I recently held a question and answer session with a particularly talented
group of my colleagues who are taking on a challenging task. At the end they
thanked me for making the time to speak with them, as is often done. It always
strikes me as bizarre when people thank me for taking an hour of my time when
they are doing the real work.
I have come to realize that very few people have any idea what I do all day,
though most generously assume I must be very busy with big important things.
I often joke that I don’t do any real work, but that isn’t entirely fair.
What I mean is that the work I do is entirely indirect. I write neither code
nor copy, design neither atoms nor bits, sell neither hardware nor software.
None of my actions directly creates value or prevents harm. I thought it might
be interesting to walk through what I think my job is as “an executive.”
Job #1: Convince smart people to work with me. As I do very little direct
work it is important I hire people who are more able than I to direct said
work. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that nearly everything I do
affects my ability to hire the best people. Every private conversation accrues
in some part to my public reputation which reaches would be colleagues long
before I do. The more I am able to adapt to a wide range of working styles the
more people I become compatible with. Every public success or failure makes
people more or less open to the idea of collaborating. Even aspects of my
personal life play a role in whether people see me as a viable person to
entrust with their career. Did you ever wonder why I started writing so many
mildly self-important notes on the internet?
Job #2: Allocate scarce resources. Whether it is a question of money,
people, visibility, or just attention it is up to me to keep our portfolio in
balance. The expression people see of this most often is decisions to fund or
not fund specific work but that’s only the manifestation of this work. The
underlying work is deciding how much risk to indulge, how to allocate across
different timelines, and how to balance across the urgent and the important.
Job #3: Craft vision. Creating cohesion at any meaningful scale requires a
narrative in which each person can see how their work fits in and why the work
of their peers is important. My role affords me a unique point of view across
the breadth of the work and the ability to command enough attention to create
a shared understanding of how it
fits together.
Job #4: Break ties. I make far fewer decisions than most people expect.
And I consider most of those instances a failure to provide sufficient clarity
in advance. But sometimes we run into situations that demand trade-offs
between competing priorities that we hadn’t previously imagined. In those
cases the decisions come to me and after gathering context and unblocking
teams we work to provide new standing context so future decisions can be
resolved locally much more quickly.
Job #5: Curate Culture. My friend and former colleague Jocelyn Goldfein
wrote “[culture is the behavior you reward and
punish](https://jocelyngoldfein.com/culture-is-the-behavior-you-reward-and-punish-7e8e75c6543e).”
As the person in the organization with the broadest visibility and the biggest
platform that makes me uniquely suited to shape culture by choosing what to
bring positive and negative attention to.
Job #6: Advocate, explain, and be held accountable. This is the smallest
part of my job but by virtue of being more visible is often what people think
is the most important. Our products must speak for themselves and our
consumers will always be the loudest voice controlling their adoption. But we
do our best around the edges to communicate both externally and internally to
help people understand our work. And at the end of the day our own leadership
and the public will rightly lay responsibility for any failures at my feet.
Of this list only #2 and #4 are really exclusively my domain, the rest are
responsibilities I carry jointly with the team itself. The reason I keep
putting “executive” in quotes is that it isn’t a real job. In fact I don’t
think I’ve seen the title used outside of the media; and then it is usually to
build someone up to make a story more impressive. In reality I am just a
people manager. And of course like any great manager when I’m doing my job
well, I have to do very little of anything. It truly is a shame, then, that I
really am always so busy…