How to Prove Yourself Without Working Twice as Hard (for Half the Credit) When You Have Reduced Privilege

It’s both a trope and a truth that working twice as hard will help you get ahead in your career. It’s also, not surprisingly, a key assumption that under-represented leaders assume they must overwork in order to prove themselves in order to advance their careers. Talk to most women, Black people or people of color, and you’ll find that most feel the pressure to work harder than more privileged worker in the next cube over, in order to receive less credit and less reward. 

I believe there is truth in these assumptions, but I also think that too many under-represented leaders use these truths as an excuse to overwork and burnout. So let’s question the “work twice as hard to prove yourself” career advice and look at some alternatives to overwork that will still help you prove your worth and demonstrate your potential.

A note about privilege: privilege is subjective and changes based on culture, context and interpersonal dynamics. However, we see many patterns across metrics as diverse as pay, hiring processes and workplace satisfaction that indicate a general privilege that men have over women and white people have over people of color. Thus, while you’ll see a variety of metrics in the data and links we use in this article, they all speak to this general pattern.

Why sometimes you should work twice as hard

First, let’s look for the truth in the you-must-work-twice-as-hard assumption many of us make. 

If you only aspire to be employed, you probably don’t need to work harder than the average bear from day one in your career. But if you want to grow yourself through your work, using it to become your best self, and receive recognition and advancement in return, you’re going to have to work harder than all the other average bears out there. 

I know many privileged people who bristle when under-represented leaders push back on this truthy trope, assuming that people with privilege don’t work hard, too. And these privileged leaders have some good reasons to resist any connotation that under-privilaged leaders are the only ones that have to work extra hard to get ahead. Why? because, especially early in their careers–everyone–even privileged leaders, have to work hard to get ahead. 

Most privileged leaders who advance also worked very hard, and often two to three times as hard, to make it to their position. Especially at higher levels of leadership, competition gets fierce for everyone and no one gets a totally free ride. Of course, their privilege helped them in many many ways, but that doesn’t mean they don’t also get credit for their hard work.

This is especially true early in our careers, or in a new position, because to succeed everyone must:

• Learn what you don’t know
• Prove–to yourself and others–that you can do the job
• Make a difference and produce results

There’s just no way around the fact that work is work and getting ahead requires hard work.

And there’s also no way around the fact that under-represented workers (including, but not limited to women) have to work even harder because they can expect to be penalized more harshly than privileged co-workers for the same mistakes, be judged against more criteria and be evaluated more harshly (especially if they are in traditionally male jobs.)

Photo by nikko macaspac

What does “proving yourself” really mean?

So it’s true that working hard is a prerequisite for proving yourself and getting ahead. For people with reduced privilege it can mean working extra hard to counter the biases that they run up against. But by itself the “working harder” strategy can drive you straight to burnout since there is literally no end to the work that generally needs to be done. So how do you know when to stop driving forward with a quantity-of-effort over quality-of-effort strategy?

Well, when it comes to quantity vs. quality I would argue quality always matters, in the form of meaningful results. Early in your career while you’re coming up to speed on everything, you need quantity to achieve quality. In other words, you have to work extra hard in order to learn what you don’t know and learn how to achieve results. But at some point you get better at what you do and can spend less time doing it. So to know when it’s time to start easing off the “moremoremore” train at work, start looking for efficiencies you can build into your process simply because you understand your work better. Here are a few examples of simple ways to build efficiency into your work, once you understand it:

• Reorganizing your time to lump similar tasks together and optimize your personal time peak zones
• Building a spreadsheet database or getting an app to track data you must collect and reference
• Outsourcing and delegating tasks that underutilize your talent and help others develop
• Finding new ways to do old things, more efficiently and effectively
• Renegotiating your work and workload so you don’t have to exhaust yourself to succeed

But once you’ve squeezed some productivity juice from this turnip, you’ll hit a point where greater efficiency is hard to come by. And at this point the main thing you’ve proved about yourself is that you can work hard, and efficiently. Many people stop here. They believe they’ve proved themselves through effort and smarts and they want to be rewarded. 

And early in your career you will  probably be rewarded at this point. Which is great! 

But too many people assume this holds through the rest of their career and say to themselves, “Well, to get the next reward I just have to work even harder and use that time I earned back with efficiency to do more stuff.” They double down on the tried-and-true work hard strategy and use whatever time they gain back with efficiency to keep working harder. This is the point where the never-ending ToDo list becomes a bottomless pit.

Chasing the pit to the bottom might work for another promotion, or even two, but at some point it actually starts to work against you. Because at some point in your career, what your bosses are hoping you will “prove” about yourself is that you understand the limits of pure effort, and have the judgment and the courage to make hard choices that create impact within the resource limits you have, including your own time and energy.

