Most of the people are always worried about their increments in the company. They think that since they completed their work in time, met all the deadlines, delivered the correct stuff; they should be given the highest possible increment. But they get disappointed when they find that they were graded as the average players or valuable resources instead of getting the best player kind of reward. Now what is the reason for this. Is it fair on their part or do you think they were cheated.
Well in my opinion their ability to deliver on time and correctly is what they were hired for. It was something that is the part of their duty. It has to be done, so they have done nothing extraordinary. For e.g. You asked a plumber to repair the tap, he came and repaired it. Is it something that was not expected from him?
Now what is the one factor that takes you from a average performer to an extraordinary performer? I would like to mention the famous quote "successful people do the things differently". You were given a task, you did that, great!!! but there could be multiple ways of doing that. Try to figure out the way that no one in the company has ever tried and which is appealing to the Boss. For e.g. in case of software, normally it is a requirement that people are asked to debug other people code which generally lacks documentation. I will point out the two approaches one that will grade you as an average employee and the other that makes you above average.
Average: Spend time in understanding the code, find the root cause for the bug, and fix it.
Above Average: Spend time in understanding the code, document the salient points in the code, find out the root cause for the bug, fix it, document the reasons for the errors.
The first guy just did what he was asked to do. The second guy did the necessary stuff and in addition to that he documented the code so that in the future he/ or some other guy need not spend that many man hours in fixing the bug in that code. So in turn he not only performed his duty, he also tried to save some nickels for the company.
So the point here is always look for the opportunities which makes you valuable to the company.
I will give some more examples in the next post
