Leverage as a Career Heuristic
"Many past episodes we talk about some of the pitfalls of our biases as of our cognitive distortions and often this discussion turns to the concept of heuristic here risks being he kind of rules of thumb that we use when making snap judgments and here is six are incredibly important unfortunately often they get a negative rap been on this show so in today's episode I WanNa talk about a specific heuristic the you can use to kind of drive your career growth James Jonathan Cottrell and you're listening to Develope my going the show is self driven developers find clarity perspective and purpose in their careers before we talk about the ristic I want to discuss today I want to take a step back and think about how we as developers as engineers designers donors how do we set our goals of course in the context of a company you may have revenue goals you may have you know official okay ours everyone agrees on but there's a distinct line in the sand between the common goals making more money and the more specific goals like having a positive impact on a particular group of people no matter how you create your goals almost everyone falls back to some kind of basic rules of thumb for example almost every once whatever they do to be sustainable and I don't necessarily mean environmentally sustainable of course that could be a part of your values the people don't tend to set out with the expectation and the desire to fail or to stop doing something that they're doing quickly the Hicks of earning resources or social recognition social appreciation these are the heuristic we tend to share and these serious six can kind of be automatic they're built in we don't have to sit down and write down that we want Social Nisshin we know how to sit down and write down that we want more resources so that we can survive and thrive so we have a bunch of these automatic curious expert what if we wanted to kind of create or build another set of heuristic on top of this most of the time when we think about our values news it is not necessarily at the heuristic level in other words there aren't really rules of thumb we have to think very hard about how we measure certain decisions against the the values today I wanna talk about a heuristic that will help you grow your career that may not necessarily be obvious it may not necessarily pop out to you from your nature or your subconscious but before we get into talking about this particular heuristic I want to introduce it with it a caveat and that is that no one is going to care about your career more than you do think about that for Ramona no one will have the capability of carrying about your career more than you do now many of you have probably heard this in some form or another that nobody's going to care about your life or your job or your income more than you do and it's true but some of the connotation nations need to be cleared up here this doesn't mean that no one else cares about your career at all and also doesn't mean that everyone else is out to get you or that they will put their careers above yours very often decisions are mutually benefit missile they benefit both your career and the other person's so have to be careful when we are thinking about making moves for our own careers we have to be careful in assuming that no one else cares at all about our careers when the truth is probably somewhere in between I've heard some pushback on this idea also from the angle that other people can't care as much about my career as as I do and I think the the better ways think about this as no one else will invest as much in your career as you will no one else will invest as much in your careers you will and when we think about it this way they he clears up any kind of confusion so let's talk about this heuristic I will talk about what the heuristic is them we're GonNa do a quick sponsor break in come back and talk about how it applies in particular scenarios in your career you're going to have moments where you have to you negotiate and negotiation isn't always about getting a better salary it's also not about getting a promotion of course those are moments of negotiation but you're negotiating all the time negotiation is out of our lives pretty much every day now we often think about negotiation as getting the Best Bang for our buck getting a better price on something but negotiations much more than that at a fundamental level negotiation is the process of resolution the process of finding common ground with another person in order to take the next step essentially anytime you are making decisions a specially when you're making collaborative decisions you probably have some dynamic of negotiation happening additionally you can imagine that negotiation happens within ourselves as well we seem to have two sides in an even decision the one side that wants to do the thing that it is immediately gratifying or maybe the thing that is safe and the other side that wants to do the thing that's long-term better for us or maybe a bit more risky often the decision making process for an individual is kind of a mock trial between these two sides thing to arguments of each one and then deciding which one is the most persuasive and so it benefits us to understand and to be good good and negotiating pretty much all negotiation relies on leverage and this is the heuristic the you can use used to grow your career now I want to be clear that I think there are a lot of ethical implications in this discussion because leverage can be anes Bhai totally innocent and even beneficial processes where you can gain leverage through very unethical processes even illegal processes like tale in the same way that earning resources as a heuristic you can come by those resources in both illegal in legal ways to remember that with every heuristic that you use I e need to bring with you the tools of inspection in the filtering that you have through your values and through your ethics and of course using the filters of societal norms and even what's legal but once we get on the other side of that once we get to the place where we can gain leverage we can build leverage for ourselves in ways that are totally above board we provide ourselves a much better position in any negotiation
