Google Lawyer on Will Ferrell, ‘Elf’ & Cotton-Headed Ninny Muggins-ness (Perspective)

Editor’s Note: The author is an in-house lawyer at Google, Inc.

“I’m a cotton-headed ninny muggins.” Too often that’s exactly what we tell ourselves.

As the story goes, Will Ferrell in the movie “Elf” plays an adult but boyish elf working in Santa’s workshop. He discovers that his less nimble human fingers prevent him from producing as many toys as his elvan counterparts. He responds with self, debasement “cotton headed ninny muggins” and ultimately checks out of Santa’s elvan world all together.

Many of us face the same fate. We check out of our work when we fail to compare favorably to our peers, perhaps at annual review time or in seeing what our neighbors are accomplishing. Some individuals may simply leave the organization, team, in search of bluer skies. However, the impact may be much more subtle. We may decide that middle of the pack is good enough and won’t try as hard to excel.

The resulting organization will limp along, much as a car engine will when one or more pistons fails to fire in sync with the rest. The vehicle will continue to move forward, but it is clear that its performance will be sub par. Individuals and organizations will fail to reach their fullest capacity unless they successfully identify and address individual inefficiencies and obstacles.

People with disabilities possess a distinct advantage when it comes to identifying and tackling obstacles to performance. Born of necessity, disabled individuals regularly face obstacles and inefficiencies because their condition prevents them from accomplishing a task or accomplishing the task as fast as their non-disabled counterparts. People with disabilities constantly develop strategies to surmount their challenges so that they can compete on an equal footing on the corporate stage.

As someone with a disability (I am blind), daily tasks simply take longer to perform. For example, traveling with a cane causes an individual like me to walk much more slowly. The cane only detects obstacles and hazards four feet or a step and a half in front. Therefore, I walk more slowly so I don’t get injured by doors left ajar, open manholes, support poles for scaffolding, etc. To counteract this inefficiency, I minimize my need to travel. For example, I only book conference rooms within a few feet of my desk.

Checking documents for formatting irregularities requires reading the document word by word, querying the screen reader to report the font, spacing, color, and the like for each word, a process which is painfully slow. Addressing this challenge requires the help of a sighted reader who can easily glance through a document for extra white space, inconsistent fonts, etc.

Addressing inefficiencies does not stop with the obstacle itself, however. Dramatic efficiencies can be found in optimizing other areas of work/life. Early on, I found that it was possible to listen to electronic documents read out loud at very high speeds. I recognized that this was an area that I could push myself and make up for some other inefficiencies, counteracting a disability with a hyperability. I regularly increased the speed of the spoken voice to test my abilities and found that with a modicum of practice, I could read dramatically faster than my sighted counterparts, approximately 620 words per minute at the peak. I started with simpler texts such as novels and then went on to increase speeds for complex texts, such as engineering texts or legal briefs.

Leveraging my ability to commit matters to memory, I would also actively memorize the salient facts and status of various matters I worked on. For example, of the 400 to 700 patent matters I worked on as patent counsel, I would actively commit the general subject matter and latest action to be taken for the 50 most active matters in my portfolio. This saved the time necessary to look up the details in the document management system, enabling me to rapidly switch between tasks throughout the day.

Each of us possess great strengths and particular weaknesses. To maximize the performance of our teams, our departments, and ultimately our companies, we must regularly identify and tackle our weaknesses. One individual may be a slow reader. However, that individual may be a superb note taker. They may leverage this skill, take notes on everything that they read, and eliminate the need to reread documents, thereby counteracting any slowdown caused by their reading speed.

Another individual may type slowly. To counteract this challenge, the individual may begin to create template documents/emails that contain much of the boiler plate language that they would otherwise have to type, including headers, footers, salutations, etc. This individual may also employ speech-to-text software so that they can dictate text and have the computer input the text on their behalf.

The process towards maximal self effectiveness begins with identifying areas for optimization. It begins with actively monitoring oneself to identify areas of frustration, stress, and discomfort. For example, a sore neck might indicate that a monitor angle or height is suboptimal. Needing to reread documents repeatedly may indicate that noise levels are too distracting. Sluggishness may indicate that one isn’t obtaining enough down time or may be handling too many matters to be efficient. Whatever the situation, the response must be to adapt, to counteract the suboptimal circumstance and achieving greater self effectiveness.

Company leaders and managers must actively encourage employee’s to embark on this personal journey toward self effectiveness. Encouragement must come in the form of Regularly creating space and prioritizing employees to engage in such journeys. At it’s essence, failure of an employee to perform at the desired level may indicate less that an employee is failing to accomplish a task but more that the company has failed to assist that employee at achieving his or her maximal self effectiveness.

Company leaders should understand that the responsibility for an employee failing to perform at the desired level must be born by the company itself.

Too often conversations in manager one-on-ones focus on the substance of the work and not enough on what obstacles lay in the way of employees achieving their highest self effectiveness. Once suboptimal circumstances are identified, leaders and managers must proactively eliminate these obstacles and work with employees to discover new efficiencies.

By not doing so, we allow our engines to limp along and leave value on the table.

Updated: Due to an editing error, the last three paragraphs were inadvertently dropped from this story when it was originally published. We regret the error.