone who doesn’t “get it” is frustrating. It’s like having a good salad but a bad ribeye at a steakhouse, you feel like they’re missing the point.
Understand what’s important
Being in sync with people about what is important is the key to making good decisions and the key to effective leadership. This is why companies spend time describing their values--they are a cheat sheet for what is important at that company, and the point is that people will use them to guide their decisions at all levels.
In addition to values statements, companies’ spend a lot of time on internal communication. All hands meetings, mass emails, @channels on slack -- it’s all done to get everyone in the company on the same page. It is very hard to keep a large number of people aligned, and if your company is big enough, there are probably people who have full time jobs dedicated to this cause.
One easy way to progress in your career is to be more than a passive recipient of this info. Be someone who actively seeks out context and information to help you and your team stay in sync. To do this, you need to do two things: ask questions, and actively reflect.
Asking questions is straightforward in principle, and you get better with practice. Ask people what they are working on today. Ask them how they spend their time. Ask them where they wish they spent their time. What problems are they dealing with, what is stressing them out, what are they proud of. Ask follow up questions. Ask why.
Active reflection is something that very few people do, especially early in their careers. But this will quickly improve your ability to “get” what’s happening. After you talk with someone (or even after you read an email) think about what signals you got about what’s important to that person. What questions did they ask you? What was the motivation behind those questions? Why did they send that email or reach out to talk in the first place? How is this person feeling? If you have a good relationship with the person, you can even guess what their motivations and feelings were, and ask for confirmation. You’ll get better over time.
One note here - the more senior you are, the more likely it is that you are the one who is deciding what is important. There is….a lot more that can be written about how to do that well, but I will say is that in general, the leaders who are really good at deciding what is important are people who were (and still are) really good at understanding what is important in their interactions with others.
Share what’s important
So you’ve got a pretty good grasp on what’s important and why. Great. That was the easy part. Next up is getting other people in sync with you.
Let’s say you’re training a customer support rep. When this person interacts with customers, there are 1000 different things that might be important, depending on your company’s goals. Speed of response, voice and tone, accuracy of answers, prioritizing certain customers’ responses over others, sharing information and feedback internally. As this rep goes through tickets, whether she realizes it or not, she’s making hundreds of small decisions based on her understanding of what’s important and why. And the quality of her work will depend on how good you are at getting her (and keeping her) in sync with what you understand to be important.
If you do a bad job, she might gloss over an obvious upsell opportunity or send a tone-deaf, canned response to a VIP customer. It’ll be like the robots in HBO’s Westworld -- when they see something they don’t understand (but is probably important) they ignore it and say “that doesn’t look like anything to me.”
To be good at sharing what’s important means you are constantly giving people context. Start your emails and meetings with the background for why you’re even having this conversation, share what the goals are, and how those tie up more broadly to everything else you and your team are doing. This might feel ridiculous at first, but you can never be too in sync. A good rule of thumb is that unless people are actively telling you you’re giving too much context, you can stand to give more. As Jack Welch said:
Real communication takes countless hours of eyeball to eyeball, back and forth… It is human beings coming to see and accept things through a constant interactive process aimed at consensus. And it must be absolutely relentless.
Next, you have to give feedback. In all directions. Up, down, left, right. If someone “missed” or was off on what was important, you have to let them know. There’s two possibilities in this case: either they are missing some piece of context, or you are. Either way the company will be improved by the conversation, even though it can be hard to confront someone’s ignorance (or your own).
Saying what people are thinking and feeling
One closing thought here, is that what’s important is not always the next big project or the company OKRs. People’s feelings are important. Leaders who have a “high EQ” are often just people who are able to understand when the bullet list of what we’re trying to do isn’t the “real” issue, but rather the anxiety the team is feeling, or the personal health issue of a team member. It is incredibly powerful when a leader says “What’s important right now is that you take care of yourself.”
Understanding what’s important and sharing context goes outside the boundary of work. People don’t want to work for emotionless decision making robots. They want someone they can trust, and at the end of the day, they will trust someone who “gets it.”