Mediocrity is a Choice!

Tweet: Most tout their past with banal rsum bullets that make them look mediocre. Try this new approach to see how it transforms your self-view!

It is well known that most employees are barely engaged in their jobs and some are actively disengaged. Gallop pols over the years show that, depending on which country and culture you dig into, nearly 80% of the employees are disengaged in their jobs. Of these about 30% or so can be Actively Disengaged. What this means that is that nearly 80% of the employees do not care what they do in their jobs as long as they do not get caught.

Even when they do, systems prevent them from anything really bad happening to them, as a result, so they continue their approach to doing their job the way they always have, wallowing in mediocrity or even in disengagement. Of these the Actively Disengaged can, not only harm the job they are doing, but also those who are affected by their active indifference. Imagine a disengaged airline pilot, a surgeon, or an emergency responder! In the US alone there are nearly 100,000 deaths in hospitals and medical facilities, not related to the illness for which patients are being treatedentirely preventable iatrogenic deaths!

After working in my current career for the past 15 years as a career coach and having worked with nearly 6,000+ clients globally I have come to the conclusion that most professionals do not know that they can engage in their job more effectively; get more out of that engagement; provide more value from their work in how it affects those who rely on it; and, most of all, get much deeper satisfaction from what they do for themselves. It is not just a theory, hypothesis, or a conjecture, but is derived from my own experience with many of my clients, who come to me unknowingly, wearing a badge of mediocrity! There is nothing special about me is often their refrain. Indeed, indeed, and I contend that they are ALL wrong!

How do I know this?

One of the first tasks I ask my clients to do is to redo their rsum in a story-telling narrative. Most come to meall the way up to CEOswith their rsum bullets highlighting their activities, not accomplishments. A laundry list of activities reads like a job description in the past tense. So, for someone, who is in sales, one of the bullets may read: As a Regional Sales Manager provided weekly activity reports to management. Yet, another may read: Always met quota set by management.

These banal statements of their everyday activities utterly fail to distinguish them from their myriad competitors since their rsums also have near identical bullets. Instead, imagine the same bullet if it read: Upon taking charge as RSM quickly discovered that the traditional quotas allocated were based on old market research and looking at the entire market as monolithic. Conducted market research that revealed much greater potential and careful segmentation showed that the company could capture a market 3X as large. Exceeded even the new quota.

During our first meeting I usually ask them to re-write their rsum in a story-telling format to showcase their leadership. I have a structured way of doing this and a fairly cut-and-dried recipe that has evolved over the 15 years I have been career coaching. During the layout of the process I emphasize to them that their next rsum message will now be based on their genius. I firmly believe that whenever anyone engages their genius in any activity it creates an Aha! (the very definition of genius).

A common reaction to this request is that most clients recoil in disbelief wondering if they have any worthwhile Aha! stories to tell about their past accomplishments. Some go away resigned to the fact that this would be a wasted effort since they have never created an Aha! in anything that they did. Yet, when I see their first sample story they send for me to review I often find in them the gems of their creativity and the spark of their genius.

I then take their rough-hewn story and bring it to life by repackaging and editing it to make it soulful. When they see the improved version of their transformed story a light-bulb goes on in their head and they start thinking of many such stories that they could now write to showcase their genius and their creative spark. It was there all along, but the way they engaged themselves it did not bring out their best work; more importantly they did not see the value of their own work. They did what they had to do by engaging their genius in a casual way, without giving it much thought. And, when they did make a difference in how they produced an outcome, some conniving colleaguesometimes, even their bosshijacked the credit for it to their own benefit!

Such lassitude often results in creating the perception of a mediocre job performance, producing the familiar statistics that we witness in our everyday surveys about employee engagement. So, what I have found in my own practice is that unless you force yourself to re-visit your own past work and re-interpret it by looking at what you did, not just as mere activities, but as impactful accomplishments based on your inner genius, you are further consigned to future mediocrity in what you do. Armed with this knowledge you must now lift yourself with your own bootstraps to operate at a higher level, engaging your genius in all that you do to transform your future and how you engage in your next job or assignment.

So, how does this process of re-writing your everyday rsum from a mundane, task- focused laundry list to a genius-based leadership narrative that defines who you really are allows you to translate your mediocre job engagement into a rock-star performance? Well, it is founded on your ability to give a renewed meaning to many of your activities through a transformation process to now make them your accomplishments. In each such accomplishment now recast as your leadership narrative you have the seed of your genius that pops out to a reader and you can further accentuate these accomplishments by verbalizing each with a specific genius phrase (as your signature skill).

