Page 161 - Make Work Great

From Contributor to Advisor

Most likely, she doesn’t fully grasp what’s really transpired. From
her perspective, she just took the next incremental step toward a goal
she’d been working toward for a long time. But consider the impact
on everyone else: she’s just taught them that one of their unquestioned
assumptions about reality was wrong. The surprise removal of such an
assumption leaves only new questions in the minds of the rest of the
group: Was this always possible? Will it be possible again? What other
opportunities have we ignored? Should we make new rules about this?
Can any of us do this, or is the one who did it somehow special?
Our heroine, of course, doesn’t have these questions, because her
reality hasn’t changed. To the others, the world has been disrupted,
while to her, the world still makes sense. As a result, it becomes
apparent to all the other monkeys that if anyone has answers to the
questions plaguing them, she does. In fact, at some level, conscious or
not, her peers begin to suspect that she may have answers not only to
questions that worry them but also to questions they haven’t thought
about yet.
That, as you can imagine, is a lot of responsibility for a monkey.
It’s also a lot of responsibility for you.

The Advice Equation
How often are you asked for advice? How frequently do others ask
permission to bounce something off you or “tap your brain” regard-
ing a problem? How regularly does someone suggest that if you
don’t know the answer, you probably know who will? How often do
you fi nd yourself providing suggestions that people appreciate? The
answers to these questions indicate how your work group regards the
utility of your cultural patterns.
This issue is a bit tricky to discuss. For one thing, the English lan-
guage doesn’t have an exact word for it. The closest nouns are words
like status and reputation. But status implies something about your
level in the organizational hierarchy, and reputation can be used for
anything from how socially desirable you are to how quickly you get

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