Who Did The Work?
Everyone knows how school group projects go: one or two people do the work and everyone else sits around on their phones. When the project is finished, everyone claims to have contributed something.
Sadly, the professional world is about the same as school. Most meaningful projects at any company are done by a small group of people while everyone else does busy work (or literally nothing). And just like in school, the entire group takes credit for what a few people did.
The result is that at most companies, a small group of people drive the business and essentially fund the salaries of—in the successful cases—hundreds or thousands of people who don’t do much real and impactful work. We wrote another essay exploring that concept in a bit more depth. This time, we’re more interested in the utility of answering the question: Who did the valuable work?
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It’s useful to know who is capable of doing impactful work if you are figuring out whether or not you should work with someone. This applies to considering candidates you might hire, evaluating a potential employer, or deciding whether or not you should start a company with someone. Did they do the work?
Let’s define what we’re talking about when we’re talking about doing the work. It does not mean:
- Having worked somewhere fancy
- Having been on a team that produced a successful project
- Having worked lots of hours
Doing the work is about making an actual impact. Again, think back to group projects in high school. Just because five people are on a project that receives a high grade doesn’t mean those five people are equally responsible for the high grade. The guy who was on his phone the whole time had less impact than the girl who copy-pasted text into Google Slides, but the guy who actually researched and wrote the slideshow had more impact than the two of them combined. You want to figure out who the latter guy is.
Who came up with the useful ideas? Who wrote the document? Who built the great feature? Who created the marketing campaign that put the company on the map? And who, perhaps instead of doing these things, was busy sending memes in Slack and scheduling lots of Zoom calls?
Even harder than figuring out who did work in general is learning who did work that drove results. Because that’s what you really care about. Not just doing work, but doing useful work. Someone could meaningfully contribute to a big project at a big company, but did that project even matter? Did it influence the success of the company? Are they to credit for the outcomes? (Were OKRs actually that magical at Google, or was Google just one of the best business models of all time and so it didn’t really matter how they went about project planning?)
If you don’t figure this out, the default is you end up doing what most companies do: working with a bunch of people who don’t do anything impactful. You'll get lucky, sometimes, and find people who drive lots of impact. But it would be nice if you didn’t have to get lucky.
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It’s surprisingly hard to answer the title of this essay. But we can think of a few ideas.
One idea is to ask revealing questions. Another is to pay close attention to details somebody shares with you: what do they take credit for? How specific are they in their answers? Get references and ask questions about the work that the person supposedly did. See if the details line up. Yet another way is to ask for specific and tangible examples of impact they personally drove (fake experts are allergic to this). Don’t fall for common traps, like credentials. Fancy credentials are the resume version of Oscar bait. As you evaluate all of these things, beware of people who are smooth talkers. Some people are great at talking about work and less great at doing it. People who do real work don’t need big wind-ups or crazy charisma or public speaking skills. They may (or may not) stutter, or not talk as loudly, or sound confusing at times. But if you listen, you’ll hear real answers.
The very best way to tell if someone does the work may be to have them do a work trial. Bring them into your company for a few days, or a few hours. They don’t need a 3-month onboarding phase. Just let them work on a project. If they do useful work, odds are they can use this time to drive impact. Work trials are helpful because lots of people take credit for doing work, and may earnestly think they were impactful and important (even if they weren’t). A work trial is one way to begin finding out if that’s true.
Nobody likes group projects where one person does all the work. It would be cool if we could carry that philosophy into real life. Being more intentional about this idea is a good first step.
Note: Playing the odds, chances are that you do not do the work. (Most people don’t.) The good news is you can change that. Here’s one way to get started. Learning to do the work only works if you want to work, though. To the dismay of you and everybody around you, nobody can actually force you to do the work.
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