I remember having a discussion with a more tenured coworker, with the subject being the impending departure of another coworker. I said, “man, it’s going to be rough when he leaves, considering how much he’s done for us over the last several years.” The person I was talking to replied in a way that perplexed me. He said, “when you think about it, though, he really hasn’t done anything.” Ridiculous. I immediately objected and started my defense:
Well, in the last release, he worked on… that is, I think he was part of the team that did… or maybe it was… well, whatever, bad example. I know in the release before that, he was instrumental in… uh… that thing with the speed improvement stuff, I think. Wait, no, that was Bill. He did the… maybe that was two releases ago, when he… Holy crap, you’re right. He doesn’t do anything!
How did this happen? Meaning, how did I get this so wrong? Am I just an idiot? It could be, except that fails as an explanation for this particular case because the next day` I talked to someone who said, “boy, we’re sure going to miss him.” It seemed I was not alone in just assuming that this guy had been an instrumental cog in the work of the group when he had really, well, not been.
In the time that has passed since that incident, I’ve paid attention to people in groups and collaborating on projects. I’ve had occasion to do this as a team member and a team lead, as a boss and a line employee, as a consultant and as a team member collaborating with consultants, and just about everything else you can think of. And what I’ve observed is that this phenomenon is not a function of the people who have been fooled but the person doing the fooling. When you look at people who wind up being highly overrated, they share certain common habits.
If you too want to be highly overrated, read on. Being overrated can mean that you’re mediocre but people think that you’re great, or it can mean that you’re completely incompetent but nestle in somewhere and go unnoticed, doing, as Peter Gibbons in Office Space puts it, “just enough not to get fired.” The common facet is that there’s a sizable deficit between your actual value and your perceived value — you appear useful while actually being relatively useless. Here’s how.
1. “Overcommunicate”
I’m putting this term in quotes because it was common enough at one place I worked to earn a spot on a corporate BS Bingo card, but I’ve never heard it anywhere else. I don’t know exactly what people there meant by it, and for all I know, neither do they, so I’m going to reappropriate it here. If you want to seem productive without doing anything useful, then a great way to do so is to make lots of phone calls, send lots of emails, create lots of memos, etc.
A lot of people mistake activity for productivity, and you can capitalize on that. If you send one or two emails a day, summarizing what’s going on with a project in excruciating detail, people will start to think of you as that vaguely annoying person who has his fingers on the pulse all of the time. This is an even better strategy if you make the rounds, calling and talking to people to get status updates as to what they’re doing before sending an email.
Now, I know what you’re thinking — that might actually be productive. And, well, it might be, nominally so. But do you notice that you’ve got a very tangible plan of action here and there’s been no mention of what the project actually involves? A great way to appear useful without being useful is engage heavily in an activity completely orthogonal to the actual goal.
