Last week I ran into one of our employees on the train commuting.  As we talked, he took the opportunity to ask me for feedback on his performance to date.  The main thing I told him was that he needed to take more initiative.  He found the advice helpful, so I’ll repeat it here.

During the conversation, I connected for him the idea of initiative in the work place, to a positive comment my mom made about my wife, which is that my wife always knows how to fold into whatever is going on in the house and help out.  In other words, when we go to visit my parents, my wife takes initiative in the right way.  And for my mom, who is in charge of her house, she really appreciates my wife’s ability to do that.

It’s similar in the work environment.  What managers most appreciate about their teammates is for them to come in, see what’s going on, think of something that would help the process in the existing direction, and take the initiative to do it at the right level of detail.  The key here is taking the initiative without being asked.

The second key is “in existing direction.”  Many people come into an organization and immediately suggest new initiatives they think the organization should be going in.  This is rarely helpful, and usually a distraction.  You might be right, but the organization has a life and momentum, and typically has to play through what it’s doing to get to the next phase.   The third key is doing it at the right level, not too detailed, and not too superficially.

Two examples of employee initiative that made a difference for me from just last week.  1) Without being asked, an engineer wrote up a list of questions he wanted answered during a product meeting that was coming up so he could know how to configure part of the back end.  I hadn’t asked him to do this, and he handed me the list before the meeting.  We ended up structuring our discussion around his list, rather than the product manager’s list, and it produced a breakthrough in thinking for the team.

2) In another case, we were having a discussion about some operating metrics and why they were moving down.  We didn’t come to any conclusion, but the next day, without being asked, one of the engineers sent us an analysis of the data to explore various scenarios.  It was the right level of analysis, not to detailed and to too superficial, and it perfectly addressed the question at hand, letting us plan our next step better.

Sure I could have asked each of these people for these things, detailing how I wanted each report or list done.  I could have given them a deadline to get them done, checking in with them to check on progress, etc.  But in any non-government job, and in a start-up in particular, there’s not enough time in the day to manage and schedule everything.  Each member of the team has to take initiative, and they have to do it in the right direction and in the right way.   If you can get a small team where everyone does that, you’re gold.  My advice is to learn how to be one of those people.