The Power of Choice

5Make Your Effort Effective

HAVING CONFIDENCE IS critically important to your development, but it alone is not enough to enable your long‐term growth. Confidence has to lead to effective effort because effective effort is what expands your skills and capabilities and drives your career. Effective effort gets results or moves you closer to your desired outcomes.

One of the most common mistakes professionals make is to confuse working hard with working effectively.

Germaine wants to be seen as the go‐to person in her department. She works at least ten hours a day processing claims for a casualty insurance company. She's been doing the same for five years, and she's very good at what she does—to the point where she often redoes the work of others on her team in order to meet the expectations of her manager. Recently, her boss asked her to be part of a project team charged with evaluating a new software package, but she declined due to the demands of her workload.

Germaine is working hard, but she is not receiving the best return on her investment of time and energy. She's not learning new skills, she's not developing the skills of others, and she's not expanding the ways in which they contribute to their organizations. I assure you that in her work group, there is someone who is putting in the same number of hours (or maybe even fewer) but who is getting better career traction because their effort is more effective.

If you're working hard but not accomplishing what's important ...