The Best Professional Advice I've Ever Gotten
If you're reading this (thank you for reading, by the way), is very likely that you can use this advice:
"While doing your job, do your best to make everyone else's life easier"
The best thing about this piece of advice is that it can be contextualized to pretty much anyone to great success. Today, I'm going to talk about how this works in the professional world of financial services and hopefully give you the contacts to apply it yourself.
What Does It Mean?
Financial professionals tend to have a career ladder where they start at the bottom of a department or firm that offers a certain type of service and gradually move up. As they climb the corporate ladder, they take on more responsibility and begin to manage those below them. For those in client-facing roles this can also take the role of interacting more with clients. In these contexts, "making life easier" for others could mean:
Anticipating your managers questions and addressing them early
Going out of your way to document things clearly to make it easier to review your work
Taking the extra time to provide more context in a client email so they know exactly what you want (and hopefully eliminating some back and forth)
Being proactive with questions and addressing issues quickly to avoid them compounding later
Taking on some of the responsibilities of your higher-ups, or delegates.
Like many of the other topics discussed on this website, your personal context will determine how many of these apply to you and which ones provide the best ROI.
Is important to understand that outside taking on the responsibilities of your higher-ups, this advice does not mean doing other people's jobs. It ultimately comes down to doing your own job well and making the extra effort to reduce friction between your role and their role. For example, if I am performing a financial statement audit, I cannot just go in and prepare the client schedules for them. But what I can do is meet with the client beforehand and provide them an example of what we need to see to audit them efficiently. This is especially true if I know that I'm going to go back with questions if I didn't tell them exactly what I wanted.
Why Does It Matter?
There's an old saying that goes "a chain is only as strong as its weakest link." This can be adapted to modern times by saying "the process is only as effective as the people executing it." You could be the world's most efficient consultant and provide so much value to your clients, but only if they get you the things you need to do your job properly. In those circumstances, for you to get better at your job, you need to help other people work with you better. The secret is: you don't need to be anywhere near your best to get value out of this strategy! In practice, taking that extra step to help those you work with and reduce friction and communication will only make you better at your job. In many cases, the person who takes the extra effort to communicate and work with the people around them will be more effective than a more competent person who doesn't take that extra initiative.
The next time you are performing your job, try to think of ways that you can put in that extra effort to make other peoples’ lives easier as it relates to what you’re doing. By taking those little extra steps over time, you will become much more effective at what you do!