Success at Work: 2020 and beyond


To experience success at work, here are the key skills that we need to survive and thrive in the coming decade.

1. Re skill & Cross Skill: Most of us are knowledge workers. It is important to enhance our depth (re skill) and breadth (cross skill) of our skill terrain to remain relevant to the market that we are working for. It is important to discuss with relevant subject matter experts and design a 30, 60 and 90 day plans to re skill and cross skill on the relevant subject matter domains.

2. Focus: Ensure absolute focus in whatever you do. One thing I realized in my experience is that “If we have focus, we have everything with us”. Prioritize key focus areas and ensure you have absolute focus on them. Work towards them in a way that your key stakeholders will be happy with your outputs.

3. Fitness: Gone were the days where health was rest assured. We are in an era where food resources are absolutely polluted. We need to be quite choosy about our intake. We need to do regular exercises and thus celebrate our health and fitness day after day with shining appearance. Please note that for a film actor or a corporate employee, fitness is now becoming the eligible criteria for the continuity. Our body language depends on our fitness. Our body language does matter while presenting ourselves in corporate world.

4. Mental Wellness: It was only in the initial career days where somebody would boost our morale. After passing on certain years, we will come to an era where each of our actions will be evaluated. We need to be our own drivers. We need to realize the fine line between “what is within our control” and “what is beyond our control” so that we can do all our best to influence “what is within our control”. When we start solving problems by focusing on what is within our control, soon we end up resolving bigger problems much effectively. When we start realizing this mathematics of problem solving, we end up as happy individuals. This leads to mental wellness as well. Mental wellness is the mandatory quality because we are knowledge workers

5. Story telling: Just the way children like stories, adults also like to listen relatable, relevant and short stories. Thus, it is important to frame short, crisp and relevant stories such that our listeners will actually understand not the only our objectives but the urge behind them. We need to learn to present our presentations and documentations in a nice story way such that end audience will feel involved and interested to our topic of interest.

6. Availability to the business: Enhance your availability to the business to remain competitive. However, it should not be that you are providing your availability at the cost of your health and peace of mind. You can leverage internet and be virtually available to the business.

7. Alignment: It is important that we align with the business goals and thus important individuals in this process. We need to realize the fine balance between when we can question and when we need to align. In the current competitive speed and conflicting goals, business is certainly tilting towards aligning individuals at the middle management because of the less time at hand and more conflicting individuals at the top level.

8. Adhoc management: However planned we are, adhocism is showering on our day to day work life because of the uncertainties and immaturities of the echo system and people framework we co-exist today. Thus, instead of complaining about adhoc working styles and adhoc work, allocate 20% time each day to address the unforeseen work or handle last minute surprising tasks.

9. Work life balance: It is important that we work in such a way that our work and life priorities are balanced. When we work too much, we are taking too much energy into our “work” bank from our “family” and “health” banks. When we do not balance “work”, “family” and “health” banks, the non-equilibrium will shoot us to our down-most levels when we are at stress.

10. Reflect and Adapt: We are constant students in every walk of our lives. We live with people and responsibilities. Based on the weight-age and credibility parameters, reflect on the feedback received and adapt towards it for better tomorrow.

11. Enhance your network: Our positive net-work is our net-worth. We need to be with value adding and relevant network through exchanging positive value and energy periodically. Thus, it is not worthy to associate with some network. We need to be with value adding network as we have limited time and resources at hand.

12. Employing Trust: Just like farmers cultivate their farming land, we need to cultivate trustworthiness with our honesty in our communication, reliability in delivering on our own promises and being culturally sensitive about our audience to build and employ trust worthiness.

At the end, we need to keep “End” in mind and be clear on “why” we are working. In private sector, our health, skill and positive net-work are our tomorrow… else we will be made to retire tomorrow.

I wish you a happy and successful new year 2020!...