Who's doing your job?
Hello!
Hope you had a great weekend! I could rest a bit more than usual, which is always a good thing.
The question for this week was put on my mind amidst several conversations I've been having over the last few weeks.
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As you grow in the leadership path, sometimes you must take on other jobs to help the team move forward. Generally, people say that after a certain level, instead of asking, "Who's responsible for doing this task?" you should probably take that task, as the room is most probably looking at you.
We have to be careful with ourselves to not take all the tasks that don't have an owner. There are some small problems that we have to let them be.
If you're taking many of these tasks covering for other roles, who's doing your job?
What other Tasks?
Are these "other tasks" in the room with us right now?
In my case, these tasks have come in the shape of overhead tasks, like keeping tickets with the required data points, e.g., assigned sprint, story points, epic assigned, etc. These tasks tend to pile on, and I recently learned about the LNO Framework which not only helps prioritizing based on type of tasks (L)everage, (N)eutral or (O)verhead, but also how much "energy" you should devote to them.
When I switched my task list to be based on these, I noticed that I was taking too many small problems (or fires) that someone else could handle or could be deferred to later. Not everything needs to be fixed right now.
Always keep tabs on your energy!
Managers beware
I was having conversations with managers and directors, who sometimes felt the need to step in to help either one of their managers or a manager who felt they didn't want the team to "lose focus."
I've noticed new managers, especially one promoted internally from the team that manages former teammates, think they can do both things: manage a team and keep coding, which is not a sustainable practice. In other cases, they take tasks that "none of their reports like," which makes them sad and keeps the rest of the teammates from growing.
Raise your hand
There are only so many people to go around delegating and only so many hours in a day or a week for you to take on these tasks.
With this economy and reorgs, layoffs, and others at every company, your team or your organization might be severely understaffed. Under these circumstances, it is also important to raise your hand and talk with your manager or leadership about how severely affected the team is.
It's sometimes difficult to have these discussions, as generally, leadership reorgs teams based on their understanding of who is needed to sustain the current work.
Your turn!
How do you deal with all these tasks? Do you let someone else take them? Do you take some? all? Who's doing your job? Let me know your thoughts by replying to this email!
Happy coding!
Things I discovered in the past week
- I'm not sure if it's valid as "discovered", but I recently built a GitHub Action that lets me sync my Readwise links to Pinboard, which is a gap I've had since moving away from Pocket for storing my to read links.
- You Don’t Need to Choose talks about the "fallacy" of choosing between personal and professional development.
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