Work flows to the competent

According to the internet, no one is doing their job.

Product management is managing the delivery of features defined by senior leadership and sales. Design doesn’t have a say in how the product works or what it does, only how it looks. Development is simply picking up tickets. Everyone in the entire company besides marketing has decided what the homepage of the website ought to be.

With all this happening at the same time, it’s fair to wonder who is doing all the work?

Early in my career I was in a meeting with one of the senior leaders of the marketing function at IBM. I was telling him about this random assortment of responsibilities I’d accumulated. He told me something that has stuck with me for over a decade since. He said that work flows to the competent.

There are two important parts of the statement.

First, it’s not your position in the org chart that ultimately determines the role you play. You can be a product manager that is just organizing the features being brought to you by sales. Or you can be a product manager that is the GM of your business. Which version of the job you do is usually the outcome of your own personal competence. When confronted with a situation where some other role is doing strategic parts of what should be your job, many people will point to organizational or management dysfunction. There is always some truth to that, but what’s also true is that people will find any excuse to protect their egos and sense of self-worth. No one wants to admit that the strategic aspects of their job are being done elsewhere because they aren’t personally competent enough to do that work.

The second important part of the statement is that the work “flows” to the competent. It’s not always a conscious choice to move work from one team or individual to another. As much as we’d like to think otherwise, not everything in a company is done in highly intentional ways. Some things just happen. And it turns out that competent people have professional gravity. There aren’t enough competent people so when there is important work to be done, it naturally finds its way to people most capable of doing the work.

People respond in different ways to this reality.

High agency people thrive because the natural consequence of the org chart being mostly directional is that they can have as big an impact on the company as their personal competence allows, no matter what their role is today. The only thing stopping you from doing what you want to do is you. You think the company should be doing something different, but that thing is outside your span of control? Who cares, cause it to happen anyway.

Others will struggle. They’ll crave more clarity and definition on roles and process. They want to do their job and someone else to do theirs. They’ll be frustrated every time someone steps out of their own lane and into someone else’s. They’ll call this dysfunction without appreciating what’s happening and why.

The important thing to come to terms with is that work flowing to the competent isn’t a type of culture you choose over an alternative. It’s a natural law of the professional world in the way that gravity governs the physical world.

Companies need to build and sell products. Manage their people and their books. They hope that the departments they establish around sales, marketing, product, HR, etc can lead their piece of the story. But reality is messy because people are. Some people will have expertise and competence that vastly exceeds their scope. Some people the opposite. For as much as any company would prefer to be neat and orderly in its operations, roles and responsibilities, at the end of the day the substance of the strategy and the work needs to be right. The product needs to be right. The marketing needs to be right. Sales needs to be right.

And given a tradeoff between getting the internal processes right and getting the substance of the work right, companies will choose getting the substance right. And that’s why regardless of what the process or the org charts says, the work will flow to the competent.

There’s no value judgment in this observation. It’s just the way things are. Once you see the world this way, it’s humbling and scary and liberating all at once. It turns out that all the best and most exciting aspects of our jobs are the responsibilities that are earned, not given.

The irony is that acknowledging this can also be the first step toward building functions that do live in equilibrium with one another. As long as product management believes it should be in control of the product roadmap simply because their name is product management, they will never be in control of the product roadmap. The product leader that comes in and says we don’t own our roadmap because the CEO and the VP of Sales are closer to the market and customer requirements is the product leader that has taken the first step toward taking back control of their work.

The next time you are in a situation where work you should be doing is being done elsewhere, try changing your default response. Open yourself up to the possibility that someone else is doing the work because you are missing something. That work might be flowing as it naturally does, to the competent.

If you manage to overcome the denial, you might find yourself confronted for the first time that the problem might be you. You weren’t passed over for that job. You were legitimately beaten.

There are many paths you could take in this moment. Going back to denial. Acceptance. Despondence.

But there is one path that offers you the opportunity to change your professional trajectory. When you accept that you aren’t where you want to be because of your own limitations and competence, you are taking the first step toward changing that. If you are honest with yourself about where you need to improve, and then set yourself to the task of improvement, you might find that you have all the power in the world.