Helping A Detailed Person Manage Ambiguity.
Do you have a Detail Rockstar at work?
The person who appreciates excellence is a series of tiny details, executed perfectly.
A Detail Rockstar appreciates excellence is a series of details, executed perfectly.
The benefits of having a Detail Rockstar on your team.
A Detail Rockstar excels at picking up on the smallest details to minimise mistakes. They notice minutiae; zooming in, ensuring it’s precise.
Because they’re so attuned to details, people think twice before sending work to approve, making others better at their jobs.
They also become highly valuable to people who need someone who can make sure the execution of an idea is delivered flawlessly.
Why? Because they think of everything.
Supporting a Detail Rockstar in their careers.
If you have a Detail Rockstar in your workplace, and you’d like them to be seen as being more strategic, or to elevate them to greater responsibility, there are a few things they could do.
Show the impact of what they do.
A mindset shift: appreciate there is no gig with 100% certainty.
Imperfect action: making small experiments to lessen risk.
Here’s a quick overview of these ideas.
Showing the impact of what they do.
A Detailed Rockstar is highly competent, and their colleagues see that every day.
What those colleagues don’t see is how what they do links to the bigger picture.
As a result, there can be a perception they’re stuck in the details, ill-suited to leadership.
You need both to succeed in leadership: an appreciation of the details and a strategic view.
So, you need to show you can do both.
It’s usually not ‘strategy’ a Detail Rockstar needs to learn.
They already know how what they’re doing links to the bigger picture.
They just need to show other people how it all connects, so more people can see the inherent value in what they do.
The flow on effect is that colleagues change their perception from ‘that’s the detail person’ to appreciating that person has a more highly valued skill set.
A Detail Rockstars love language is certainty.
Uncertainty and ambiguity are their kryptonite. Yet there is no leadership gig on the planet that I’m aware of that has 100% certainty or the ability to predict every future variable.
Leadership is taking action with your own biased knowledge and incomplete information (and doing it with conviction so others will come onboard with you).
For a Detail Rockstar that can be very uncomfortable. It presents a few challenges:
Potential failure. i.e. the whole idea of having a detailed list is so you *don’t* have to make such errors or take action without a complete view.
Potential inauthenticity. Pretending to know things, to get my team onboard, when I have incomplete information, doesn’t sit well with me.
For someone who’s wired to avoid failure, this ‘risk taking’ business doesn’t feel adventurous.
From the outset, it appears irresponsible.
The fallacy about getting details right is that you can protect yourself from failure.
Yet, there is no perfect checklist that can guarantee 100% certainty.
There are things you can control, and things you can reasonably predict based on what you know today.
Behind this idea, for the Detail Rockstar is a concern about doing the ‘wrong’ thing, or leading people down the wrong path.
You don’t need to become a ‘risk taker’ to be considered for future opportunities.
It’s not really in a Detail Rockstar’s nature to be down with risk taking activities.
But a skill a Detail Rockstar can start to get curious about is how to create certainty within certain parameters, so they have enough information to take educated experiments.
From that place of having taken a safe risk, they can get data, feedback, and evaluate their own performance. From there, they can iterate and improve.
Over time, the skill of taking action without 100% certainty becomes like a muscle, they start to trust what seems reasonable for their own risk profile.
Excellence, being a process of details executed perfectly, is their love language.
Yet you can only excel at something if you practice, right? With tiny educated experiments, you can slowly get to that point, in a less risky way.
The leverage for a Detail Rockstar is that once they try these educated experiments a few times, they get to excel at it.
Are you a Detail Rockstar?
First of all, thank you, from all of us who aren’t.
If you’re reading this and you’re thinking you have other aspirations for your career in addition to the gig you’re currently doing, it could be worth trying out these ideas.
Specifically…
Communicating less detail and more of how what you do benefits the bigger picture.
For example, instead of sharing your to-do list with them, use your time with more senior folks to remind them you’ve got it handled.
Shift from what you’re doing (present tense) to talking about the impact of your hard work (future tense). As a result, others will perceive you as both strategic and across the details. That’s a competitive mix.
Practicing making small decisions (e.g. small risks).
Try out this idea of making educated experiments, every day.
What do you learn when you take action, even when you don’t have 100% certainty?
If you are a Detail Rockstar, and you want to be seen differently.
Illustrate how what you do helps the bigger picture. Save the details for your peers who are in the trenches with you (who’ll appreciate it more anyways).
Take educated risks and report back on the outcomes.
If your direct report is a Detail Rockstar.
Give them a few projects where they can fail, safely.
Get them to play back what they learn and increase their tolerance for uncertainty. Pro tip: stay involved and give them input. Every adventurer needs a safe harbour.
If you support a Detail Rockstar.
Start asking them how what they’ve done has impacted the business, customers, community members, or the future of the organisation. Get them to tinker on how it all connects.
Did this make you wonder how to help your detailed folks?
We have a number of leadership tools to help Detail Rockstars become comfortable doing educated experiments and re-thinking perfectionism.
Get in touch to book an informal chat to get some ideas, or check out our training options.
“I realise now it’s not a checklist but a need to show the executive team the value I offer.”