Details matter: When considering professional success, focus on the ‘how,’ not just the ‘what’

While it’s tempting to base your career success on hitting the peaks and avoiding the valleys, some experts caution against taking an all-or-nothing approach to assessing your job performance. Instead, they suggest that you focus on the ordinary days so you can truly determine whether or not you enjoy — and are good at — what you do.

Surviving the fall

Fannon, who worked in the HR departments of Rutgers University and the University of Wisconsin, says she had a client who was on track to hit new sales highs, only to learn that the product she had been selling was sold off to another company. Instead of transferring her to the new owner, she was simply laid off.

“It was a huge crash for her. She had made the product so viable and so attractive to potential clients that all of a sudden, there was a value attached to the product that hadn’t been there before. And when it came time to acknowledge that new, higher value, the company did so by simply letting her go while they enjoyed the profits from her work,” Fannon says.

Since this particular client came to Fannon in the middle of her job search, her resume was very focused on that recent experience. “An employer might look at that and think ‘apparently you weren’t valuable enough to keep around,” Fannon says. “I helped her change her resume so that her work on building the product, her day-to-day responsibilities and rituals that led to increased sales, was front and center.”

Hand-in-hand approach

Thomas Wietecha, an executive coach in Los Angeles, says It’s almost impossible to separate the work from the end result since we only remember the

work that went into good, not necessarily the mediocre. “This goes all the way back to when we were in school. We won’t remember studying really hard for a chemistry test unless we received an A-plus or maybe, an F. No one

remembers how much they studied for a test when they ended up getting an 81,” he says. “No one cares about the middle of the curve.”

As a result, Wietecha says employees don’t put too much value in the work they put in to get to the middle. Still, Wietecha says it’s worth examining the paths that lead to all your work results since an examination of the minutiae can lead to some interesting insights. “The devil’s in the details, right? It’s the

minutiae where the magic happens. It’s the small little things like following up on emails or making sure a proposal is in your potential client’s hands at 4:59 p.m. the day you speak on the phone instead of 9:01 a.m. the next morning,” he says.

Deep understanding

James Evans says he began scanning his written notes from his daily calendar a few years ago. As a result, he began understanding the importance of the smaller things he was doing to attain the larger wins, not just at work but also in his personal life. “I’m a ridiculous notetaker but I’d take notes and then do nothing with them,” says the

pharmaceutical sales rep in Sarasota, Florida. “Once I scanned everything from this year in, I had a pretty clear account of the things I did that worked and the things I did that didn’t.”

Career consultant Fannon says notetakers make the best employees because when they read over their notes, they’re constantly assessing their work.