context: I work in an operational capacity for a startup and have for several years
To me this misses what I consider the most important thing to success in operational roles: total responsibility. Just about anyone can learn to do stuff, and lots of times operations is treated as the function of the organization that does the stuff no one else wants to do, but to me this isn’t exactly right. It’s more about being responsible, probably heroically so, and being willing to do whatever you have to do to take care of the things you care about. Another person I know describes it has “holding parental mind” for something, which I think helps point at the breadth and depth of what operations is really all about.
This is not to say all these other things are not important, you can probably get along okay with someone who can just do stuff, and no amount of responsibility can overcome all other skill deficiencies, but to my mind great operational competence only arises when a person takes radical, total responsibility for the thing they are charged to protect.
I think total responsibility is really important, although in larger organisations it can be useful to make sure that you aren’t duplicating efforts or annoying other people by assuming that you are the only one that can fix things and end up burning bridges with the people you need to work with.
Thanks for this addition! This is very interesting. Do you find that taking responsibility and being willing to do whatever you have to do is something innate to people, or something that is mostly acquirable? Do you have ideas for how to test whether you have this trait?
I personally have found it pretty situational – I went through a fairly binary switch from “had not had a project that felt important enough to take heroic responsibility on” to “suddenly found lots of projects where it felt fairly natural take heroic responsibility for things.”
(And then burned out and currently don’t take much buck-stops-here responsibility, but feel like I could again if I needed to. I think figuring out how to do this sustainably, both as an individual and at the org level, is pretty tricky)
Do you think there are certain situations one could force or reenact in order for a person to develop the trait of taking responsibility, or discover if they have it? Do you feel like the perceived importance of the project is the only factor, or are their other factors that can induce this?
For me, it was quite important that the project was not just “important” in the sense that it was relevant to the global good, but “important” in the sense that it was meeting all of my own needs. ie:
I felt like other people in my social circle cared about it
The end product was something that tied in with my overall self-narrative/image
Many intermediate stages were very creatively stimulating
The difficulty of the tasks were roughly at my current skill level
There was clearly nobody else who would do the thing if I didn’t do it (this is unfortunately in tension with “doing it sustainably”. It’s possible people need to be forced to learn this skill in somewhat stressful burnout-inducing environments and then later can apply it in healthier environments)
A lot of things had to go right at once, which were pretty situation-dependent (and me-dependent)
For what it’s worth, when I started teaching and was responsible for 30 children, I suddenly became a lot better at taking responsibility / noticing things that need doing / optimizing systems. That’s a situation that I think forces people to take on the “heroic responsibility” mindset.
I expect the disposition to take responsibility can be developed, since at least for myself I didn’t always do it and now I do, but I only learned to do it after some significant psychology development (what I would call making the 3-4 transition in Kegan/CDT terminology), although I’m not sure how tied it is to that (haven’t spent much time thinking about what enables the disposition to total responsibility). I’m not sure how to test it but I’m fairly confident I could suss out whether someone has the disposition in an interview, though I’m not sure with what level of precision, specially being unsure how many false negatives I would generate in my assessment.
If you were to interview someone for a position, what type of work trial, case work, or other activities would you have the interviewee do for you to assess whether they have the trait of taking responsibility? Do you think just answering questions would provide enough for you to assess it, or could they do certain tasks or trials to test it?
I would just ask them questions, although to be transparent I care only some about their answers and a lot about how they answer, since I believe that to be the place where most of the information I use to make the assessment comes from. I say this because I want to make clear I don’t know how to assess this in a scalable and repeatable way I can teach others, though that might be possible although I suspect that it’s not short of teaching you to be substantially more like me in several dimensions.
context: I work in an operational capacity for a startup and have for several years
To me this misses what I consider the most important thing to success in operational roles: total responsibility. Just about anyone can learn to do stuff, and lots of times operations is treated as the function of the organization that does the stuff no one else wants to do, but to me this isn’t exactly right. It’s more about being responsible, probably heroically so, and being willing to do whatever you have to do to take care of the things you care about. Another person I know describes it has “holding parental mind” for something, which I think helps point at the breadth and depth of what operations is really all about.
This is not to say all these other things are not important, you can probably get along okay with someone who can just do stuff, and no amount of responsibility can overcome all other skill deficiencies, but to my mind great operational competence only arises when a person takes radical, total responsibility for the thing they are charged to protect.
I think total responsibility is really important, although in larger organisations it can be useful to make sure that you aren’t duplicating efforts or annoying other people by assuming that you are the only one that can fix things and end up burning bridges with the people you need to work with.
cf. Jocko Willink’s Extreme Ownership, especially if you’re looking a super Alpha / militaristic framing of the concept.
Thanks for this addition! This is very interesting. Do you find that taking responsibility and being willing to do whatever you have to do is something innate to people, or something that is mostly acquirable? Do you have ideas for how to test whether you have this trait?
I personally have found it pretty situational – I went through a fairly binary switch from “had not had a project that felt important enough to take heroic responsibility on” to “suddenly found lots of projects where it felt fairly natural take heroic responsibility for things.”
(And then burned out and currently don’t take much buck-stops-here responsibility, but feel like I could again if I needed to. I think figuring out how to do this sustainably, both as an individual and at the org level, is pretty tricky)
Do you think there are certain situations one could force or reenact in order for a person to develop the trait of taking responsibility, or discover if they have it? Do you feel like the perceived importance of the project is the only factor, or are their other factors that can induce this?
For me, it was quite important that the project was not just “important” in the sense that it was relevant to the global good, but “important” in the sense that it was meeting all of my own needs. ie:
I felt like other people in my social circle cared about it
The end product was something that tied in with my overall self-narrative/image
Many intermediate stages were very creatively stimulating
The difficulty of the tasks were roughly at my current skill level
There was clearly nobody else who would do the thing if I didn’t do it (this is unfortunately in tension with “doing it sustainably”. It’s possible people need to be forced to learn this skill in somewhat stressful burnout-inducing environments and then later can apply it in healthier environments)
A lot of things had to go right at once, which were pretty situation-dependent (and me-dependent)
For what it’s worth, when I started teaching and was responsible for 30 children, I suddenly became a lot better at taking responsibility / noticing things that need doing / optimizing systems. That’s a situation that I think forces people to take on the “heroic responsibility” mindset.
I expect the disposition to take responsibility can be developed, since at least for myself I didn’t always do it and now I do, but I only learned to do it after some significant psychology development (what I would call making the 3-4 transition in Kegan/CDT terminology), although I’m not sure how tied it is to that (haven’t spent much time thinking about what enables the disposition to total responsibility). I’m not sure how to test it but I’m fairly confident I could suss out whether someone has the disposition in an interview, though I’m not sure with what level of precision, specially being unsure how many false negatives I would generate in my assessment.
If you were to interview someone for a position, what type of work trial, case work, or other activities would you have the interviewee do for you to assess whether they have the trait of taking responsibility? Do you think just answering questions would provide enough for you to assess it, or could they do certain tasks or trials to test it?
I would just ask them questions, although to be transparent I care only some about their answers and a lot about how they answer, since I believe that to be the place where most of the information I use to make the assessment comes from. I say this because I want to make clear I don’t know how to assess this in a scalable and repeatable way I can teach others, though that might be possible although I suspect that it’s not short of teaching you to be substantially more like me in several dimensions.