Growing With Your Company’s Complexity. §
Highlights §
- As a business’ complexity rapidly grows, folks in important organizational roles often struggle to learn quickly enough to remain effective in their current roles. In such cases, opportunities moved on to someone else who was currently available, often someone newly hired into the company. (View Highlight)
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- Everyone has some set of tasks that they’re already experienced doing, and another set that they’re still learning. In most jobs, you generate value when you’re performing tasks you’re experienced with, and you’re generating future value when you’re performing tasks you’re learning. (View Highlight)
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- In an ideal career, you find yourself progressing up the difficultly curve, such that you are always doing some stuff you’re good at, and undertaking some new work (View Highlight)
- you often find yourself experienced at tasks that the broader organization is unfamiliar with. This is a tricky time, because the organization depends on you to deliver the work that only you’re experienced with, while simultaneously depending on you to rapidly learn new skills that no one in the organization can teach you. (View Highlight)
- The consequences here are significant. The person in that role will often become a bottleneck on the company’s execution, and their rate of learning will decrease even more as they refocus on work they’ve already mastered (View Highlight)
- it’s often the case that any manager’s failure to scale with the company can unintentionally cram down an entire organization’s career growth. (View Highlight)
- our goal as a leader is to offload work that you are experienced at to the wider organization as rapidly as possible, freeing up room for you to continue learning. (View Highlight)
- There is some nuance here. Often you’ll hear folks say that they want to be more strategic, and then they stop doing a bunch of critical work. That’s not the solution here. The goal is to solve for the work you’re experience with, not to abandon it. (View Highlight)
- the majority of my learning occurs while working through the challenges of my daily work, and I think that’s an important goal to optimize for when trying to learn quickly enough to remain in-role at a growing company. (View Highlight)