Notes from Work: Bridging disparity
Last time, I wrote about skeptics in the founding team. Skeptics are normally executors and the opposite of visionaries who wear optimism on their shoulders. There is another version that we see in organizations, especially startups.
There is a gap in the intellectual plane of thinking, decision-making, and the plane of tasks — doing things. This disparity emerges from the critiquing questions that are asked. Only some things need to be answered, and some answers are ambiguous because they must be discovered.
With employees, it is easier to work — they expect tasks, deadlines, and goals, and tend to follow suggestions or instructions. A few outliers may arise up to the situation, but those are rare.
After building three organizations and advising many more ground-ups, setting up an organization is fairly easy for me. But it also depends on the people I work with. I owe replies to them, but sometimes, there is an obvious chasm between the topmost elements of an organization — involving strategy, and vision and converting them into actionable intelligence.
But some only understand black and white, even though in the formative stages of an organization involving multiple dynamics, it is hard to find answers. In such cases, the chasm widens. That is where one needs to take a step back. The step back does not mean letting go, but reconfiguring the approach in a way that the other members understand — which is, seeing things as ‘tasks’. Tasks are tangible and outcomes are well-defined. This is where employees excel too.
So all I had to do was to put together a process and orient the team. It becomes easier for everybody — there are no stratospheric conversations, so. there is no ambiguity. The most interesting piece is that the solution was simple — I had to make myself absent.
The disparity is that there is no need for an intellectual democracy when all people understand are just tasks and outcomes. Speak their language, and it works well.
The takeaway is to build a series of tasks if people can’t understand long term, and can see only as far as the road turns. We will get to the corner, and take things from there. Sanity and safety — people get back to work.
~Ashok Subramanian © 2024
