How to Turn the Job You Don’t Want Into a Masterclass for the Job You Do

How to Turn the Job You Don’t Want Into a Master Class for the Job You Do

OPENING STORY

The main reason I was there was to learn Defense Acquisition and help all the civilians there understand the Navy and what the Navy needs. Our day-to-day job, when we are that junior, is to support more senior Naval Officers and Civilian Program Managers.

If you've never worked around defense acquisition, it requires learning a completely new language. For the first few months, I had notes all over the margins of my planner: look up this acronym, figure out what this means. Wait… is that an acronym in an acronym? Yes, yes it is. : )

Eventually, once you’ve been immersed in it long enough, it starts to make sense.

So what do seasoned program managers do with a young Lieutenant who is eager, optimistic, loves to learn, and is just happy to be there? In my case, they gave me a tiny job. I mean very tiny.

My first job was to track statutory and regulatory acquisition documents through the routing chain. They handed me a checklist, gave me a few directions and pointed me in the right direction and told me to get to work… from that day on, I was following paperwork from office to office, making sure it got reviewed, signed and then moved on to the next person – of course some of the major documents had to go up to the Assistant Secretary of the Navy level and some of them even had to go to the Department of War level. (Back then, it was the DOD.)

That being said, even a Lieutenant shouldn’t be able to screw that up, ha ha. I had a lot of experts around to help me with the Pentagon routing processes.

I had a couple of other little jobs, bolted onto the side, but nobody was pretending like I was in some huge leadership role. It was more like: “Here is something you can do, try to be useful, and maybe some of the acquisition language will rub off on you.”

I could have done exactly that… I could have done my tiny job, I could have even decided to deliver it with a high degree of excellence — while looking at it as a black and white task list that I was checking off, one by one.

I could have gone home every night like nothing special had happened. No one would have thought I did anything wrong... the work would have been completed so my boss would have been satisfied and life would have gone on.

The thing is… as I spent time around the Program Managers, and other program leadership… a spark was lit within me. The people I worked with were true professionals, the work was very technical (which I loved) and I could see our team was made of the literal people who were delivering the capability to the ships.

They were leading these huge capability-development efforts, they had team members all over the country, and I remember thinking very clearly: I want to do THAT someday: I want to be a Program Manager.

Once I had that epiphany, the little document routing job took on a much different level of seriousness to me. I had to do the tiny job I had been given, but I started using it to learn everything I could about the job I wanted.

To route one of those documents correctly, I had to understand the purpose of the document. I had to know who the chief engineer, the contracting officer, the Chief Tester, the software development lead, the key Fleet Stakeholders, and the Pentagon POCs were.

I had to know who was required to review what, who endorsed it, who actually had authority for final approval, and why all of those people were in the review chain in the first place.

I needed to know what a good document looked like because eventually my Program Manager might ask me, simply, "Is this ready?" and I wanted to be able to answer him properly.

Sometimes I integrated the changes myself — but most of the time the contractors, who were paid to be exquisite Subject Matter Experts, drafted the updates and I was simply the document wrangler - chasing down people and signatures. I spent a lot of time figuring out why a document was stuck with one person… and then finding ways to get it moving again.

Years later, I did actually become a Program Manager, and when I looked back, I saw that little document routing job differently.

I didn’t just route documents. I learned how the whole program fit together. I was learning who had authority, who had expertise, more nuanced information about our customer, stakeholders I did not know before, and how a decision moved through our large organization and across our entire industry, when needed.

A few years after that first assignment, I was assigned as a Program Manager on a newer version of that same capability, leading my own team of incredible professionals.

When I was running around, chasing signatures as a Lieutenant, there was no guarantee that I would get an opportunity to lead my own program. I just knew I wanted it, and I was going to soak in as much as I could from any job that gave me access to learn from these incredible leaders, at the time.

So – now… let’s talk about the “THREE REPS IDEA”

A while back I heard an interview with Tom Brady, the one many call the GOAT of all NFL Quarterbacks, talking about a concept that reminded me of that “document routing” period in my own career.

