Enjoying your work without thinking of rewards.
As humans, most of what we do is always about getting an answer to the question “ What is in it for me?”. While this is perfectly fair, should everything you do always directly relate to some expectation? How about doing things because you really like doing it and want to excel in what you do?
Let us talk about corporate culture, specifically software industry. You start your career as a junior engineer or an intern. It has just been a year and you start comparing yourself with others. You are thinking: “That guy joined in February last year and he already got promoted, what should I do now? How do I get promoted” You see someone get a bonus and you feel dejected that you didn’t get it. Next few months or even a year is only spent in worrying about this and checking with your manager every single time on that elusive promotion. You speak to more engineers about this ‘big issue’ and figure out that 25% of the folks who joined around the same time got promoted, you worry more. You decide to reach out to your manager’s boss just in case he/she has more ideas on exactly why you didn’t get promoted. Finally a year or two later, you do get promoted. Six months or a year later, the cycle continues. Have you realised that all the unnecessary worrying has most likely set you back a few months? Instead of enjoying what you do, innovating further and pushing yourself, you have a single goal now — Promotion or that bonus or whatever reward you were after. What about your manager? Would he/she be looking forward to talk about your promotion aspects every time you meet? There are lot of things beyond the control of you as an engineer and even beyond the control of your manager. What should you really have done?
Focus on things you can control
What you have working for you is a great job and a set of expectations from the job and the level you are in. If you are unsure about the expectations at your level, make sure you clearly check with your manager. Now that you know what you are supposed to do, how about taking it one or two steps further? Some very simple examples: If one of the expectation is being an expert programmer in one language, how about developing skills on top of that? Once you know you are an expert and you have mastered everything it takes, why don’t you start coaching junior engineers in the skill you have, look at open-source projects, join some meet-ups and get more ideas, improve the application you are involved in with the ideas you now have. How about working with other teams and sharing the knowledge and even building common reusable pieces of code? Was all these part of the expectations? No, but you now have exceeded the expectation! Focussing on the aspect that you can control and becoming better at it is the way to go. What happens now?
You are enjoying what you do and now have slowly unknowingly started behaving like an engineer at the next level.
Let go of things you can’t control
When you get a reward is not something that is in your hand. Let go of it. If you have a worthy manager or colleagues with whom you have worked, rest assured. Your phenomenal progress is being noticed and it is just a matter of time before you get what you deserve.
As one of my very good mentor once said: Act, behave, work and show results as if you are already in the next level. True measure of success is when your coworkers look at your designation and are surprised because they were expecting you to be 1–2 levels higher than what your designation currently says.
