Robert Walters has some unconventional advice for those looking to advance in their careers: It’s better to strive to be among the top performers in the workplace than it is to be the best performer.
Walters, a senior vice president at AT&T, says shifting that mindset can help workplace leaders create more achievable benchmarks in the workplace for their employees, rather than fostering competition among colleagues.
“Putting people in a position to succeed and giving them kind of milestone achievements [ensured] that they were feeling … sell-fulfillment,” Walters says.
He says he has experienced this in his own career. Though he admits to adhering more toward a “best performer” mindset as an individual contributor early in his career, he came to realize that attitude didn’t work when trying to improve the performance of a team he was leading.
The turning point came in 2011, when Walters was a director of project management, network planning and engineering, according to his LinkedIn, and that mindset weighed on his relationships with his team.
“Quite frankly, I had less patience and less time allocated toward nurturing relationships with those I didn’t consider top performers,” he says. “What I recognized was I wasn’t raising the median level of performance of those around me.”
After changing his mindset, he says the team was able to achieve a better outcome than originally intended.
“Most things are achieved through a collective team effort,” Walters says. “Instead of thinking that I could solve ‘world hunger,’ I recognized that as a collective group we were able to start rowing in the same direction.”
Experts like bestselling author and leadership expert Simon Sinek suggest a similar approach to what Walters has adopted. Sinek advises employees to not care too much about specific accolades or achievements in the workplace.
“There’s no such thing as winning,” Sinek said at the 2023 World Business Forum. “Yes, it’s good to have goals. There’s no problem with having a target. Sometimes you’ll hit them, and sometimes you’ll miss them. The more important thing is, what’s your momentum?”
Sinek suggests adopting an “infinite mindset,” by which he means focusing on holistic, lasting improvement. Workplace achievements, like an employee of the month award, may come anyways as a result, he says.
Walters has embraced an analogous mindset. He tries to “stack days,” where he focuses on continual improvement every day in the workplace, no matter how small. The compounding effect from that will result in major improvements over time, he says.
“Whether [that day] is a small progression or a large progression, you’ll look back at your career 10 years later in awe of how you’ve progressed,” Walters says.
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