Fingerprints and owning your role

Remember when you first became an employee, a team member, line leader, or manager. One had to find the right balance, prioritise the important things and communicate with the right people to ensure individual and team success.

People strive to be amazing at their jobs, but it’s not always that easy. We all come to work to do a good job, but in our unique roles, what “doing a good job” really is can be unclear especially when you are faced with challenges that bother on increased demand on your abilities. To survive, you would have to own your role and take responsibility for your performance daily.

The human foetus acquires fingerprints at three month’s gestation which makes us all unique. So it’s safe to say that fingerprints are to our body what ownership of our work is to our organisation.

Putting that analogy in perspective, we share our 10 fingerprint guide to owning your role:

1. Understand the part your role plays in delivering on the company’s vision, mission and values

2. Under-promise and over-deliver on your job: ensure you have a reputation of over delivering on your KPIs. Don’t hesitate; be the one to drop the 13th donut into the box.

3. Work for not only your individual success but for the success of your team.

4. Make the necessary sacrifices to get the job done.

5. Show passion and enthusiasm in doing your job: Your head and heart must be involved in your work. Let your colleagues, customers and supervisors sense your passion for your job.

6. Adopt the ‘kaizen’culture, a habit of continuous improvement: Deliberately endeavour to get better at what you do by attending relevant trainings, conferences, getting information, reading books and rubbing minds with other skilled individuals within and outside your field.

7. The customers need comes first: its one thing to know customers are assets and it’s another thing to treat them as such. Customers (internal and external) are the lifeline of any business. Value them and endeavour to leave them with a great experience every time there is interaction.

8. Develop your own personal processes and systems to make your job easier

9. Be cost-conscious and profit-focused: Like in your personal life, always find the best deals and look for ways to get things done without compromising on quality, cost or time. Re-evaluate the current processes you are operating by to see how you can optimise across board.

10. Always find the alignment between your role and your organisation’s goals which enables you put in discretionary effort.

Establish credibility and take ownership of your deliverable – it has your fingerprint on it.

Ngozi Adebiyi