When you reach this point, the ways to prove yourself include management and leadership abilities like:

• Taking time regularly to reflect on what success looks like and how to achieve it given current conditions and resources (which can change as often as daily)
• Ruthlessly expunging non-priority (i.e., low-impact) activities from your todo list and project plans
• Leveraging the effort, judgment, resources and motivations of others

When you’ve proven yourself capable of these kinds of things, others see you as ready for bigger assignments, more responsibilities and opportunities to make an even greater impact. 

The downside to working twice as hard to prove yourself

This switch from working to optimize impact over effort is exactly the point where people with privilege begin to think differently than many without. If you have less privilege you can get stuck in the assumption that working extra hard to prove yourself is the only way to succeed. But here’s why it’s not.

1. While you can scale, your effort does not. There are only so many hours in a day and your body, brain and heart only have so many ergs of energy to spend after sleeping and eating. No matter how smart you get, those limits are finite. So your only opportunity to scale and improve is to use those limited resources to create a bigger impact. You don’t scale, but your impact can when you demonstrate the management and leadership abilities listed above.
2. Burnout is real, and expensive. There are so many reasons not to burn out. People who burnout risk their health, their happiness and well-being, their relationships and their jobs. Just don’t. Burnout is not an option.
3. Working twice as hard just trains everyone around you to give you more work. Especially once you show your interest in working harder instead of smarter, other people start to think you really like it. Even when you complain about it, at some level people see you doing it and assume that’s what you want, or know they can get away with giving it to you. The only way to train other’s expectations is to create boundaries, say no, and stick to your decisions. Whatever boundaries you lay down, that you adhere to consistently, will be the boundaries others learn to respect. You can also train people that you have a lack of (or lax) boundaries. Many of us want others to see our limits and respect them without us having to do anything. The truth of it is that they can’t see and respect what we don’t respect for ourselves.

Many fear that if they don’t work harder, they’ll lose the credit and credibility they’ve earned with all their hard work. This is a reasonable fear in the sense that if you just stop working so hard, others will notice. This won’t necessarily work in your favor, unless you demonstrate through smarter work that you can achieve as much (or more) with less effort. When they see you working as hard (or less hard) and achieving more, your credibility will go up. That said, you will probably have to make sure to give your results some visibility or else they won’t notice your results; instead they’ll only notice that you’re putting in a different/lower level of effort.

How to prove yourself without killing yourself: working smarter

People with privilege, who have proven themselves through effort, are more likely to feel reduced pressure and allow themselves to work less hard at some point. When they do this, they claim back more energy, turning away from “working harder” to turn towards “working smarter” approaches. They believe, usually correctly, that their past achievements will be fully credited to them, and they will be given the benefit of the doubt if they underperform now and then. They also believe correctly that they’ll more likely be judged for their potential rather than simply their past performance.

So what’s a person with reduced privilege to do? Because you don’t share the same benefits of privilege, does this mean you won’t be given credit for working smarter? No, this is not what it means. You will be given credit for working smarter, and proving yourself a capable leader who can work smarter. Working smarter can actually earn you more privilege than others like you who do not turn this corner. 

Even though this is true, the unfortunate truth about privilege is that, in some situations with some people, you may be given less credit for working smarter than your more privileged coworkers. You may still have to work harder than your privileged coworkers.

The bottom line is that while working smarter is not the solution to reducing others’ privilege, it can be part of the solution to gaining more privilege for yourself. That privilege may come in the form of a raise, a new title, more interesting work, public recognition and many other guises. It can help you ease off the “work harder’ bandwagon of energy drain a bit more. And while it still won’t solve the privilege gap, it can reduce it.

Too many people miss a huge opportunity to advance in their careers because they think working smarter won’t help people “like me.” As a result they keep banging their head against the “work harder” wall until they are exhausted and burned out. 

Just for fun (and as a way to work smarter) I asked an Artificial Intelligence engine for advice on how to prove yourself. I edited out the ones that required “work harder” solutions so here is the “work smarter” list of AI-generated strategies to prove yourself:

• Develop a growth mindset to demonstrate your ability to adapt & grow
• Celebrate your wins and acknowledge your achievements
• Develop a positive mindset and healthy relationships for self-validation
• Overcome fears and build confidence 
• Build an online portfolio to showcase your professional know-how
• Be a team player & collaborate effectively for maximum impact
• Take initiative & lead projects for a bigger impact on performance

If you’re not sure how to start working smarter, here’s a good trick: reduce your hours and commit yourself to finding a way to make a greater impact anyway. While this sounds paradoxical on the surface, the creation of scarce resources in the form of less time will force you into more creative solutions and a relentless focus on what matters. By withdrawing the option to just throw yourself at the problem with sheer force, you’ll find more nuanced, non-obvious and straightforward ways to think about both the problem and the solution. And sometimes it can’t be done and you literally must rethink your priorities from scratch. This is not a bad thing. Every time you rethink your priorities you’re likely to come up with a better approach.

And that’s the point. Constant improvement. Better results. Impact that makes a difference, not just activity that keeps you busy.

Try it. Draw boundaries. Reduce the time you spend. Don’t give up on your goals. Get curious. Get creative. See what happens.