Owning your future
February 2025
In a professional environment, you have two options: you can follow, or you can lead. In order to take ownership of your future, you want to spend as much time as possible leading.
It’s important to understand, though, that you work in a collaborative environment. You have to be humble and open minded, and you have to work well with others. This is not about only doing what you like. It’s about having a win-win mentality, where you get something and the rest of the organisation gets something as well. Otherwise, you are going to fail. Nobody wants to be around someone that’s selfish and/or full of themselves.
In fact, a successful way to approach this is finding the gaps in ownership in your organisation. Those gaps are where you’ll find most of the freedom of action. If you identify work that nobody wants to do, you can get (almost) total freedom while doing it. You can experiment and find a fun way to get that work done, while solving a real problem for your organisation.
It’s not simple, though. The day to day inertia can get you into a vicious cycle that leaves you with no time to focus on your future. You need to be aware of this, understand when it is happening to you, and break out of it.
Remember, the end goal is to own your career, your future.
With that in mind, let’s get on with it!
Breaking the day-to-day cycle
Owning your future starts with you. This is important, no matter how obvious it sounds. You won’t be able to be proactive with your goals unless you start taking action, so you need to start taking the time to invest in yourself.
Finding the time to work on your future can be difficult, though. It’s really easy to fall into the trap of being constantly busy at work. If that’s your problem, start by taking a good look at on what do you spend your time. As a first step, stop working on stuff that doesn’t have any impact. This work usually come as useless meetings, repeatable manual work, features that aren’t worth it, etc. Each organisation is different, so you need to identify this type of work in your environment.
Be strong and just stop doing it. If it causes a problem, come back to it, but most likely, it will be OK. Taking this step is going to give you back enough time to work on what matters to you.
I can’t stress how important this first step is. Taking your time back is what you need as a foundation to build on. Keep checking every week, even every day, if you are wasting your time. If you are, stop it.
Win-win thinking
Now that you have time, the next step is to start thinking about what you want to do with it.
There are many things you might want to do. For example, you might want to spend the time reading novels, or learning to play the ukulele, or going to the swimming pool. All those things are good, I’m doing them in a regular basis, but they’re unlikely to help your organisation. You need to find work that you want to do that has an impact in your company. The simplest ways to do this is by improving existing flows and by finding gaps in ownership.
Improve existing flows
You probably have some ideas on how to improve things in your organisation. It can be many things, from lack of automation, to strategy definition, sharing knowledge, or even learning new things. Any issue you have identified on existing flows, go ahead and start fixing them one step at a time.
Additionally, you should also aim to change how you are doing things. Use the extra time you now have to identify how you can change your ways of working, so they are more align with what you like. Nobody is going to complain, because your motivation is going to be higher and your results would be even better than they are now.
One example of this type of change can be how you deal with meetings. Most people find many meetings boring. What can you change to make those boring meetings better?
In the end, you need to identify the pain points, and work on how to remove them or make them less painful and more fun.
Find gaps in ownership
It is frustrating when something is not own by anyone. It makes progress slow, because nobody is driving it. Many people feel this, but not many act on it.
You have to look at lack of ownership as an opportunity, because that’s what it is. If nobody owns a project, or a task, or whatever it is, you can basically do almost anything you want without any resistance. It’s a sandbox to experiment and grow.
When you take ownership, you are also moving things forward, which is exactly what the organisation needs. There are many advantages for you on filling this gap: visibility, career growth, and personal growth. You just need to deliver.
Deliver to build trust
This strategy only works if you deliver. In order to enter the virtuous cycle you need to own your future, you need to follow through so people trust you. If people trust you, they will listen to you and give you the time to work on your ideas. If you keep delivering, they will trust you more, and give you more time to work on more ideas. Keep delivering and get the organisation as a whole to trust you. At that point, people will start to rely on you to guide them, which means even more control over your future.
Trust is really the key. But trust is not just keeping your promises, it’s also about letting people know if you are letting them down.
Communicate what’s coming
People want to know what’s coming. Your task is to communicate frequently to avoid surprises. This allow people to adapt and to plan ahead. It’s important that you do this because it’s the right things to do… but it also shows them that you care about their time and their peace of mind.
There is a more subtle reason to communicate what’s happening next. It gives others a way to have skin in the game, to feel invested in the project. If you make others participate of your work often, they can help you with feedback or by collaborating more directly with you. They start thinking of that project as something partly of their own, and become allies that you can rely on eventually.
Lastly, communicating frequently gives you an opportunity to build a relationship with the people you are communicating with. This is important because it’s easier to trust someone you know than a stranger. And it is really all about trust.
Communicate outcomes
It’s important that people know what you have achieved and the impact you are having. Similarly to the previous point, people won’t think of you as a stranger, and they’ll also start believing in you. It’s another way of building trust.
This type of communication doesn’t take a lot of time. A simple email, a slack message, you can be done in five minutes. However, people usually forget this last step. Don’t be like most people, instead of moving on to your next problem so soon, take your time and let other people know about what you just did.
That’s all!