A while back, I wrote about the Six Stages of Kevin Kelly. It’s a reflection on an essay by Kevin Kelly with leadership lessons about what you spend your time on over the course of your career The hierarchy he presents goes like this:
Stage 1: Don’t Screw Up. “When you start your first job, all your attention is focused on not screwing up.”
Stage 2: Learn New Things. “At this stage, working smart means doing more than is required.”
Stage 3: Exploration. “Working smart here means trying as many roles as you can in order to discover what you are best at.”
Stage 4: Doing the Right Task. “It takes some experience to realize that a lot of work is better left undone.”
Stage 5: Doing things well and with love. “At this stage, you can begin to do only the jobs that you are good at doing and that need to be done. And what a joy that is!”
This seems like a natural-enough progression for the motivated, reflective self-starter who wants to learn and be useful. It evolves from fear of messing up to pushing past our comfort zones to playing around with what work we do and do not do to have the most impact.
And, wouldn’t the pinnacle of that evolution be “doing only the jobs that you are good at doing and that need to be done?”
Alas, no, that too is just the penultimate step.
There’s a step beyond that that is about doing the jobs that only you can do. Not all the jobs you’re best at; not all the jobs that need to be done…but just the jobs that you and only you can do.
I’ve sat with this idea for a while as I’ve become more senior. It’s not an easy one to implement for a lot of reasons, not least of which because of how satisfying it is to do important work that needs to be done: this is meaningful work that creates value for everyone…and Kevin’s saying that this is work that we should NOT be doing, because someone else can do it well.
Sticking with the things that ONLY you can do is different: it means spending more of your time dancing with uncertainty; more of your time trying to figure out what to do; more of your time willing to be wrong, willing to do things with uncertain payoffs, willing to do things that are hard(er) to measure.
And here’s the kicker: even these goalposts keep changing. Because your organization’s competence keeps changing, the people around you keep changing and growing, and, over time, the things that only you could do well become things that others around you can also do well.
What a gift that is, and what a challenge.
It means that, if we’re doing this right, our jobs never stay static; the role our organization needs us to play keeps on changing.
It means that, the moment we really, truly figure something out is probably the moment when we should teach it to someone else.
And it means that the moment we are really comfortable, something about our mindset or our team’s growth has gotten off track.
No time to be comfortable, but comfort is overrated.
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