When he was at the University of Michigan during his college career… there were times when he was buried on the quarterback depth chart and might get only two or three practice reps, per session, while the starting QB and the second string got 99% of all the other opportunities to shine in front of the coaches.

And at some point, with help from Greg Harden, a “Peak performance coach” for athletes at Michigan…

Even though Brady was third string, Greg challenged Tom to compete… and to focus on what he could control.

Tom Brady took that advice to heart and decided to get the most out of the reps he did have. He brought focus, enthusiasm, intelligence, and talent to each opportunity he had, to show what he was capable of.

Brady said, “When I got my three reps, I turned them into the three most important downs in the history of Michigan football, and with my energy I brought my teammates along with me.”

It worked: His second year, he got more reps and made it into a couple games, the third year, he won the backup job, and then in his fourth year, he became the starting QB. Tom Brady could have spent the entire practice thinking about all the reps somebody else was getting, or he could decide to do something with the small opportunity he did have.

I love this idea because it is practical. It helps you focus on what you can control and keep your attitude in a powerful place. Brady could not rewrite the depth chart himself any more than I could walk into a new command, as a Junior Officer with zero acquisition experience and declare that I was a Program Manager.

The decision I could make was how I was going to show up: I was going to have a good attitude and to execute my tiny task with excellence.

I was inexperienced and swimming in a sea of some of the most talented professionals I had ever worked with. If you have ever heard about the “Proximity Principle,” there is something to be said about the opportunities you have to learn from the people around you, especially when you look around and the people around you are highly professional, deep experts, and awesome humans.

But there are also times when we spend so much energy looking at the opportunities we did not get that we miss what we could be learning from the one sitting right in front of us.

And I think this is especially important for you to consider if you KNOW you are capable of more.

I want you to consider: How can you use the scope of what you are already responsible for now that would let you practice part of the work you wish you were already doing?

You know I don’t believe that every career problem can be solved by “working harder”.

There will be times when you find yourself with work you really don’t want to be doing but there is always a level of agency that you do have. If you go back to the “Why You Are Stuck,” episode… you will hear many of the reasons why you could feel stuck and what you can do to get things moving again…

And, after you figure out the parts you do have control over, you have the opportunity to decide how you are going to walk into the world and execute.

You could ask for a different assignment (maybe that is possible in your situation) or you could actively decide to learn something from the assignment you have now.

If you have been given a small project, maybe you can use it to understand the stakeholders instead of only finishing the task. Who cares about this? What are they trying to accomplish? What tradeoffs are they making? Who actually has authority? What would make this decision difficult?

If you are not the person making the decision, you can still practice thinking like the person who has the authority to make it.

Before you bring the issue forward, what do you think the options are? What are you worried about? What would someone more senior be worried about? What would you recommend, and why?

That is what I was doing with those acquisition documents before I ever heard about Tom Brady’s experience. I was not trying to turn document routing into some glamorous job, but I was paying attention to everything the job could teach me about the work I aspired to do later.

Here's your experiment for this week:

Pick one place where you are frustrated because you are not getting the opportunity, access, authority, or development you want.

First, write down what is actually outside your control. Do not sugarcoat it. If there is a real obstacle, write down what the barrier is that you see.

Then ask yourself: what is still within your control?

Then find one rep you can take this week that lets you practice something you are going to need in the job you want next.

Just choose one useful rep – and execute it with excellence.

Then pay attention to what you learn from it. Maybe you discover a capability you need to develop. Maybe you find out you are more ready than you thought. Maybe you learn something about the organization that changes your path.

This is where you might encounter another problem that often shows up once you start building this kind of evidence. The right people may still have no idea you are doing it. That is what I want to talk about next - how you make your thinking and your capability easier for other people to see without turning yourself into somebody you don’t want to be.

If you want help with that now, the free Visibility Course is linked in the show notes. And if you try the experiment this week, I would love to hear what you noticed.