The Process is Everything

I recently got a promotion. I’m happy about this because I believe I earned it and am looking forward to a new challenge. To receive this promotion, I had to complete the whole interview process for the role and compete with outside applicants who had years more experience than me, which isn’t an uncommon characteristic of qualified applicants since I have less than 10 months of experience in my current field. When I learned why I was selected for the role I was somewhat surprised by the reasoning. 

In the role I am now getting ready to leave I performed very well. It would be hard to find positive metrics where I wasn’t top of the pack and even the ones where I might slightly lag behind there could be an argument made against their statistical validity. If I am extremely critical, I could argue against the statistical significance of some of the places where I sat at the top as well. Regardless, it was very clear that I was excelling and ready for a new challenge. Even before the interview process for the new position, I had already invented projects for me to work on because the current workload didn’t fill up all of my plate. I thought all of this made me an obvious choice for moving up.

I won’t go into the whole interview process and will save you from the internal drama and frustrations it might have brought about. I also won’t give the entire reasoning on why I was selected for this position because despite the last paragraph being about how awesome I think I am there is a long list of reasons I can come up with for why I should have been passed up on this opportunity. After all, just because I did good in my current role doesn’t mean I am ready for this new position. There are so many factors that went into this decision that I do not know the complete story of that it would be misleading to try and summarize them all. Additionally, I am not writing this piece to explain how I got this role. The purpose of this article is to delve into the one characteristic I was told that made the decision maker believe I was the most qualified, my ability to develop a process.

It's all about the process

For me, the process is everything. Everything I do follows the rhythm to the song of myself. Look at this blog where I write reports on almost every book I read. See the exact placement of everything on my desk. Look at the chart I use to schedule all my meals for the month and determine every grocery I need to buy. Look at the spreadsheet where I track every movie I’ve seen at AMC. It’s all part of my process.

It’s important not to confuse process with organization. Yes, I am very neat, but that is part of the process. I make sure I have a schedule and know what is coming next so I can be prepared before it arrives. When I am aware of everything I am doing, I can see what I am not doing. Why has it been so long since I’ve written a new book report? Am I slacking off or busy with other projects? I’ve been to the theater three times this week and still want to go again because I have nothing else to do. Well, what could I be doing with this free time? If I don’t feel like being productive, why is that? With this kind of thinking in my personal life, it bleeds into my work life.

Everything comes down to the process. Consistent success is determined by the processes behind the work and how adaptable it is to changing conditions. What works one day may not work the next. It’s no surprise that in school and in life, I have always been most interested in learning new frameworks to analyze the world with. Most of my personal reading has to do with understanding a specific system and the rules it follows whether it be radical candor, scrum, design principles, behavioral economics, etc.

Early on when I committed myself to reading more and found myself reading all these books that teach field principles, I noticed patterns. Not repetition or authors citing works that I had already read. There were overlaps in what seemed to be completely opposite areas of thinking. When reading The Creative Act I noticed how Rick Rubin’s description of finding and developing the right creative idea mirrored the double-diamond method of problem solving that Don Norman outlined in The Design of Everyday Things. Why does the right-brain creative approach look so similar to the left-brain analytical approach?

Solid frameworks are universal in application. Methodologies for thinking through a problem, whether business or artistic, should always work when implemented correctly. Stairs work the same way in all parts of the world. (I’m assuming.) I didn’t get promoted because I was a good performer, I was promoted because I read Hooked and understood how to develop good habits that would make me successful in my position. I used scrum principles to iterate my approach to doing work and design principles to think through unique problems.

How will my processes change as I enter this new role?

Like I said earlier, what worked yesterday won’t necessarily work tomorrow. This new role involves new tasks with different measurements of success. Even if I improve in all the areas that I have been doing well in I can still easily fail. Using the tools I used to develop the processes in my current role, I can create good habits in this new one.

The first step is identifying what success looks like. Once I understand that I can see what measurements determine success and find the factors that contribute to that measurement. After identifying those factors, I can see what actions contribute to those factors. How is what I am told to do aligning with those elements and contributing to success? Is there anything I am doing that seems counterintuitive or not as efficient as it could be? What could I change? Has anyone else tried to make those changes before? If so, did it work for them or how did it not work for them? Once I have an established workflow, I can see what does and doesn’t work. I take that information and repeat the same question process.

In asking myself these kinds of questions I can identify what competencies will help me excel in the role. Often times they are different than what I expected or even what I was told would be useful. In my BDR role, I found that organization was far more important than objection handling despite hearing from practically everyone that I should be prioritizing the latter without mentioning the former.

With my limited experience, I have nothing down to a science yet. I’m sure some unknown unknowns will pop up sooner rather than later that will force me to rethink my approach to everything and I am going in with that kind of flexibility. Only time will tell me where this kind of thinking will take me. Hopefully it’s to success.

Of course, first I need to determine what success is.