Ownership or How to Be the Best Junior Employee Ever
Note: This is from some thoughts I wrote up awhile ago when I was interviewed about being a woman in tech. I’m splitting it into a few parts and starting with the most general — advice for anyone newer to the tech workplace. Also, Jane Nevins wrote a great summary of this already, so apologies for any repetition.
Before I worked in tech, I was a junior associate at a law firm. You may not think of a law firm as the most innovative management space. We didn’t have 1:1s, or lunch talks on things like Radical Candor, or even managers really — just whoever was more senior than you and assigned to the case you were working on. Still, in spite of (or probably because of) the chaos, I learned a few things that have shaped how I work and how I try to teach my teams to work.
The Most Important Thing You Can Do As A Junior, or Really Any Employee, is Take Ownership of Your Projects.
Take Ownership of Your Projects
To me, ownership is treating a project like it’s yours — taking pride in getting it done. When you get a project, imagine what you’d do if the person who gave it to you disappeared tomorrow. How would you get the project done? Ask yourself this for every project you get. What would you be proud of? How would you get from point A to point B? Then, after you’ve asked yourself this, make a plan.
The next thing is equally important: communicate that plan back to the person who assigned the project. When Jane Nevins wrote about this, she got a lot of questions from nervous managers. Their questions boiled down to: “If I don’t tell the person exactly what to do, how will I know they won’t do it wrong and waste my time and my employers time and cause a workapocalpyse?” The answer here is simple. After thinking about what you’d do if your manager disappeared tomorrow, don’t actually act like they’ve disappeared.
Take your idea of how to approach the project, bring it to the person who assigned it to you, and ask them for feedback.
As a junior employee, this gives you a chance to practice thinking through project planning and take risks, while getting all the benefit of your manager’s years of experience. It allows you to pick up skills that you’ll need later in your career. If you’re reading this as a manager, this is how you stay involved constructively — you still get a chance to review the project and offer feedback. It won’t go off the rails. Try it — your employee might even surprise you with a better approach than the one you had in mind.
Work Independently, But Give Frequent Updates
If you come up with a plan, your manager will be very excited to see you showing initiative and defining your project, and they’ll also want to make sure the project is getting done. So provide a deadline with your project proposal, and then give status updates as to your work. For example, you can write weekly updates about the project or, if you need to, have weekly or daily check-ins on the project.
Ask Questions
No one actually expects you to do the project all by yourself. The key in doing this is to see how far you can get in your thinking before you hit a roadblock. Not a roadblock that you can solve with a 5 minute Google search — one where you’ve put in a good faith effort but you still don’t know what to do. Then, and only then, ask your manager what to do. Bonus points for making a list if you know you’ll have more than one question. This is good for your manager because they’ll know that they can trust you to come to them when their help is needed. And it’s good for you because ideally your manager is only helping when you want the help — a great recipe for avoiding micromanagement.
It’s Supposed to Be Hard
Working at a law firm was a big mindset change for me. When I started, I viewed my job as being like school: just check the boxes and get the “A”. So I would try and get things done quickly — put in my hours so I could go home and get a few hours of sleep before the next thing. I’d do exactly what was asked and nothing more. I asked questions when they came up — sometimes interrupting my poor slightly senior associates multiple times a day. I didn’t see projects as mine.
People at my firm were always talking about ownership, but it didn’t really sink in. I got criticized a lot. Finally a few people explained it to me in a way that made sense:
Everyone else is just as busy as you. If you’re assigned something, it’s because the person doesn’t have time to figure it out themself. They don’t just want an easy answer, they want you to figure out how to find the answer, find it, and then suggest any next steps that make sense.
And they’re busy, so they want you to get the ball rolling as far as you can, organize your questions, and ask them at once so that you can each go back to working independently.
Fortunately, law firms are an extreme and in the real world where most people aren’t billing 100 hour weeks, managers have some training and aren’t just trying to hand off something to you and have you bother them as little as possible while still getting it done. I like talking to my team, and most managers I’ve had since the firm are more than happy to give feedback.
Still, I find this technique of planning for the worst, of pushing myself to think through as much of a project on my own as I can, to be valuable whoever I’m working with. If your manager is like one of the lawyers I just mentioned, they’ll be happy the thing gets done. If your manager likes to micromanage, this will help you manage up and reassure them that you are competent and they don’t need to stress about everything. And if you have a good manager, they’ll be happy to see you stretching yourself and testing different options.
If you end up trying any of these things, I’d love to hear from you (you can comment or email me at tltcoaches@gmail.com). And if you’re interested in coaching, you can find me at The Leadership Team.
