Why do you do a job role?

This is something that I had a pat answer for many years ago, it was a tripod of reasons I was once told by a contractor.

1. You do it for money.
2. You do it for the CV.
3. You do it because you enjoy it.

You aim for all three of these. You settle for two and you leave at one.

While this logic worked when life was black and white, time and experience seemed to make it seem overly simple, but when you get right down to it, is it? You might have to amend the tripod legs a little bit to make them a bit more comprehensive, but it might still apply. So let’s go through them one by one 

“You do it for money”: Well what do we mean by “Money”, do we mean the market rate?, do we mean enough to retire early?.

Thankfully in the job market there is actually a good general definition for this kind of thing, it comes from a number of the big tech companies, and that is when you pay a resource, you must pay enough money so that they don’t have to think about money day to day, it might not be heaps and heaps, but it’s enough so that people are not distracted from their job by external money problems, doesn’t worry about holidays, does not become worried in the week before pay/invoice day, this will be a balancing act as such an amount is normally above the base market rate that HR and finance use, so as a manager if you are trying to achieve this with your staff members you will have a never ending battle.

“You do it for the CV”: This one is the one that needs firming up the most, because “good for your CV” defines a lot of things, are you at the beginning of your career and just want to bulk up your CV to make it useful, or are you thinking of moving into a specific region or market, I have found through 25 years of being in the corporations and particularly in corporate IT, that about five years is about as far ahead as you can think. Technology changes so much that it’s best not to get bogged down in one year, as you learn a lot of stuff that will die (even if that might show you are cutting edge), But thinking of more than five years and the whole world can change. So, go for that. Think of what this will do for you in the range of two to five years. Finally also think If you have to delete this role from your skill set will that be doable, Some skills actually prove to be toxic to your end CV, or removed for another reason e.g. you did some work for a Government agency. So if you’re going to take one of these on purely for the money, then can you afford to take it off afterwards? 

“You do it because you enjoy it.”, This one is the most subjective. It might seem like you enjoy something, but it might actually just mean the work itself. You might find it technically challenging or socially challenging, but do you genuinely enjoy it as a whole? are work politics toxic?, are there some days you enjoy far more than others, when some people are on holiday is the job much much more fun, on this I think you are going to have to go with an average, and if that is tricky, think of what you feel like when you come back to it from a weeks holiday, are you keen to get stuck in, or are your dreading one part such that it overshadows your whole work.

So to me, it DOES seem the tripod, the old contractor way of working things out, still holds true in a more complex time and setting, But you need to think a little bit more about each leg before you make your decision.

For example, enjoyment might not be pure job enjoyment. It might be a case of you are there because a particular person is also there, who working for makes the whole thing fun, if you remove that person is it still fun, look at the company. Is this an enjoyable company to work for. work through each of your legs and try and find a job you genuinely find worth your time and energy.

Nugget 14: “There is a maximum number of parallel streams any team can take before slowing delivery”

Explanation:

Every project and organisation has multiple parallel work streams and often multiple ones are high priority. Despite what people will say you cant make them into a simple 1.2.3 list, this does not make any logical sense after all if you go to a granular enough detail you will be able to find out which of 2 tasks is more important than another, but it does make practical political sense, i.e. you are simply not going to be able to politically hold off one person who wants their task done while you fully complete something else that is only a little bit more important elsewhere , you HAVE to show some progress on both items.

So while people at the Coalface might be upset and push back on you to put them in an order, there are times you wont be able to do that ,and the team is going to have to parallel process. 

HOWEVER it is your job to ensure that the actual number of streams that you are running simultaneously is not beyond your team’s capacity to cope with.

For me the definition of “too many” is when the administration load of flipping between streams and areas of decision, actually means that your total delivery time noticeably goes down.

Your definition of this might vary according to the different type of work you’re doing. For example, you might have developers that can only cope with one deliverable at once. So therefore, you can only have as many streams as you have developers. But ultimately, your job as a manager is to determine this. you have to run the balancing act of accepting more work and not appearing restrictive as a team. and knowing when if you accept one more thing, even when pressed by a senior manager, the delivery of all of your other items will suffer and ultimately the project will be damaged, at this point gather your evidence and hold firm with you senior manager, while presenting the best options you can.

Disclaimer: As always these posts are not aimed at anyone client or employer and are just my personal observations over a lifetime of dealing with both management and frontline associates.