You Already Have a Superpower

When I was a kid, my mom gave me a 300+ piece Harry Potter Lego set we were going to put together. 10 months later it was still in the box, so I did what any kid would do and I opened it. A few hours later, I had completed the set with every piece in place. My mom was hosting an event that day, and was shocked I was able to put it together by myself. It was on that day I determined my superpower, I can figure out how to solve anything.

We all have superpowers but often we don’t know them or don’t know how to identify them. Often there are signs: a peer who always comes to you for help over others, a manager giving work to a specific person, the person who is tasked with prepping executive decks. These are just things you’re good at but these are superpowers. While you’re not going to become an Avenger anytime soon, you can use your superpower to accelerate your career. Today’s blog will focus on how to identify your superpower, how to put it into action, and how to grow it.

1: Find It

On average most people entering the workforce have 2 decades under their belt. Over 2 decades, we’re often looking externally at what people do well. For example, I was a defender when I played soccer. While playing I noticed one of my teammates had better control than me. When the opposing team’s offense had numbers on us, I’d get him the ball and with a precision pass he’d get the ball up to one of our teammates on offense. What I did was observe what impressed me, and decided it was my superpower.

Often, this same approach works for our own superpowers as well, but we’re so critical we skip past it. If you’re unsure what your superpower is, the easiest way to find it is to start a reflection process. The simplest reflection process is doing the following on a daily or weekly basis: Write down what you did well, what you did poorly, and what you learned. Writing what you did well is your superpower and the more you do this the easier it should be to spot. Writing what you do poorly is the things you should steer clear from or are your learning opportunities. Writing what you learned ties both together. I typically will write something I learned from what I did well and what I did poorly. An example, today I was able to bring together multiple orgs and have a meaningful conversation around supporting my customer. What I learned is I’m able to spot when we’re introducing more calls than necessary since my org and each of those orgs had weekly calls. Superpower used, too many calls on the calendar, let’s fix that by bringing everyone together on a regular basis. Problem solved, but you see how you can do this exercise frequently enough to see your own superpower.

Another way to identify your superpower is to ask others what you do well and give examples. In grad school, I learned this was called a reflective best self (RBS) exercise. Remember how we said we are good at seeing what others are good at? The same goes for people working or engaging with you. The quickest way to learn what your superpower is to ask. Most people like to share what they like about working with others. What I did is I listed the words that my peers used about me the most when I did mine. There were some words that resonated across all of my peers which are attributes of my superpower. Both methods work, it just depends on if you’re more introspective or outward-looking.

2: Use It

Before moving to Seattle, I knew I had a superpower but I only used it to teach and support my customers. While I was excellent at it, I wasn’t recognized or rewarded for it. That was expected of me as a Field Engineer. In 2020, I took a role in Seattle, which had a focus on supportability. Supportability is a discipline focused on preventing customer support issues, or if received resolving them faster. Shifting disciplines changed how I saw my superpower; it opened the opportunity for me to proactively use it versus reactively use it. This led to an interest in automation, where I started building proof-of-concepts (POCs), standardizing team process, and sharing these improvements with my manager. My superpower was flourishing, within 6 months I was a Senior Customer Engineer, and in another 6 months, I was a manager. That’s what aligning to the business problem looks like, and I stumbled into that thought process.

When I reflect on that time, this is when I learned how to use my superpower, and this is what I want to share with you. At this point, it’s expected you already identified your superpower, so your next step is to understand the business goals of your organization. By business goals, I don’t mean your specific metrics or key performance indicators (KPIs), look at what your organization is designed to solve. All organizations exist to solve a business problem, middle management exists to drive the strategy that addresses that business problem. This business problem is where you want to apply your superpower, because it instantly aligns you with your leaders and organization. Most people make the mistake of applying it to solve their problems. By doing so your expectations do not align with management’s expectations leading to you being in the middle or worse the bottom.

Once you understand the business problem, understand how your superpower connects to the business problem. For example, if your superpower is artistic, you might want to contribute to promoting and marketing team initiatives. What most people don’t realize is that while a business might have a discipline such as engineering or marketing, you still need different skillsets to drive the business. Put 10 software engineers in a room, they can build a product, but they probably can’t sell it. The sweet spot is using your superpower to move the business forward, allowing you to do what you do best, and to impact the organization.

3: Grow It

Once you’re using it, the next question is how to keep it growing. Watch a plant grow and you’ll see leaves, petals, and more growing in all different kinds of directions, but what you don’t see is that the roots are also doing the same thing. In order for the plant to be able to sustain its growth, it needs the root system to be just as strong. You have to approach growing your superpower the same way. For your superpower, you will have visible growth, leaves, and non-visible growth, the roots. Visible growth is what people see and it’s the direct use of your superpower. Non-visible growth is the unseen work, it’s your learning, building, and trying out new things. Non-visible growth is all of the things you do to continue to build up your superpower and often they are more vital than visible growth. For me, my non-visible growth comes from studying different sources. For example, I am listening to the audiobook Sell or Be Sold by Grant Cardone, because I want to sell my solutions better. While I can solve anything, I still need to be able to sell my solutions to management, to my customers, and even to my wife.

When speaking with mentees, I always tell them to be a continuous learner, because I know that’s the best way to build your superpower. It’s because most things in life overlap or are adjacent to each other. Just like we were talking about business needing multiple skills earlier so do superpowers. Let’s walk through an example, I want Blkgradstudent to solve for a lack of mentorship opportunities for early-career professionals. To solve for that, I have to study writing to better relate to my audience. I have to study marketing so I can better reach my audience. I have to study leadership, because I want my mentees to be leaders and high performers. To be able to solve the problem, I built Blkgradstudent to solve, I have to constantly study and build up my superpower.

Adjacent skills are going to be the nearest things to your superpower so you’re going to be most likely to learn them quickly. But you know what the good thing about adjacent skills is? They also have adjacent skills to them. As you start going down the path to learning adjacent skills, you’ll realize some are not for you, and others are. These will be the deep roots that will be able to support your superpower as it grows. The better foundation you build, the better your superpowers will show up, and the faster you’re able to transition into a high performer.

Wrap-Up

You already have a superpower — you just haven’t named it yet. Find it, aim it at the problem your team actually needs solved, and keep feeding the roots underneath it. That’s how you become the person everyone comes to. And if you want help naming yours, that’s exactly what a Blkgradstudent session is for.

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