Here is a real conversation I once had. It’s a bit ridiculous but I used to be a bit more ridiculous so just bear with me.

Me: “What do you think your job is?”

Them (a senior manager at the company): “My job is to empower my team to get results.”

Me: “I don’t think so. I think your job is to get results. If and how you choose to empower your team, well, that’s up to you. But it’s not really relevant to what your job is.”

Before you get upset with me and my delivery and think that I’m no fun at parties, realize that this was (a) years ago and (b) this person and I didn’t end up working together for long.

You should also know this person was ineffective at their job. Actually. And it’s not because they weren’t smart. Or hard-working. Or anything like that.

I think it’s because they literally didn’t know what their job was.

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This sounds a bit ridiculous because it is. How do you not know what your job is? You (or at least this manager) are getting paid 6 figures? Shouldn’t you at least know what your job is?

Thing is, I think many people don’t know what their job is. Maybe a manager thinks their job is to empower their team. Maybe an HR person thinks their job is to write company documentation and post job listings on LinkedIn.

I think what’s going on here is that people are distracted. They are not really aware of what success looks like, and are too easily influenced by the status quo.

Many people struggle  to answer the question: What is actually important about my job? What is this company actually paying me to achieve for them?

It is not hard to fall into this trap. To get distracted.

  • Some executive coach goes on a podcast and talks about how to manage people.

  • Some VC writes a thought leadership piece about how the best managers manage.

  • Some guy posts a Twitter thread about what he’s observed in the best managers.

Slowly or all at once, you start drifting away from your actual job, getting results, and start focusing on other things, like all of these distractions you learned about online. Eventually you believe your job is to “empower your team”. You do all sorts of things that supposedly empower your team without paying too much attention to whether those things are getting results. And that is how you end up not knowing what your job is.

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Life when you don’t know what your job is can be a bit easier. Once you convince yourself that yeah, your job is to get results, but what you should really pay attention to is going through all the motions. Doing the things that supposedly smart people say to do.

You can absolutely do this as a mid-level manager. Lots of them do. You can hide. Hide behind planning meetings and excuses and frameworks. Especially if nobody above you is paying close attention, or if you just happen to be quite good at talking.

If somebody asks why you didn’t get results, you can say things like “well, I was trying to empower my team.” And honestly, it can sometimes work.

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If you are the founder or the CEO, though, eventually this comes back to kill you. Because your job is to generate long-term shareholder value and not let your company die in the process.

Could you imagine the CEO of a public company speaking to the market and saying something like: “Well, we tried empowering our team this quarter and we didn’t get results. But we tried!”

Nice.

Get the real outcomes. That’s what actually matters. However you do it is up to you. This applies to every level of the company. The closer you are to working backwards from the actual job, the better. And if “empowering your team” is getting crazy levels of results, then go for it.

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