Ever think you’re not very good at your job?
You’re not bad per se. You’re not incompetent or lazy.
You put in the hours. You don’t drop the ball. You check off your to-do list.
But perhaps when you look at your peers, you notice them stacking promotion after promotion on their LinkedIn profile. Or at drinks, they casually mention receiving a second raise this year.
Maybe it’s politics or luck. Perhaps they “play the game” better than you do. Sometimes that is why people get ahead.
But what if you suspect they’re just better at their job than you?
If that’s the case, how would you uplevel your skills? What skills do you improve, and how would you do it?
At multiple times in my career, I’ve been lucky (or unlucky, depending on how you look at it) to identify large skills gaps between who I was and the person I wanted to be.
Today, I work at a technology start-up. Last year, our small 9-person team become an even smaller 5-person team, and in the chaos of that contraction, I suddenly owned our email automation, landing pages, and the application review… basically everything that generated revenue and kept the lights on.
I got a new title: product manager. My first step was updating my LinkedIn profile (obviously). Second step, Googling “what does a product manager do?”
Before that, in 2013 I worked at a Hollywood literary agency. One of my responsibilities was reading and editing contracts on behalf of our clients. My training was a stack of old contracts I was instructed to study. “Just copy that language,” they told me.
In both instances, there was a moment of pause where I had the following conversation with myself:
“There’s no easy way to say this, so let’s put it out there: you suck at your job right now. It’s not your fault. You kinda fell into this. But you stink. So let’s get to work, and try to suck a little less.”
To suck a little less, I had to answer these questions:
- How do you get better?
- Is there a best way to go about it?
- And how do you know it’s working?
I realized the answer was what I called the Rising Tides Method to getting better at your job. There are five steps:
- Choose your skills
- Learn enough to be dangerous
- Macro & micro timebox your studying
- Tighten your feedback loop
- Move on to the next skill
I’ll dig into each below, but first let’s discuss other frameworks that’ll potentially help accelerate your career.
Why going T-shaped is not always the right answer
There’s a popular career framework called becoming “T-shaped.”
It means you should have a solid baseline of a variety of skills, then one or two arenas where you are the Big Man or Woman On Campus. In other words, be a “generalized specialist.”
Here is an example from Reforge CEO Brian Balfour on how to become T-shaped at customer acquisition:
The point is that to become an expert, first go broad, then selectively deep.
It’s a powerful framework when you’ve already built that base knowledge and you’re ready to specialize.
But becoming T-shaped presumes you have baseline knowledge in your arena.
What if you don’t have that baseline knowledge?
In that case, going T-shaped may not work for you, at least not yet. Then you need a different approach or framework — preferably one that allows you to develop a variety of skills, moves the needle on the metrics that matter in your role, and provides enough positive feedback to keep you motivated to improve.
This is the approach I’ve used at multiple points in my career, which I’ve called the Rising Tides Method (cause it raises all ships, ya know?)
The Rising Tides Method to get better at your job
Like I said, there are five steps to the Rising Tides Method. I’ll go through each one, plus examples of what it looks like when applied to different careers and skills:
1. Choose your skills
First, you have to choose the skills you’ll develop. How do you decide? One way is looking at the skill sets of colleagues or managers who are just slightly ahead of you in experience. You can study them and ask yourself:
What skills help them excel in their role?
I’d recommend spending a week observing their daily habits, processes, and tools, and then come up with a hypothesis for the skills you can focus on.
Of course, you could just ask them, but I think this is less effective for two reasons:
- Narrative Fallacy. As Shane Parrish puts it, narrative fallacy is “the backward-looking mental tripwire that causes us to attribute a linear and discernible cause-and-effect chain to our knowledge of the past.”Hindsight distorts reality and we tend to bend the past to make sense of the future. In other words, they probably have no idea what skills helped them get where they are today.
- Unconscious competence. People who are excellent have reached a level of unconscious competence. They’re excellent, but may not be able to explain why or show someone else how. This is why it’s rare for the best practitioners to also be the best teachers.
After observing your colleagues, you might notice the best of them are able to turn around near-perfect copy after a few hours — copy that would take you a week to write yourself. Or maybe you observe the people you want to emulate are terrific public speakers, and so you decide to focus on that.
At Reforge, I decided one of the skills to learn was SQL since I needed to regularly query our databases. In Hollywood, the skill I focused on was editing literary contracts.
2. Learn “enough to be dangerous”
Should you strive to be the very best at this skill? Unless you have the next 5-10 years to devote to the endeavor, I wouldn’t recommend it.
If you’re following the Rising Tide Method, the goal is building a foundation, not specialization. So you should aim to learn just enough to be dangerous — no more and no less.
If you’re working on public speaking, you don’t need to be Tony Robbins or Oprah. You just want to carry a meeting with a loose agenda, or rally your team at the beginning of each week. The former would take years of training, while the latter can be accomplished with 10-15 hours of practice.
