Over my eleven years of being a business owner, I’ve moved around quite a bit. I’ve been an engineer, a project manager, a business developer, a coffee maker, and everything in between. Lisa has worked as our marketing director, moved to the COO role, and now serves as Kin’s CEO, all inside of two years. We’ve also hired people for one job whom eventually moved on to do something else – project managers have turned into ops directors and, as recently as a month ago, an engineer moved into a data sciences role.
Just as numerous however are the team members who find long term fulfillment performing the same duties they originally came on board for. My former business partner, Ka Wai, remains enamored with rolling into work each day ready to program after almost twenty years! Tom Stanley, a long time team member of ours, also remains devoted to the craft of programming (though he’s thrown in a splash of support engineering recently).
So what makes people, to borrow a phrase from Lisa, “fire themselves and, in turn, rehire themselves for something new” within the same company? Likewise, what keeps some people drawn to the craft they fell in love with so many years ago?
The answer in my experience lies somewhere in the unique mix of mission, personality, and opportunity each individual finds in their work.
What’s your mission?
People who move between roles tend to view their professional mission in broader terms than their craft. For example, a former team member of ours, Lindsay, originally came on board as a project manager, but soon found her alignment running our company’s operations. From there, she played a crucial role in Kin’s early days helping new customers build better workplaces. The mission she discovered over time wasn’t to be the best project manager she could be, rather it was to help make work better for the people around her.
On the flip side, a software engineer whose mission is a mastery of low-level programming languages will stay incredibly close to the code, as it were, dwelling in the boundless nuances and semantics of each technology. A great example of this is Paul Kizior who, over his five years with us, has excelled as an engineer and, while his specialties have developed, he continues to thrive in the core craft he was hired for.
There’s no right or wrong professional mission, mind you, rather whatever someone’s mission is gives insight in how to view and even fulfill, someone’s trajectory at work.
Instincts at work
Instincts play a critical role in our work, and we’ve used assessments like Thinking Wavelengths to support observations we make of how we all instinctively deal with ambiguity, risk, and delegation. On one end of the spectrum are people who thrive in the undefined realms of a business. At the other end are those who relish routine and knocking out assignments. The way that translates to a software company like ours is, generally, people who love the risk will tend to the strategy and leadership end of the business, while the procedural work where mastery of one’s craft (design, engineering, etc.) is the pursuit will complement on the other end.
The original company I co-founded, We Are Mammoth, is a consulting company that requires a steady hand from our production team – the work is overwhelmingly routine, but it requires focus and attention to detail due to its sensitivity and timeliness. As such we’ve biased our team’s DNA toward predictable and steady over the years.
On the flip side, our product roles at Kin require more open-ended discovery and risk taking and, as such, we’re trying to bias the team’s DNA toward those traits. While there’s a business need for the routine-minded team members, we’ve biased our expectations
Sparks and opportunities
Sometimes there’s a spark that can take hold of someone that shoots them them out of their regular professional orbit. A great example of this is Ameer Mansur, our network administrator of six years. Ameer is a good example of someone in between the extremes I describe above – he’s tactical when he needs to be, yet his broader mission has been to ensure the integrity of our company’s IT and security infrastructure.
Well, along came an opportunity a couple of months ago to get Kin aligned with the European Union’s new data privacy regulations (GDPR). It was new to Ameer, but just the spark he needed to bring clarity to not just his role at Kin but to his career moving forward. Ameer leapt off his historically routine role, head first into a regulation that would push him to lead product, legal, and business overhauls within Kin.
As serendipity would have it, our company needed Ameer to grab this spark and pursue it with all he had. You might say he was the right guy at the right time, but you also might say we were the right company at the right time for him. It’s fun to be a party to this kind of transformation.
Which road should you take?
In his book Raising the Bar, Clif Bar founder Gary Erickson writes about a cycling trip in Europe where he chose to follow his map’s white roads rather than those marked in red. The red roads were the thoroughfares used to get from point A to B and the white roads, by contrast, often would meander up the side of a mountain only to dead-end quietly, or maybe take him through a series of small villages he’d otherwise have missed. Gary realized, of course, that he was drawn more to the journey than the destination. He enjoyed the unknowns; what couldn’t be planned.
Small workplaces like Kin often can’t offer the typical corporate ladder that larger organizations cling to out of organizational necessity. For some, that’s a deal breaker, as they have their destination and stop-offs planned out in advance of setting sail on their careers. My opinion, however, is that smaller companies offer much more in the way of finding true alignment of passion and career mission and while it doesn’t always have to be the meandering journey that I’ve come to prefer, it does offer just the right mix of opportunities and structure that are good for anyone looking for a little adventure in their work.