Or, as an alternative, wordy title: The Theoretical Pyramid of Professional Development.
Today, I want to chat about career skills, but if you’ll spare me a moment for a quick digression, I’d like to wax on about a completely separate topic: CrossFit. We’ll tie this all together here momentarily.
One of the fundamental principles in CrossFit is communicated through a pyramid, specifically the “theoretical pyramid of athlete development.”
Nutrition exists at the base of the pyramid followed by metabolic conditioning (aka cardio), gymnastics, weightlifting, and finally, sport.
This pyramid has a few different implications as we’re looking at athletic development over the long-term, the primary one for today being:
Your success at any given level is predicated on how well you’ve developed prior levels.
For example, your weightlifting capacity will be impacted by poor nutrition. A solid conditioning base will improve your gymnastics capability. And so on.
Let’s bring this all back to the professional arena.
A few recent experiences1 have caused me to think about what professional development pyramid would look like. Meaning, if our goal was long-term success and fulfillment throughout our career, what kinds of skills would form the backbone of that success?
I’ve listened to two podcasts on the topic and chatted with some managers at various companies during a recent conference I attended. Here’s a tentative list I’ve come up with in no particular order.
- Effective Communication—This is critical regardless of whether you’re working with a team, sharing timelines with your boss, or chatting with a potential customer. Can you articulate your ideas in a clear and concise manner both verbally and textually? One may be more important than the other depending on context.
- Reliability—Can I count on you to do what you committed to doing to the level that you promised on the timeline we agreed to with minimal follow-up? That sounds like a doozy, but it really is a core skill. If any of the components (delivery, scope, or timeliness) has to slip, do you communicate that as early as possible?
- Organization—It doesn’t really matter if you use the latest productivity app or a notebook and a pen. Can you effectively plan out your day/week/month to deliver results? If you’re tasked with something during a meeting, do you have some method of recording that so you don’t have to be reminded?
- Focused Attention—Cal Newport has literally written books on the importance of focused attention. I’d direct you to Deep Work for starters. The ability to concentrate all of your talents on the most critical task at hand for long periods is critical for accomplishing anything of value.
- Humble, Adaptable Mentality—Can you take feedback on your work? Are you open to debating points of view on a certain issue? If we move forward in the direction opposite your viewpoint, can you adapt and come along? Are you up for tackling new things, even if you might not excel in the beginning?
These skills form the foundation on which you can build specific skills like learning JavaScript or data analytics. If you focus on the specific skills first though and ignore the foundation, you’re shortchanging your future self.
Tying this all together then, if we built out our own pyramid of professional development these skills would sit at the bottom. I feel like this is important primarily because it’s easy to interview for and focus on developing the career-specific skills that look good on a resume. These foundational skills are harder to tease out in an interview, which is one main reason I love the trial interview process at Automattic.