What is a Superpower?
A superpower is a skill where your relative ability is higher than your peers. That’s it.
Whether you’re looking for a new job or working towards a promotion, it can be daunting to find a way to stand out in a sea of extremely capable counterparts. As a data professional, you’re going to be surrounded by technical peers. At first glance, your colleagues may have very similar backgrounds and comparable skills. Upon closer inspection, however, you’ll find that they have relative strengths and weaknesses, even with the same ostensible skill set.
A superpower helps you stand out because you are better at it than your peers. Critically, this doesn’t require to you be the best, or even good, at this skill. You just need to be good relative to others. For example, maybe you are a data engineer and nobody on your team knows how to make dashboards. If you have even a cursory ability to stand up quick dashboards, you’ll be able to curry favor with downstream stakeholders consuming your pipelines due to the extra visibility. There may be more skilled dashboarders than you, and it might be your worst skill, but it can be your superpower if stakeholders start coming to you because they know they can trust what you deliver.
Superpowers can be very specific: you might know a specific tool or package better than anyone else. However, it’s worth trying to find more general superpowers that you can apply in a variety of scenarios. You can try to grow your tool-specific expertise into a broader ability to learn new tools quickly. With this shift, you’ll no longer be tied down to maintaining projects related to that tool, you’ll be tasked with influencing which tools your team uses.
Unlike in comic books, a superpower doesn’t have to be something you’re born with. It’s definitely easier to wield something that comes naturally to you, but you can choose one as well. If you notice that effective verbal communication is a rare but rewarded skill, you can decide to work on public speaking even if you are terrible at it now. In fact, the easiest way to gain a superpower is to identify the skills that are the rarest among your peers and choose to work on those that are also valued by stakeholders and management.
Introspection and Discovery
You likely already have a superpower. In order to identify it, you’ll need both internal reflection and external feedback.
Looking internally requires a detached, candid assessment of your own skills. You can use self-evaluations during annual review as a jumping-off point. Use your known biases to help calibrate. If you know you have imposter syndrome, be more forgiving when comparing your skills to others and vice versa. Focus on objective results more than subjective impressions.
You can also draw upon external cues. What do people come to you for? Do you find colleagues approaching your desk or pinging you with similar questions? Does anyone comment on how you make something look easy? Is there something you find yourself repeatedly getting commended for? These can all point to skills you possess that others have recognized in you as a relative strength.
Finally, you can solicit feedback from others. Discuss with your manager in your 1:1s how they view your strengths and weaknesses and what skills could be most impactful to improve. Ask your colleagues what they think your best talents are. You may be surprised to find the difference between what you value and what your peers value.
If a Tree Falls
An unused superpower is a non-existent one. If you don’t find ways to apply your superpower, others will not know you have it, and you’ll be in the same spot you’d be in if you never had the ability. If you have just started a new job, recently picked up a new skill, or haven’t been assigned the right project to display your talent, your manager may be unaware of your superpower. It’s unlikely they will spontaneously give you opportunities to showcase it unless you first demonstrate your proficiency.
Seek out projects or tasks that will give you the best chance of exhibiting your superpower. Even if you’ve been consistently wielding yours, these types of projects are the ones that afford you the most influence and leverage. Average actions are easily drowned out like white noise. A Data Scientist standing up an A/B test for a product change easily bleeds into the background of expectations. On the other hand, a Data Scientist leveraging their product context superpower to help reduce irrelevant testing and build consensus on meaningful alternative tests will raise attention.
Another way to make use of your superpower is to scale it. Upskill your colleagues by sharing your insights and mentoring them. A rising tide lifts all boats, and a rising bar helps supercharge your team. Mentoring others will not only help solidify your own understanding, but it will also help prevent you from being pigeonholed. If your superpower is writing super clear documentation, but it’s not all you enjoy doing, you need to find ways to avoid becoming “The Documentation Person”. Creating quality templates can free you from constantly being asked to collaborate on documentation.
With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility
Superpowers should be part of a well-balanced arsenal. This can be especially important if your superpower is something you really enjoy. You may find yourself growing complacent with your other skills as they atrophy. Your superpower should be a cherry on top rather than a crutch to hide deficiencies. As a Machine Learning Engineer, it doesn’t matter how well you can communicate if you can’t build a robust model. That’s not to say you need to be the best at everything, but try not to be the worst at anything. You can use the same introspection techniques to identify your biggest growth areas. Find small opportunities to work on these skills to ensure they’re not a liability.
Burnout is another risk that can arise, particularly if your superpower doesn’t come easy to you. Make sure to seek a diverse set of projects to ensure you don’t overuse the muscle. If you’re an incredible meeting host, but it exhausts you, try to space out your most critical meetings, or schedule them when you’re most likely to be well-rested. While this is easier said than done, you can learn the signs of burnout, and work with your manager to ensure you are finding balance.
Finally, over time, everything may start looking like a nail. It can be tempting to apply your superpower as a cudgel to any situation you’re in, even if there are more effective techniques available. For example, you might find yourself reflexively reaching for PyTorch when a heuristic approach would likely be just as good. Avoiding this pitfall requires continuous reflection and thinking critically about the work you do.
Another tool in the shed
Superpowers are different from traditional skills because of the outsized impact they can have relative to the input work required. They help you stand out and do things others can’t. While it can mean being the world-leading expert in something, it doesn’t have to be. You can find skills that are hard for everyone and make that your superpower with basic competency.
You don’t have to be born with it. It doesn’t have to be static. You can have more than one. Take time to experiment and get out of your comfort zone. The worst that can happen is you spend time improving yourself. Be honest with yourself throughout the process and seek feedback from trusted sources. At the end of the day, a superpower is just another tool. When wielded mindfully, it can help increase your influence and deliver greater impact.