Are You a Star at Work? Alan M. Webber &
Robert Kelley
How do you become a star at work? For more than a decade, Robert E. Kelley has
tried to answer that question, conducting in-depth research at such companies
as AT&T’s Bell Labs, 3M, and Hewlett-Packard. How do average performers differ
from stars? Are stars just smarter? Or more self-confident? Or better at
interpersonal and leadership skills? The answer, says Kelley, is none of the
above: “It isn’t what stars have in their heads that makes them stand out. It’s
how they use what they have.”
In How to Be a Star at Work: Nine Breakthrough Strategies You Need to Succeed
(Times Books, 1998), Kelley details his research and offers a blueprint to help
average performers lift themselves into the realm of the stars. “Most people
know that they have a star within them,” he says, “but for some reason, it
hasn’t clicked. They see other people getting ahead, people with roughly the
same talent as they have - and these other people are on a faster track. Most
people genuinely want to be more productive, do their best, and live up to
their potential, but they don’t know how to do it.”
Kelley is a professor at Carnegie Mellon University’s Graduate School of
Industrial Administration and the president of Consultants to Executives and
Organizations Ltd. His previous books include The Gold-Collar Worker:
Harnessing the Brainpower of the New Workforce (Addison-Wesley, 1985) and The
Power of Followership: How to Create Leaders People Want to Follow and
Followers Who Lead Themselves (Currency/Doubleday, 1992). Fast Company found
Kelley at his home in Pittsburgh and asked him to describe what it takes to be
a star at work.
Is your star on the back of your T-shirt?
My colleagues and I spent more than 10 years trying to find a valid, objective
measure that we can apply to all people - or even to everybody in the same kind
of job, or everybody in the same company. It’s almost impossible: No two jobs
are alike, no two companies are alike. So we gave up on finding one metric that
everyone can agree on.
Instead, we developed a definition like the one sometimes used for
“pornography”: Nobody can tell you how to measure it, but everybody knows it
when they see it. Everyone is an armchair expert. Everyone has an opinion. And
everyone is more than willing to dispense that advice to anyone else who will
listen.
So we collected all of those opinions: There are roughly 45 beliefs that
people use to explain why some people are stars. A lot of people chalk it up to
raw intelligence: Stars are smarter. Another set of explanations emphasizes
social skills: Stars are born leaders. And then we heard personality
explanations: Stars are driven, they have the will to succeed, they’re
self-confident, they’re self-motivated. We also researched explanations that
stress environmental factors: Becoming a star is all about having the right job
or the right boss.
We spent two years putting all of these beliefs to the test. We put stars and
average performers in rooms and gave them IQ tests. We gave them personality
tests. We measured their attitudes about whether they liked their jobs, their
bosses, their companies. After two years, we came up with the results: None of
these factors distinguished the stars from the average performers!
We finally developed our “back of the T-shirt” theory. Your IQ, your
personality, your social skills, even things like where you went to school -
that’s all on the front of your T-shirt. Think of all that as your potential
energy. But the important thing is how you transform potential energy into
kinetic energy. That’s on the back of your T-shirt. If you want to know if
someone is a star, or is going to become a star, focus on what’s on the back of
that person’s T-shirt.
In other words, it’s not what people bring to the party that makes them a star
- it’s what they do with what they bring. The secrets to being a star are not
in people’s personal characteristics but in how people go about doing their
work.
Do you shine in the white space?
When you’re starting out, remember that the things you do first not only build
a foundation but also send important messages to your colleagues, your
customers, and your boss. That’s why the first step toward becoming a star is
to show that you take initiative. Initiative is about working in the white
space. In today’s workplace, you see it more and more: work that no one can
predict will need to be done and that doesn’t fit neatly into someone’s job
description - in other words, work that gets done only when people step forward
and tackle it.
But it’s not enough just to take initiative - first you have to understand it.
If you ask average performers, “How do you get ahead?” they’ll tell you that
initiative is important. Yet star performers and average performers have a
fundamentally different understanding of what constitutes initiative. Here’s an
example: A young woman is asked by her boss to go to a meeting in another
department, to take notes, and to report back to her group. She realizes that
just taking notes won’t do the job, so she takes a tape recorder with her.
After the meeting, she listens to the tape, writes up her notes, and reports
back. To her, using the tape recorder was taking initiative.
When stars hear that story, they say, “That’s not initiative - that’s just
doing your job!” The boss told her to report on the meeting. How she chose to
do that was up to her - but tape recorder or no tape recorder, she was only
doing her job. For stars, initiative generally has four elements: It means
doing something above and beyond your job description. It means helping other
people. Usually it involves some element of risk-taking. And when you’re really
taking initiative, it involves seeing an activity through to completion.
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