Doing the dirty work can lead to glory.
I love playing volleyball. When I first started playing, I was pretty terrible at it. And at 5'11, I (for some reason) fancied myself a "hitter." It's all I wanted to do, hit.
I would play three or four nights a week...regularly going to open-play gyms and consistently be the last person picked. Finally, a guy I played with pulled me aside and said "learn to do the grunt work." He saw my confusion written all over my face and said "all of these guys can hit. You aren't going to get better than them overnight, so, do the things they can't do or don't want to do. Learn to be a great passer. Become a great setter."
So I did. I focused on passing and setting. Over time, I wasn't picked dead last anymore. Eventually, because the really good hitters needed a good setter, I started getting picked near the top. And then a crazy thing started happening--they started teaching me how to be a hitter.
In volleyball, the glory often goes to the big hitter or the big blocker. But those hits don't happen without a solid pass and a solid set. Our professional careers are no different. Early in my career, I noticed the 90+ day receivables in my business unit were over $500,000. For an organization our size...it wasn't a sustainable situation.
Worse, it was seen as grunt work which no one really wanted to tackle. I raised my hand for that project. I re-wrote our receivables policy. I created an incentive program that caused our customers to pay us on time. Over time, those 90+ receivable reports were sub-six figures. Consistently.
Tackling a project no one else wanted to do got me on the radar screen of our leadership group. Early on, the work I was doing wasn't going right. In fact, I still have a copy of my first-draft guidelines I put together where our division director wrote in big, red ink: "please don't send this out as-is!" I believe she must have used up all the red ink in her pen on that rough draft.
But I was given some rope. I was coached. Because again, it was work no one else wanted to do...so why punish the one person that was willing to do it? That cultivation and patience allowed me to (eventually) find some success with the new policies and programs.
Pitching those programs let me gain experience in a low-pressure environment. Those pitches taught me how to get better at putting programs together and present the ideas more clearly. Doing the grunt work prepared me to take on the bigger and 'better' projects. I started pitching a lot of new programs and the amount of leeway I was given grew with each endeavor. Eventually, leadership came to me to ask me to roll out a new program.
I see this scenario play out all the time in volleyball. The big, tall guys come strutting in. He is going to show us what a gift he is to the sport. And, often times they are great hitters + great blockers. But when they go to pass? It's a train wreck. And even worse they don't get the chance to hit very often because they can't pass. They didn't prepare the right way. So, you're a great hitter, but you can't get the ball to the setter because you can't pass. The result? You don't get a chance to use the one skill you do have.
In competitive volleyball, you can see the difference. After a hitter has a great hit...the first person they go to is their setter. The next? The one that got the ball to the setter. The hitter knows who made their hit happen. Without that grunt work? No glory.
So, do the grunt work. Experiment and learn on those less-than-glamorous projects. Leadership always remembers the people who are willing to take those projects on. And they are always willing to give a bit more freedom to fail. Keep at it, do the job well and they'll ask you to move into the hitter position because now you have all the tools needed for success.
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