Allow impact to dictate your workday, not just your job description.
I’ve been fortunate enough to spend my career in Startups of many sizes and even started my own, during that time I’ve noticed something. I think in the rush to structure, scale and focus, teams miss out on empowering something that’s essential to success…chasing impact.
One of my favorite articles is about giving away your legos. Graham details how, in a scaling startup, you’re always giving away your metaphorical lego towers to go find new legos to build with. It’s an amazing analogy for any stage. However, it doesn’t address that most people are so focused on the legos they think they are supposed to play with & miss the impact they could be driving.
Leaders have to empower teams to strive for impact
Sometimes as leaders, in the hopes of creating focus, we create hierarchy, silos, and hyper-specific titles that cloud people's path to what we really want them to do. Impact the business by solving the problems that will allow us to achieve our goals. If you stop reading now, here’s the takeaway. Just focus on impact and your goals, find a way to make it happen, and quit hiding behind your job description.
I think people look at job descriptions as safety, clarity, and focus. But in early-stage startups, I really wish sometimes it was acceptable to just write: “you are going to help us hit X revenue in a scaleable fashion while helping us build a culture of ambition, authenticity & excitement.” Why? Because the 15 bullet points on what this person should do just draws a box around the legos a person is allowed to play/build with and how they can build it. The focus leaders put on those bullet points makes sense, you want to think through the role, but at the same time, why hire a smart person if you already know exactly what you want to be done and how to do it? The fact is, there are at least 5 ways to get to every goal, some short-term and others long-term solutions. But what most companies get wrong is that they detail out the what, when, where, and how for people and then wonder why no one is looking for new ways to solve problems or staying ambitious.
Don’t hear me wrong on this, focus is not the issue. The issue is that we have trained our teams to think inside the box, not to look for work, and to feel that they need to be told to go find problems to solve. Focus is crucial, but the focus should be on the goal and the goal alone. We try to provide role clarity and that comes from a good place, but it also restricts what I think is a big differentiating factor in people that excel or flounder in fast-moving companies: the ability to figure shit out.
Some leaders try to comfort teams with the allure of knowing how they will spend their 8 hours each day when I actually believe what people crave most is creating measurable impacts for their teams. The intrinsic motivation that making a difference brings is a huge part of what builds great culture. Remote, in office, ping pong, no ping pong…I’ve found in myself, colleagues, and teams that the impact you have is what you’ll remember and what keeps you going every day. Once you begin to create impact, you can’t go back to being a cog. Once a smart person is let loose to go solve things and figure it out, something transformational happens that I’ve been fortunate enough to witness in myself and so many others.
When you simply let your people run at goals without 100 boundaries and waiting on their leader for every morsel of direction, they:
- Sprout a yearning to learn that may not have previously been there
- Take control of their schedule and where to focus their time
- Level up their hard skills instead of using the lack thereof as an excuse
- Become more self-reliant and sustaining
- Become addicted to impact & will chase it as long as they are treated well
Storytime: What Good Looks Like
I’ve been fortunate enough to work with some incredible leaders. The best was hands down the late, great Nate Sexton. The reason I’m most grateful for Nate is that he taught everyone on his team to color outside the lines, and to explore ways to solve problems other than the idea he or leadership had. He viewed scaling a startup as a game we had to figure out how to win, and there were multiple routes to achieve victory, not just his.
What that did for me and my peers is that it gave us the freedom to start picking up all sorts of legos, figuring out how they worked and determining if they could help up get to our goals. That trickled down to all of our teams and those people are still the best pure problem solvers I’ve ever been around.
We weren’t afraid to step outside of our job description, slide into another one, circle back to ours and then build a comprehensive solution. Nate really didn’t care about our title or who got credit, we were all just focused on building something amazing for our users.
But it wasn’t easy for Nate to break us from our addiction to direction and CYA. I vividly remember sitting across from him asking “Nate, should I build a forecast model for staffing, do you think that will help?” or “Hey Nate, how did you create those rules for Zendesk for SLA?” or even questions I can’t believe I asked like “can you teach me how to write a jira ticket?” Nate responded almost the same way each time, nothing. He just pretended like he didn’t even hear. So instead of asking again when I know he heard me, I would google it, watch a youtube video or finally read the book he had given me a month earlier. You see, I truly believe Nate wasn’t just being an asshole. If we asked a good question or needed genuine help, he would drop everything and brainstorm, whiteboard or point us in the right direction of where we could learn something. But this guy taught himself multiple programming languages because he was sick of Dev’s getting in the way of him solving problems for the business. So to him, someone asking for something that was a google search away was kind of absurd.
So then I caught the itch as did my peers and team. Everyone was reading, throwing their job description in the back seat, and putting our goals on the dashboard and we were off to the most productive year I’ve ever seen a team have.
Storytime — what bad looks like
At a past role, I had a team full of amazing problem solvers; we could have figured out nearly anything and had saved the company tons. But we over-structured, over templatized, and sometimes cut the legs out for people to build and think creatively. The problem wasn’t the team, it was a leadership team that had fallen into a fixation on politics & optics. The actual team was amazing, but there was so much red tape in running at impact. We had our hands slapped more than once for “solving problems for other teams” or “not waiting to be assigned issues”. We literally built solutions to hit company goals that leadership chose to stuff under the rug. This is what bad looks like and sadly I think it’s the rule, not the exception in most startups at scale.
My advice on switching your mindset to drive impact.
In a young startup, impact is everywhere. It’s a grove of trees where every apple you pick is an opportunity to grow the company, fix a broken thing, or make the experience better. But what I see so much of is people just walking around not looking. It’s hard to break out of the box that your job description creates without a leader that empowers that kind of thinking. Some people also get stuck in the fixed mindest of “not my job, not my problem” and want to do just enough. But, if you are someone who truly values growth of yourself and you have a leader that empowers you to attack problems, it’s time to stare at a wall.
Yes you read that correctly, I mean stare at wall. An old CEO and great friend used to spin my chair around weekly and say just that, “Harb(that’s me), stare at that wall and think about how we fix this all this shit”. So I did, and I won’t ever stop.
At work, people almost never think strategically about how to drive impact or reach their goals. We think work means typing something, building a spreadsheet, or sitting in a meeting. But so much of the success I’ve seen is when people choose to slow down. Often times, the best decision you can make is the deliberate one to think rather than act, talk to a customer rather than sit in a meeting, or read how other have solved similar problems instead of assuming you are the first to have it. When you give yourself the freedom to think outside of the box, or a new approach you will often stumble upon something amazing. Here the process I loosely follow:
- Write down my goal.
- Write down what success would look like.
- Jot down all the things that impact or relate to that goal being reached.
- Start looking for connections.
- Talk to the people with the problem, research products, tools, methods, similar problems other companies have and how they solved it.
- Start formulating a way you could drive impact if you knew (X) skill or how (x) worked.
- Go learn that thing.
- Ask for help where you need it, document everything you learn.
- Test it and measure.
- Regardless of the result, repeat with the next goal or the same one(failure is fine).
Leaders (good ones, not ego and credit-driven leaders) are looking for people who think like this, who enjoy that exploration period, and aren’t tunnel-visioned into their day-to-day monotony. In a fast-paced start-up or any growing company, you need to be evolving new skillsets all the time, constantly reading and searching for impact. If you don’t want to do all this for your current company, don't. But you should do it for yourself because I can’t tell you how fast this thinking shows up in reviews, interviews, and your confidence to reach the next level.
Read your job description once, then file it…learn your goals and chart your own course to solving them. A good leader will be there for support and brainstorming every step of the way.
Would love to hear your thoughts!