Competence grounds Authority
Early on at ScalePad I was fed up with our infrastructure team and couldn’t understand what they even spent their time doing all day.
So, I went to my boss with a list of issues we needed to fix with our software infrastructure. He then tested me with a flurry of questions about my proposal - do our enterprise contracts have uptime penalties, and if so have you priced what a migration window costs us against them? Who’s on-call for this after it’s shipped? Our SOC 2 audit is in Q3 - does this touch anything in scope, and who re-documents the controls? What’s the rollback strategy if the migration fails at 60%?
I didn’t understand the questions themselves let alone know the answer to any of them.
My boss then told me that he appreciates my desire to solve these issues but that I don’t know the factors involved, nor the fact that there are four other problems he’s dealing with right now that are more pressing to the company’s strategic objectives than the one I raised. He’d already understood the issues I brought up and if we spent more effort there we would hinder the business by not urgently closing the gap on our high subscription churn rates given that the main individual needed to solve my issue was already occupied on that project.
He encouraged me that if I cared about fixing these infrastructure problems nonetheless, to meet with the team and understand the dynamics they’re dealing with, the pressures they’re under, the constraints they have, and then discover what the best solutions could be.
I was thoroughly humbled after this meeting. It even took me a few days to process. I doubted whether I knew anything useful in the first place. After all, I took a lot of pride in my work, and I put a lot of thought into this meeting only to be shown:
I didn’t actually understand what was important to the business
I didn’t even begin to have an understanding of the landscape: other forces, technical tradeoffs, budget constraints, resourcing gaps, opportunity cost
I didn’t have the skills to generate and execute solutions for the problem area
And ultimately, I was wasting his time since he was already aware of the issues
What was even more embarrassing - I was originally intending to use this meeting to show off how much I knew and to leverage it to ask for a promotion.
I supposed that the reason that these issues weren’t being fixed was that I didn’t have authority over these people. If only I was given a title and job to oversee them, then I could make the changes I wanted and set things straight.
By the wisdom of my leaders, I didn’t get much authority then despite my ambition. Instead, they guided me patiently, giving me opportunities to lead in small ways and therefore to learn without as many opportunities to make a fool of myself.
When I was thoroughly humbled and had time to see and then improve on my weaknesses, a time did finally come when it was right for me to be promoted.
But then I learned that the title didn’t really change anything at all.
I had once thought that a better title would grant me the power and visibility to solve problems in the organization, but when I received the title, I got back to work the next morning and had to do the same things, pretty much.
What I learned was that the title is grounded in the authority, not the authority in the title.
And since the title impacted so little, I learned to shift my attention away from a desire for promotion, instead focusing on developing competence - knowing what matters to solve, and resolving those challenges thoughtfully and aggressively.
This led, eventually, to the development of reputation.
At times when I lacked effectiveness I’d desired authority instead. It was an easy excuse. But above all nothing’s been more useful in effecting results than reputation.
Reputation does not come from being assigned a title, nor does it come by posturing. Reputation is slowly built through the demonstration of competence guarded and maintained by consistent effort. Through reputation your presence carries real weight, and through reputation your title is established and reified.
The long-term objective of building reputation can often compete with the desire to be promoted in an organization. Competence (from the Latin competentia, meaning “symmetry”) is a relative term; it depends on the target you’re weighing against. So paradoxically by declining a promotion your competence is higher than that of someone with the same skills who accepts it.
Similarly, acquiring a position of authority before your time is undesirable because it reverses the trajectory of your reputation, practically speaking. When you take a position beyond you, instead of growing reputation steadily through consistent effort, you enter a position of reputation debt.
A title in this way is credit extended against future performance. Take one before you’re ready and every day you fall short of what it implies, the interest compounds.
I have actually suggested to people before that they may want to consider asking for a demotion. It’s a really hard thing for someone to do, and I’ve never seen it done, even when it is the wisest and most profitable long-term decision for someone to make.
But the best thing to do is to avoid being promoted before your time, and in my case I am grateful to my leaders and mentors who have protected me from my own impatience, and kept me, against my wishes, on the righteous slow path that builds reputation through sustained competence.
Fast forward to now, and I consult for ScalePad part time with no official title, and yet I feel more autonomy to effect change in the organization than I ever have. The reason for that is that I have everything needed to make changes - trust, good intentions, relationships, technical skills, communication skills, awareness, judgment. And most critically, I work with a great team that is receptive to reason and cares about results.
I really am grateful for my mentors who refused to give me what I wanted. They challenged me to grow and fulfill my potential without much drama. I can see a version of my life where I did get the promotion I wanted before I was ready, and I can see how that would have been catastrophic in a number of ways.
Ambition is like a wild fire and it can rise to consume everything but it can also be smothered. I’ve been impatient in the past and probably really annoying to manage as an employee. Even so, when I was impatient, people in my life acted with patience toward me. They carefully guided me away from making a fool of myself and kept me on the slow path towards freedom.
I hope some day to pay that forward.
“Seek not what is too difficult for you, nor investigate what is beyond your power. Reflect upon what has been assigned to you, for you do not need what is hidden. Do not meddle in what is beyond your tasks, for matters too great for human understanding have been shown you.”
— Sirach 3:21-23