The real power of this process is not just in how your rsum now shines and stands out from everyone elses, but more importantly, how you engage in your next job. What this experience provides them is a framework for anyone who has gone through this process to look at any assignment as something that requires them to engage their genius, so that they can verbalize their accomplishments in a compelling way. So, this process also creates job engagement previously missing for most clients; it excites them to engage in their next undertaking very differently.

So, if you are feeling mediocre lately, embark on the process of delving into your accomplishments. Take the trouble to dig into your leadership stories of how you engaged your genius in your tasks, verbalize them as accomplishments, and see how different your rsum now looks, and, more importantly, how differently you feel about what you can do next!

Back in the 70s I remember seeing a billboard on the Silicon Valleys main freeway. It simply had three lines: Some make it happen; some watch it happen; and some wonder what happened! Then there was the companys name for you to call, saying Come, join us, and Make it Happen!

Now, Go, make it happen!

Good luck!

About Author

Dilip has distinguished himself as LinkedIn’s #1 career coach from among a global pool of over 1,000 peers ever since LinkedIn started ranking them professionally (LinkedIn selected 23 categories of professionals for this ranking and published this ranking from 2006 until 2012). Having worked with over 6,000 clients from all walks of professions and having worked with nearly the entire spectrum of age groups—from high-school graduates about to enter college to those in their 70s, not knowing what to do with their retirement—Dilip has developed a unique approach to bringing meaning to their professional and personal lives. Dilip’s professional success lies in his ability to codify what he has learned in his own varied life (he has changed careers four times and is currently in his fifth) and from those of his clients, and to apply the essence of that learning to each coaching situation. After getting his B.Tech. (Honors) from IIT-Bombay and Master’s in electrical engineering(MSEE) from Stanford University, Dilip worked at various organizations, starting as an individual contributor and then progressing to head an engineering organization of a division of a high-tech company, with $2B in sales, in California’s Silicon Valley. His current interest in coaching resulted from his career experiences spanning nearly four decades, at four very diverse organizations–and industries, including a major conglomerate in India, and from what it takes to re-invent oneself time and again, especially after a lay-off and with constraints that are beyond your control. During the 45-plus years since his graduation, Dilip has reinvented himself time and again to explore new career horizons. When he left the corporate world, as head of engineering of a technology company, he started his own technology consulting business, helping high-tech and biotech companies streamline their product development processes. Dilip’s third career was working as a marketing consultant helping Fortune-500 companies dramatically improve their sales, based on a novel concept. It is during this work that Dilip realized that the greatest challenge most corporations face is available leadership resources and effectiveness; too many followers looking up to rudderless leadership. Dilip then decided to work with corporations helping them understand the leadership process and how to increase leadership effectiveness at every level. Soon afterwards, when the job-market tanked in Silicon Valley in 2001, Dilip changed his career track yet again and decided to work initially with many high-tech refugees, who wanted expert guidance in their reinvention and reemployment. Quickly, Dilip expanded his practice to help professionals from all walks of life. Now in his fifth career, Dilip works with professionals in the Silicon Valley and around the world helping with reinvention to get their dream jobs or vocations. As a career counselor and life coach, Dilip’s focus has been career transitions for professionals at all levels and engaging them in a purposeful pursuit. Working with them, he has developed many groundbreaking approaches to career transition that are now published in five books, his weekly blogs, and hundreds of articles. He has worked with those looking for a change in their careers–re-invention–and jobs at levels ranging from CEOs to hospital orderlies. He has developed numerous seminars and workshops to complement his individual coaching for helping others with making career and life transitions. Dilip’s central theme in his practice is to help clients discover their latent genius and then build a value proposition around it to articulate a strong verbal brand. Throughout this journey, Dilip has come up with many groundbreaking practices such as an Inductive Résumé and the Genius Extraction Tool. Dilip owns two patents, has two publications in the Harvard Business Review and has led a CEO roundtable for Chief Executive on Customer Loyalty. Both Amazon and B&N list numerous reviews on his five books. Dilip is also listed in Who’s Who, has appeared several times on CNN Headline News/Comcast Local Edition, as well as in the San Francisco Chronicle in its career columns. Dilip is a contributing writer to several publications. Dilip is a sought-after speaker at public and private forums on jobs, careers, leadership challenges, and how to be an effective leader.

Disclaimer: Please use this channel at your own discretion. These articles are contributed by our users. We are not responsible or liable for any problems related to the utilization of information of these articles.