Are You a Star at Work?

How do you become a star at work? For more than a decade, Robert E. Kelley has tried to answer that question, conducting in-depth research at such companies as AT&T's Bell Labs, 3M, and Hewlett-Packard. How do average performers differ from stars? Are stars just smarter? Or more self-confident? Or better at interpersonal and leadership skills? The answer, says Kelley, is none of the above: "It isn't what stars have in their heads that makes them stand out. It's how they use what they have."

In How to Be a Star at Work: Nine Breakthrough Strategies You Need to Succeed (Times Books, 1998), Kelley details his research and offers a blueprint to help average performers lift themselves into the realm of the stars. "Most people know that they have a star within them," he says, "but for some reason, it hasn't clicked. They see other people getting ahead, people with roughly the same talent as they have - and these other people are on a faster track. Most people genuinely want to be more productive, do their best, and live up to their potential, but they don't know how to do it."

Kelley is a professor at Carnegie Mellon University's Graduate School of Industrial Administration and the president of Consultants to Executives and Organizations Ltd. His previous books include The Gold-Collar Worker: Harnessing the Brainpower of the New Workforce (Addison-Wesley, 1985) and The Power of Followership: How to Create Leaders People Want to Follow and Followers Who Lead Themselves (Currency/Doubleday, 1992). Fast Company found Kelley at his home in Pittsburgh and asked him to describe what it takes to be a star at work.

Is your star on the back of your T-shirt?

My colleagues and I spent more than 10 years trying to find a valid, objective measure that we can apply to all people - or even to everybody in the same kind of job, or everybody in the same company. It's almost impossible: No two jobs are alike, no two companies are alike. So we gave up on finding one metric that everyone can agree on.

Instead, we developed a definition like the one sometimes used for "pornography": Nobody can tell you how to measure it, but everybody knows it when they see it. Everyone is an armchair expert. Everyone has an opinion. And everyone is more than willing to dispense that advice to anyone else who will listen.

So we collected all of those opinions: There are roughly 45 beliefs that people use to explain why some people are stars. A lot of people chalk it up to raw intelligence: Stars are smarter. Another set of explanations emphasizes social skills: Stars are born leaders. And then we heard personality explanations: Stars are driven, they have the will to succeed, they're self-confident, they're self-motivated. We also researched explanations that stress environmental factors: Becoming a star is all about having the right job or the right boss.

We spent two years putting all of these beliefs to the test. We put stars and average performers in rooms and gave them IQ tests. We gave them personality tests. We measured their attitudes about whether they liked their jobs, their bosses, their companies. After two years, we came up with the results: None of these factors distinguished the stars from the average performers!

We finally developed our "back of the T-shirt" theory. Your IQ, your personality, your social skills, even things like where you went to school - that's all on the front of your T-shirt. Think of all that as your potential energy. But the important thing is how you transform potential energy into kinetic energy. That's on the back of your T-shirt. If you want to know if someone is a star, or is going to become a star, focus on what's on the back of that person's T-shirt.

In other words, it's not what people bring to the party that makes them a star - it's what they do with what they bring. The secrets to being a star are not in people's personal characteristics but in how people go about doing their work.

Do you shine in the white space?

When you're starting out, remember that the things you do first not only build a foundation but also send important messages to your colleagues, your customers, and your boss. That's why the first step toward becoming a star is to show that you take initiative. Initiative is about working in the white space. In today's workplace, you see it more and more: work that no one can predict will need to be done and that doesn't fit neatly into someone's job description - in other words, work that gets done only when people step forward and tackle it.

But it's not enough just to take initiative - first you have to understand it. If you ask average performers, "How do you get ahead?" they'll tell you that initiative is important. Yet star performers and average performers have a fundamentally different understanding of what constitutes initiative. Here's an example: A young woman is asked by her boss to go to a meeting in another department, to take notes, and to report back to her group. She realizes that just taking notes won't do the job, so she takes a tape recorder with her. After the meeting, she listens to the tape, writes up her notes, and reports back. To her, using the tape recorder was taking initiative.