Be Even Better
I have recently run across two professional development practices that I am interested in adopting; and now I am starting to think that combining them together will make them even more useful. The first practice is Jacob Kaplan-Moss's recommendation to maintain a transition file. This document is designed to help you train your successor and should contain notes on team mechanisms, role responsibilities, projects, and (if you are a manager) the people you manage. Jacob's reasoning for maintaining and updating this file every 2-3 months is mostly around supporting your team and showing general professionalism when you decide to leave. But I think this introspection is valuable even if you never leave your role. By preparing to teach someone to do your job, you can leverage the "Protégé Effect" to understand your job even better. Preparing to explain why something is done affords a perspective to see gaps, inconsistencies, and opportunities.
That brings me to the "Be Even Better" practice, which I learned about in an internal Amazon email list for managers. The post described a quarterly personal development day that team members schedule for themselves with the subject "Be Even Better." I love the title because it encourages a positive form of self criticism that embraces a "Growth Mindset."
One of the suggested question prompts to initiate the "Be Even Better" exercise is "if someone came in tomorrow and took my place, what would they be shocked or surprised about?" By updating the transition file and then asking this question, you give yourself an opportunity to combine the energy of a newcomer who wants to have an impact, with the experience and context of an incumbent. The next steps in the process are to prioritize, plan, and set goals for improvement. If you were training your successor, it would feel much better to say "this is how we are solving this problem" than to appear content that the problem persists.
I think we humans have a natural tendency to settle into a ruts where we just go through the motions of our day - attending meetings, responding to emails, processing deliverables... We get tired of being annoyed by issues and develop an unhealthy tolerance of them. Then we complain about burnout and "needing a change." We under-appreciate the potential to change our perspectives and see new challenges and opportunities in our current work environment where we can harness our domain expertise and professional relationships to achieve more.
That is not to say that a change of work environment isn't also a good idea. Being on the messy side of a learning curve is great mental exercise and the ability to share practices and ideas from different places is great for organizations. But a job change is risky. The recruitment process isn't ideal for learning whether you will like the new role. At Amazon, we have many "boomerangs" who come back after jumping into sub-optimal jobs. The art of managing a career is being able to maximize the growth you can get out of every role that you have and seeing when growth opportunities start to actually diminish .. rather than just appear to diminish because you stopped paying attention.