For me, I didn’t need to learn how to write advanced SQL queries. I’m not trying to become a database expert. I just wanted to be able to answer simple questions without constantly asking our Head of Data, like a school boy nagging for clues on the quiz.
In Hollywood, I didn’t need an encyclopedic knowledge of all entertainment contracts. I wasn’t trying to be a lawyer or even an agent for that matter. So I focused on the 2-3 literary agreements we used 90% of the time: literary options, purchase agreements, and television writing agreements for our clients.
3. Macro & micro timebox your studying
Set a period of time where you’ll work on this particular skill. This is your macro timebox. I’d recommend one to three months. It should be long enough to get significantly better, but not so long that it drags.
Then determine your schedule to focus on developing this skill throughout the week. Will you do it first thing in the morning? Late evenings? Weekends? This is your micro timebox. In an ideal world, you’d be able to devote 50% of your time to this, but if you’re juggling work and adult responsibilities like basic hygiene and feeding your kids, then 20% might be more practical.
For SQL, I worked on it for about a month, dedicating at least an hour each morning to free online classes and practice data sets. For contracts, I carved out the last hour of each day to studying.
4. Tighten your feedback loop
It’s nice to practice in a warm cocoon of positive feedback and practice scenarios, but the real learning happens when you test your skills against reality. Fortunately, since we’re working on job-related skills, you should have lots of opportunities to keep a tight feedback loop.
(If you’re not focused on a job-related skill, you’ll need to create some system of accountability to periodically test your progress.)
If you’re working on public speaking, use weekly meetings to measure your progress. If you’re working on copy, submit copy at the end of each week to your manager or a colleague to review.
I failed to tighten my own feedback loop when teaching myself SQL. I spent the first couple of weeks working on test data sets, which was useful in learning syntax and clauses. However, I didn’t actually learn how to query against the live data sets we actually had. It took a few extra weeks to course-correct, and now I have the habit of writing at least one query every day to continue to improve.
5. Move on to the next skill
You picked a skill to improve. You learned just enough to be dangerous. The end goal is to create a strong baseline of various skills, so now it’s time to move on. Repeat the steps above.
Using the Rising Tides Method, you can greatly improve your skills foundation. Even if you just work on four skills (1 skill every 3 months), that’s a huge uplevel in your abilities overall and makes you exponentially more valuable to your team and company.
As I mentioned above, in 2019 one skill I focused on was SQL, but I also worked on email automation, excel, and becoming a better product manager. Because I worked on these skill sets, I:
- Owned a year’s worth of email campaigns, emailing close to 300K people
- Ran the application process for our company, which generated over 9,000 applications and 90% of the year’s revenue
- Led 4-5 product changes from identifying the customer pain, research, cross-functional collaborating on solutions, testing, analysis, and iterations
When is the Rising Tides Method right for you?
The Rising Tides Method is a terrific approach to skill acquisition under the following circumstances:
- Beginner to intermediate knowledge. At the beginner and intermediate level, you can take advantage of free resources. Plus your colleagues and managers are more likely to be able to help you course correct. The greater your expertise, the scarcer these resources become.
- Technical skills. Generally, it’s easier to measure progress with technical skills than creative skills. There are clear, objective lines of right and wrong. For example, a SQL query will either return data or throw off an error, whereas “good” copywriting is more subjective.
- Generalist vs. Specialist. If your role requires cross-collaboration with a lot of teams and a variety of skills, the Rising Tides Method works well. In other words, you’re expected to be a swiss army knife, not a scalpel.
As I mentioned above, if you’re mid-career and already have a strong skill foundation, then the T-shaped framework is probably a better framework than the Rising Tides Method.
Finally, a few final tips to be successful with the Rising Tides Method:
- Recruit coaches. Formalize the feedback cycle with a coach if possible. This person can be paid or unpaid, they can be a colleague, manager, or outside of your organization. But they have a clearly defined role of checking your work at set intervals (i.e. once a week) and helping you get better.
- Develop a good recall system. You’re going to be jumping in and out of studying and working multiple times a week. You’ll have notes everywhere. The stronger your recall system (how quickly and easily you can find your notes) the easier it will be to improve your skills. This doesn’t have to be fancy — I use a single Google doc with a lot of bookmarks to keep track of everything, from SQL clauses to excel formulas. A good recall system keeps you focused and prevents you from getting distracted.
- Be opportunistic. One of my favorite things about the Rising Tides Method is that if you come across the opportunity to learn something new, you can drop everything and give it a shot. The flexibility and time boxing keeps you focused, but you still get to scratch the itch. For example, there were different points last year where it made sense to dig into adjacent skills like page speed optimization, SEO, and Google Analytics — and instead of kicking the can down the road, I took a break for a week, learned enough to be dangerous and then moved on. By having a good recall system, I picked up right where I left off.
If you use the Rising Tides Method (or something similar) for your own skill acquisition process, would love to hear how it goes for you.
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