May be it is just me, but I think like a tactician now at work. Where before I just did my job, now I am constantly thinking how I can do better, be better than how I was last week and be better than my colleagues. Ultimately it is the fear that drives this behavior. The fear is that my employer will one day tell me that I am being let go because of something related to my visual impairment, even if they don’t present it that way.
I am the single breadwinner and if I lose this job then things could get quite tough. While there are laws against discrimination I am not naïve. I think I have a healthy and valid fear. In the last few months there has been much talk about a new technology being brought in that all the programmers in my team would use. It is a completely mouse driven, visual technology and requires no code to be written. So it is looking like my team will not be programmers for much longer but a team of mouse clicking monkeys. This new technology enables less qualified people to build an albeit simpler version of the software we develop currently. I am struggling to work out how I am going to survive this change and I am wondering if any of my highly skilled colleagues will stick around for this new era.
So right now my fear has spiked but even before this new technology came on the horizon I felt a healthy dose of fear. Personally I find that this isn’t necessarily a negative in my life, it is more like one of the drivers that spurs me on to be better at my job and not let me get complacent. But I don’t want to talk about “The fear” in this post. I want to talk about the word Value.
Value. It is a word that is part of the corporate speak that you hear executives and middle managers use in team and company meetings. The corporate speak probably makes sense if you are an executive, each line of work has its own language and phrases to describe it and the language of business strategy and operations efficiency too has its own. But it sounds rather cheesy to everyone else.
But the word value, I have learned, is a word that is worth paying attention to. Quite simply, thinking about value makes you better at your job and makes you more essential to your employer.
Thinking about value frees you from the constraints of how you usually look at your role and your duties. You stop thinking as a programmer, or a salesman and start looking at things unfiltered. You start questioning how you do things and how your team does things. You start seeing inefficiencies and issues that are pain points for the team and yourself.
It is very easy to become accustomed to doing things a certain way and accepting things the way they are without question. But ask yourself the question: What could I do right now or this week that would add the greatest value to the team?
I think this way of thinking came out of acquiring my visual impairment right when large changes to our team were occurring. I was feeling extremely vulnerable and was terrified of losing my job. So out of that I came up with the strategy that I would be as valuable to the team as I could. I figured if I was valuable then I wouldn’t get fired. So that meant more than just programming, there are plenty of programmers out there and plenty of gifted ones at that. I needed to differentiate myself and so I started analyzing things, cutting away the customs of the team and really looking.
My first effort with this new way of thinking was identifying why our relationship with another team was so troubled. It really came down to that we had never formerly agreed on how to cooperate and whose duties were whose. So I wrote a short document that would formalize the relationship with the other team and sent it to my boss. I suppose I was winging it here as I had never written anything like this before. But my boss liked it and although my document never got further than this boss it did start a round of meetings where the terms of the relationship were arranged and a new and better document was written and signed.
With that mini achievement I continued to keep an eye out for value adding opportunities. When an external consultancy was hired to develop a large suite of business applications for us I quickly saw room for improvements. Our approach to testing had always been informal as had our relationship with the owners of each project we were involved with. But because of the large amount of money at stake the relationship with the consultancy quickly became very legalistic and rigid. I saw that we really needed a formal testing process. So I bought books on software testing process and read blogs about the subject and documented a formal testing process that would state how we would interact with the consultancy, what the deliverables were, how we would manage testing tasks internally, the format of test scripts and so on. I presented it to the whole team and invited comment.
This was really a success for me as it was taken up and reduced a lot of the friction between the consultancy team and our own. I was put in charge of the testing process and made accountable for it.
Those are two examples and there are more but I think you get the idea. Thinking about value allowed me to be the guy that solved a problem and managers tend to love those types of people, if done in the right way. Sometimes the manager is not interested and that could be for any number of reasons and if you can’t persuade them then look for something else.
Adding extra value to a team in this way is probably more true for jobs which have a wide variety of tasks and duties rather than narrower fields. For example being an analyst programmer involves a huge variety of duties whereas being a telephone operator is more focused on a single activity.
In jobs which are more narrowly focused it will be harder to apply this way of thinking. However where the duties are wide ranging there is usually a lot of areas where the entrepreneurial spirited employees can see an area which can be improved and be the one to bring that improvement to the team.
Coming back to my situation, I am now looking at how I can survive the sweeping changes in technology that are about to come in. I will be looking at how I can carve myself a niche and make myself useful, using value as my yardstick. I don’t know if I will be successful, to be honest I think I might lose this one but even if I do I know I’ll be using value when I enter the next interview room, when I look at any training opportunities while trying to improve my chances of gaining employment and then when starting my next job. I hope that I can keep my job but if I can’t then I suppose that’s life and I’ll move on to the next challenge.
The Screenreader 