That's Not My Job
No, really, it probably isn't
Welcome to Polymathic Being, a place to explore counterintuitive insights across multiple domains. These essays take common topics and investigate them from different perspectives and disciplines to come up with unique insights and solutions.
Today's topic focuses on being a good team player and when it can go too far. The key is, sometimes it is OK to say “It’s not my job.” We’ll explore when that time is and what tools you have available to ensure that the job gets done the best way possible and by the right person.
Introduction
LinkedIn has become a treasure trove of simplistic platitudes, trite tautologies, and outright bad ideas for leadership. Today’s falls under a less egregious form, but one that I think needs to be poked at to show where it can go wrong. The meme goes:
Never say, “That’s not my job.”
That oozes arrogance and laziness. Chip in to help with what needs to be done, even if it’s not your responsibility. Do what needs to be done or help someone find the solution. Period. Even When nobody’s watching.
On the surface, this does seem to be a logical and team-focused goal to ensure work continues to get done. But what happens when it really isn’t your job? Worse, what happens when stepping in devolves the process until clear lines of ownership, accountability, and even knowing who can or can’t do the task blur into pure chaos?
Welcome to the vast majority of organizations I’ve been asked to help straighten out in my career. In almost every one of them, this idea of just jumping in and getting it done permeated the culture, and yet success was never achieved.
Worse, they created a thousand workarounds because no one slowed down long enough to fix the root cause. People were rewarded for finding novel solutions instead of following the processes. In many cases, it resulted in significant corrective actions and quality issues.1 It’s easy to just ‘get it done.’ It takes a lot of time to strip back all of these band-aids and fix the real problem.
Lean Six Sigma has a phrase for this: “Don’t steal the monkey.” This means if a problem or roadblock emerges, don’t just step in and do it yourself. Sometimes it’s not your job. Instead, step back and figure out who should be doing it, why it’s not working, and get to the root cause of the problem.
A great tool to achieve this is called Leader Standard Work. It’s one of the most powerful tools for success and provides visibility into each person’s tasks and accountability mechanisms to ensure it’s done right.
Leader Standard Work
I’ll use an example from a manufacturing cell: these are typically led by a manager and supported by manufacturing, quality assurance, test engineers, planners, material managers, and assemblers and testers. Functionally, it is a cross-domain team.
Whenever I’ve implemented Leader Standard Work, I start by having the leadership team write down the top 15 tasks each day, 10 tasks each week, and 5 tasks each month they think need to get done to be successful.
When they hand the list back, inevitably 80%+ of what they’ve listed isn’t their job. They’ve just stepped in to do it over time. They never said, “That’s not my job.” Instead, they stole the monkey from someone else. For example:
Supervisor checking test equipment each morning - Test engineer’s role
Test engineer trying to release replacement parts - Material manager’s role
Manufacturing engineer attending delivery meetings - Supervisor’s role
Once we assigned those tasks back to whose role they actually were we’d go back and update the list of tasks. The second time we’d still find that over 50% of the tasks were not what the team members should be doing.
After around five iterations we’d have a Daily, Weekly, and Monthly task list that finally identified what that person needed to do. The list ended up being shorter than the first list and that allowed us to add in new tasks that drove continuous improvement to make the processes better over time.
There’s another concept to apply here I call Layered Accountability. It’s based on the idea of looking at the right areas, at the right time, to maintain a generally high performance. We explored this in the essay “The Enemy’s Gate is Down” where I’d spot-check very specific tasks.
Besides focusing on their specific job, each role also needs to look down to ensure the layers they lead are performing, and then look up at the strategic areas to see what’s coming up in the future like we covered in Stop Aiming at the Wrong Targets.
Business Continuity
Clearly, delineating roles and tasks, establishing leader standard work, and ensuring that the right people are on the right task is a crucially important aspect of achieving business continuity. Even better, it enables you to identify the critical processes and align the team around true measures of success.
I recently advised a small start-up team that was so tangled up that they struggled to develop software architectures, hold teams accountable, and even write job requirements. After working them through a series of workshops focused on maturing Products, Processes, and People, we were able to bring in leader standard work to iron out their processes and finally, align their people.
The irony is they started off bragging, “We never say that’s not my job here.” By the end, they realized that phrase actually caused their problems. They had to step back and find out who really needed to get it done. In doing so, they balanced the work and realized they needed to hire extra people, but not in the areas they originally thought.
In Summary
It is important to say no and sometimes it’s not your job. That doesn’t mean you let it fall by the wayside and ignore it. Instead, your team needs to do the hard work to align processes and people so that you can efficiently deliver products.
Don’t steal the monkey and improve the processes instead. It’s one of the most powerful tools to avoid functional stupidity as well as break the paradigm of the successfully unsuccessful.
What times have you found saying “No” was the right answer and how’d it work out? Please share any insights you may have that can help others learn!
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I’m going to make a case that much of the issue with Boeing right now and their legion quality issues are because they’ve stepped away from their adherence to standard work and continued to justify it because they were getting things done. The issue, without the proper oversight and controls, they have significant quality issues.
I don't know, man. I always step in to do the job, whether it's mine or not. I usually just roam around hospitals and walk into random operating theaters. If I see a patient under full anaesthesia, I grab a scalpel and get right to work.
I'm proud to say, not a single one of my patients has ever complained.
This is key for me at the moment as a design team of 3 who consistently get asked to do work that Purchasing and sales should be doing