A big concern that’s cropped up during my current work trial is whether I’m actually just not agentic/strategic/have-good-judgment-enough to take on strategy roles at EA orgs.
I think part of this is driven by low self-confidence, but part of this is the very plausible intuition that not everyone can be in the heavy tail and maybe I am not in the heavy tail for strategy roles. And this feels bad, I guess, because part of me thinks “strategy roles” are the highest-status roles within the meta-EA space, and status is nice.
But not nice enough to sacrifice impact! It seems possible, though, that I actually could be good at strategy and I’m bottlenecked by insecurity (which leads me to defer to others & constantly seek help rather than being agentic).
My current solution is to flag this for my future manager and ensure we are trialling both strategy and operations work. This feels like a supportive way for me to see where my comparative advantage lies—if I hear, “man, you suck at strategy, but your ops work is pretty good!” Then I would consider this a win!
My brain now wants to think about the scenario where I’m actually just bad at both. But then I’ll have to take the advice I give my members: “Well, then you got really valuable information—you just aren’t a great fit for these specific roles, so now you get to explore options which might be great fits instead!”
One approach I found really helpful in transitioning from asking a manager to making my own strategic decisions was going to my manager with a recommendation and asking for feedback on it (or, failing that, a clear description of the problem and any potential next steps I can think of, like ways to gain more information).
This gave me the confidence to learn how my organisation worked and know I had my manager’s support for my solution, but pushed me to develop my own judgment.
Thanks, this is a good tip! Unfortunately, the current options I’m considering seem more hands-off than this (i.e., the expectation is that I would start with little oversight from a manager), but this might be a hidden upside because I’m forced to just try things. : )
Thing I should think about in the future: is this “enough” question even useful? What would it even mean to be “agentic/strategic enough?”
edit: Oh, this might be insidiously following from my thought around certain roles being especially important/impactful/high-status. It would make sense to consider myself as falling short if the goal were to be in the heavy tail for a particular role.
But this probably isn’t the goal. Probably the goal is to figure out my comparative advantage, because this is where my personal impact (how much good I, as an individual, can take responsibility for) and world impact (how much good this creates for the world) converges. In this case, there’s no such thing as “strategic enough”—if my comparative advantage doesn’t lie in strategy, that doesn’t mean I’m not “strategic enough” because I was never ‘meant to’ be in strategy anyway!
So the question isn’t, “Am I strategic enough?” But rather, “Am I more suited for strategy-heavy roles or strategy-light roles?”
A big concern that’s cropped up during my current work trial is whether I’m actually just not agentic/strategic/have-good-judgment-enough to take on strategy roles at EA orgs.
I think part of this is driven by low self-confidence, but part of this is the very plausible intuition that not everyone can be in the heavy tail and maybe I am not in the heavy tail for strategy roles. And this feels bad, I guess, because part of me thinks “strategy roles” are the highest-status roles within the meta-EA space, and status is nice.
But not nice enough to sacrifice impact! It seems possible, though, that I actually could be good at strategy and I’m bottlenecked by insecurity (which leads me to defer to others & constantly seek help rather than being agentic).
My current solution is to flag this for my future manager and ensure we are trialling both strategy and operations work. This feels like a supportive way for me to see where my comparative advantage lies—if I hear, “man, you suck at strategy, but your ops work is pretty good!” Then I would consider this a win!
My brain now wants to think about the scenario where I’m actually just bad at both. But then I’ll have to take the advice I give my members: “Well, then you got really valuable information—you just aren’t a great fit for these specific roles, so now you get to explore options which might be great fits instead!”
One approach I found really helpful in transitioning from asking a manager to making my own strategic decisions was going to my manager with a recommendation and asking for feedback on it (or, failing that, a clear description of the problem and any potential next steps I can think of, like ways to gain more information).
This gave me the confidence to learn how my organisation worked and know I had my manager’s support for my solution, but pushed me to develop my own judgment.
Thanks, this is a good tip! Unfortunately, the current options I’m considering seem more hands-off than this (i.e., the expectation is that I would start with little oversight from a manager), but this might be a hidden upside because I’m forced to just try things. : )
Thing I should think about in the future: is this “enough” question even useful? What would it even mean to be “agentic/strategic enough?”
edit: Oh, this might be insidiously following from my thought around certain roles being especially important/impactful/high-status. It would make sense to consider myself as falling short if the goal were to be in the heavy tail for a particular role.
But this probably isn’t the goal. Probably the goal is to figure out my comparative advantage, because this is where my personal impact (how much good I, as an individual, can take responsibility for) and world impact (how much good this creates for the world) converges. In this case, there’s no such thing as “strategic enough”—if my comparative advantage doesn’t lie in strategy, that doesn’t mean I’m not “strategic enough” because I was never ‘meant to’ be in strategy anyway!
So the question isn’t, “Am I strategic enough?” But rather, “Am I more suited for strategy-heavy roles or strategy-light roles?”