Find out what your superpowers are, and then put them work
If you start wearing a cape at the office, you’ll probably draw a few stares. Fortunately, you can find other ways to show off your superpowers at work. If I were able to give someone just one piece of professional advice, it would be to figure out what your superpowers are. others struggle with? What special skill have you spent extra time developing? What can you offer that others can’t? One of my favorite interview questions is to ask people what their superpowers are. Understand what those are. Take off your humility hat for a minute and try to get into a more boastful mindset. Ask your friends, your colleagues, your managers. You might be surprised what comes back. Once you identify your superpowers, it’s about finding roles, companies, and opportunities where you can use them. You’re never going to be in a job where you can use those superpowers 100 percent of the time. (If you can, more power to you!) But be sure to put yourself in a situation where you can put them to work. From there, make sure you are using those superpowers to align with your manager and your team on expectations. It’s surprising how rarely that actually happens. You can only exceed expectations if you know what the expectations are. You can’t assume that your manager is going to set those for you. Be proactive talking about them. Check in on them. Clarify them. To me, identifying the expectations is the potential weakness threatening every superhero. Once you’ve actually done that, from there, it’s about communicating regularly, and doing what you say you’re going to do. When you can’t do something, or you’re blocked, or you’re stuck, communicate that and work through it. It gets pretty easy to exceed expectations from there. In comic books, every superhero has an arch enemy. But in the work world, that conflict is almost always unnecessary. Some people complain their enemy is a “bad boss.” But is that really the case, or is it an illusion? Most people, including bosses, are trying to do the best they can given the situation they are in. While there might be some bad actors in your company -- one of those might even be your manager -- he or she probably is working through challenges, too. If you perceive your boss is “bad,” reflect on why you feel that way and what role, honestly, you can play in making the best of a difficult relationship. If you’re doing things right and managing that, most likely someone will notice. After all, everyone loves a superhero. Dan Kessler is president of Energage, a Philadelphia-based research and consulting firm that surveyed more than 2.5 million employees at more than 6,000 organizations in 2017. Energage is The Denver Post’s research partner for Top Workplaces.