During my senior year of high school and my freshman year of college I worked as a runner for a law firm. I filed legal paperwork with the courts, bought office supplies, made copies, filed paperwork and performed a number of other office duties.
It was a good job and paid well for a high school and college kid. It taught me a lot and I feel like it gave me an advantage about knowing and understanding what an office environment was and how to be a professional as I started my career. It also taught me how to work through challenges and think on my feet when I didn’t know how to do something or understand how to do something.
I mean, I was 17 and 18 years old and was filing official court papers and doing other legal type work that I had never been trained or taught to do. I was basically learning on the fly. The fact that I was able to learn and perform the job at a high level gave me a tremendous amount of confidence in my ability to learn and perform at a high level.
One thing that also stood out to me, although not right at first, was what it meant to be dependable. When I was sent on an errand or given an assignment, I attacked it with everything I had. I took great pride in doing a good job and doing it quickly. I was trying to maximize my time and make sure I was doing everything I could to earn my paycheck.
After about a year of working for this law firm I had another employee tell me, “It’s ok for you to take your time on these errands and go get a drink or run some personal errands while you’re out. You go out and get back so quick. Take your time.”
These thoughts had never crossed my mind. Like I said, I wanted to earn my paycheck and build a good reputation for myself. It turns out I had. These comments came shortly after the firm hired another guy to come in and do what I was doing while I was in class and couldn’t be at the office. This guy would be given the same assignments and struggled to figure them out but would also be gone for hours on end when given an errand.
An errand that took me 30 minutes would take him two hours. Nobody ever knew whee this guy was or what he was doing. As a result, every time he went out on an assignment, I looked better and better. It became clear who the dependable one was. Unknown to me, many project and assignments got held until I was in the office because people knew they could depend on me.
At the time, I really had no idea, until that colleague pulled me aside. In addition to telling me that I could take my time, she told me what was going on with this other guy and that I was the one people trusted and depended on. I was flattered.
I was also a little irritated. Because of my dependability I was given more projects and assignments. It was good to have earned so much trust but I quickly found myself swamped with project and struggled to keep up. Meanwhile, my colleague never seemed to have much to do. He came in and put time in but never really had a lot of work to do.
Over the course of my career I’ve had this same experience multiple times. Most recently I worked with a guy that had more years experience than me but he had a reputation of not being very good. It didn’t take long to see that he had earned this reputation. In every aspect, he was the last person to speak up and volunteer to help or chip in. When he did get an assignment he was the last to complete it or the first to delegate it. He was lucky in many cases that he worked with people committed to achieving high levels of success so he could ride their coat tails and piggyback off their success. His assignments would often get accomplished by somebody else without the bosses knowledge.
He wouldn’t give credit to the team but would take the credit for himself. It didn’t take long for him to lose the respect of the team and for everybody to know that he wasn’t about to do any real work or make any significant contribution. It was well known though that he would take credit for any success though.
More than 25 years since this first experience, I think I’ve learned how to deal with and handle it better. I still can’t take 2 or 3 hours to run an errand and still push myself to accomplish as much as I can and earn my paycheck.
In this recent example, we had an account that we worked on together to put together a proposal. The client signed off on it and he was supposed to lead the account. The client would call and could never get him but could always get me. As a result, the client kept calling me. It became evident that this guy wasn’t going to engage so I took the account over.
It turns out the account turned into a highly successful and highly visible account. The account specialized in events and the first event was a huge success. I felt that I contributed significantly to that success as did the client, the media and the general public. After the event my colleague approached me and said, “Thanks for letting me be involved.”
I didn’t hesitate. I responded with, “I begged you to take the lead on this account and you wouldn’t. The client knew it and knew they could trust me so you earned this.” The client retained us as his PR service provider and acknowledged that it was due to my efforts. In private the client old me that if my colleague would have been involved he wouldn’t have kept us on because he wasn’t impressed and knew he wouldn’t have gotten the result she got with me because I was responsive and dependable.
Again, I was flattered. There are huge benefits to being dependable and working hard. It helps you build your brand and ensure success. In these instances I didn’t have to tell everybody what I was doing. People saw it for themselves and appreciated it. My colleagues in each of these examples spent the bulk of their time trying to persuade and prove to people the value they were adding. People knew exactly what value they were adding and it showed in the way they worked with and treated them.
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