By Meghana Gorla
In the course of one’s professional journey, you might have to make many switches back and forth between leader and individual contributor. I’ve had the opportunity to lead teams of my own throughout the school year, which provided the agency to use creativity to steer goals to previously unimaginable heights. Entering into my summer internship experience, however, I had to re-learn the role of individual contributor and how I could still use innovation without the backing of a certain title. Using my experience, this time around I sought a way to leverage my own skill sets and provide value outside of the job description. I learned that you don’t need a specific title to reinvent the way things are done or to inspire the people around you. If you are responding to the team around you and generating something useful in a way that is unique to you, there will always be space for an inventive approach, no matter your position. Below are some of the steps along the way I took to get to this lesson.
Understanding Your Skill Set
Part of being able to contribute meaningfully, means understanding what you can individually bring to the table that hasn’t already been served up. This doesn’t necessarily mean a technical skill set either. The way you can leverage your talents might not be incredibly clear, which is why it’s very important to understand what they are. During my summer experience, I wanted to find a way to use my creativity, so I decided to branch out of the typical cold-calling sales routine and created a pitch deck as well as a video for a potential client that tapped into the storytelling side of sales. It took knowing that I work well with visual components, however, to challenge myself to see how I could make it work with what I was currently doing. If you are good at researching, how can you bring that to explore new angles with your work? If you are critical, how can you incorporate your perspective on current procedures and how they can be improved? We have a variety of skills both clearly stated on our resumes and others more tucked away, but it takes knowing them to push the boundary and explore how you can make your role truly your own.
Involving Your Manager In Your Thought Process
When you are given a certain set of expectations after taking on an entry level role, it can feel like there is pressure to do as you are told and perhaps fear over how changing things up slightly might be perceived by management. This is why open communication and honesty throughout the process is incredibly important. At the end of the day you and your manager want the same things, but everyone has their own way of going about a problem. Having an open dialogue with your manager on the work you have been assigned to do, and then taking it further by asking questions about a new area, or suggesting a new perspective based on the extra work you’ve done shows curiosity and investment on your side. These are qualities that your team will ultimately respect and want to make room for, if you can demonstrate that your aim is to go the extra mile for the sake of the larger goal, rather than to challenge authority. If you can create that open dialogue it creates room for collaboration and opens the door to more meaningful work as well as trust when people recognize that you are taking a genuine interest in what you are doing, not just for the sake of checking off a box.
Rolling With The Curiosity
Once you understand what really excites and inspires you along with what you’re good at, it’s important to roll with it. If you have an interesting angle of how something should be approached, why not take the first step in creating an outline or mockup for what that might look like? If you want to test a theory, why not choose a low stakes environment and present your findings to your manager to get the ball rolling? Taking the first step from where your curiosity leads you helps develop that ability to take initiative and risks, which is an integral part of innovation. In some cases, ( be mindful of the context) it can move the ball a lot further when you “ask for forgiveness, not permission.” Again it all depends on the situation, industry, and who you are working with, but there are still ways for you to test the initial inklings of an idea in a low stakes way. Instead of thinking how someone will respond to the work you’re doing and assuming they will shut it down, it can be helpful to just start creating and see how you are able to inspire yourself and those around you with the effort you put in.
Each person occupies a role for the way that they can uniquely fill it. When you are entering a company for the first time as a new hire or intern, there can be pressure to try and look like the successful people in the room. While you will always be consistently learning from those around you, rather than getting caught up on what you should be doing, try exploring what you can or want to do. It can be an interesting perspective shift that allows you to go further with your ideas than you ever could have before.