People do 3 types of work within companies.
Produce:
Creating artifacts to serve the company’s external stakeholders.
Organize:
Creating the necessary structures & processes for Produce work.
Self-promote:
Creating a proxy for their own competence & impact.
A short tutorial👇🏾
Examples
Produce work: products, eng infra, sales deals, services, support, status updates,...
Organize work: internal processes, resource planning, status updates, re-orgs, hiring,...
Self-promote work: perf reviews, status updates, 1:1s with manager,...
Important tweet👇🏾
The 3 key sources of conflict within a company:
- Self-promote work disguised as Produce work or Organize work (Politics)
- Disagreement on relative priorities of Produce work (Strategy problem)
- Too much Organize work too little Produce work or vice versa (Execution problem)
Role of company leadership:
A company’s leaders need to be able to precisely & consistently diagnose the source of major conflicts. They need to be particularly intolerant of Self-promote work that's suboptimal for the company, even if it's optimal for a given individual or team
Role of managers:
Managers need to create clarity for each employee on the optimal allocation of time across the 3 types of work, for their specific role on the team.
When managers fail to do this, each employee picks their own subjective defaults, causing mutual frustration.
Footnote:
The original idea here of the types of work was inspired by this line in the book Principles by Ray Dalio
“in most companies people are doing two jobs: their actual job and the job of managing others’ impressions of how they’re doing their job.”
Was a💡moment for me.
As a startup founder/CEO/executive, it's important to look for the crossover point described in this thread:
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