that crummy stuff? yeah, we’re the champions of that.
In organizations that have really strong culture - the shared ways of doing that lead to great results - the team doesn’t complain about the crummy stuff. This is because leaders don’t apologize for it. Instead, leaders build a proud identity for teams about their excellence and enthusiasm in taking care of the crummy stuff. Teams then live up to that identity.
Achieving a worthy mission always requires doing things (maybe a lot of things) that are unsexy and tedious and a half-step removed from the core thing you think you’re actually there to do. That’s unsexy tedium - that’s the crummy stuff. If you’re in a competitive market or sphere, your willingness to do the crummy stuff may be precisely what sets you apart from competitors.
Every worthy, visible problem you want your team to solve conceals or contains a multitude of other problems. A smart leader will first look upstream to see if there are ways to eliminate those subsidiary problems altogether. Unfortunately, early stage founders and anyone working in the public/social sector often lacks the time, cash, or power to tackle things upstream. If that’s true, solving the subsidiary problems becomes you and your team’s responsibility. It’s what you exist to do.
If it’s what you exist to do, you should take pride in it. Draw power and strength from it. Apply enthusiasm and geekiness to it.
In weak cultures, I see leaders in a state of apology for the crummy stuff. Instead of
Building up the identity of the team as “the kind of people who eat the crummy stuff for breakfast and take pride in that” or
Building up the the identity of the team as “the kind of people who experiment and problem solve so the crummy stuff doesn’t even show up on the breakfast table anymore”
leaders cave and say, “yeah this sucks and I’m sorry. Not much we can do about it.”
If you’re founding something, you are trying to change the status quo in some way. You’re counter-cultural. You have some dissatisfaction with the way things are going. Once you have enrolled a team in your effort to change things, your righteous dissatisfaction can degrade into complaining rather than develop into problem solving.
In urban public schools, the amount of crummy stuff you might complain about is large. Poverty, gun violence, learning deficits kids carry from earlier grades, mental health challenges. That’s just a short list. The schools that I’ve seen do best and right by their students don’t complain about these problems and the way they complicate raising kids and developing their minds. The best schools thoughtfully address the parts of the problem that are most relevant to that child rearing and mind-developing work. They teach phonics and basic English to students who have just immigrated. They arrange for treatment programs for kids who need additional care and guidance. They build reading time into every class, even math, to close literacy gaps. They take pride in all that.
In customer-facing businesses, you can complain about the idiosyncratic ways customers “misuse” your product. Or you can delight in user feedback, savoring grumpy customer service calls for the gift they are, and make ever more friendly, accommodating, beautiful versions of the product. You can praise your team for their appetite for feedback, their quick turns on new iterations, their intellectual and emotional honesty in the face of challenging data.
In a biotech startup, I saw a team break drug development speed records by becoming absolute nerds for the crummy stuff. This was a brilliant group of scientists and drug developers who thrived in the lab. Instead of complaining about the logistical hurdles that kept their killer research from becoming meaningful medicine, they became supply chain experts. They personally carried product across borders, wooed processors in Kansas with ice cream sandwiches, found sheep in Massachusetts for challenge trials. Instead of making a fuss, they made history.
That’s the power of embracing the crummy stuff. If you’re the leader, don’t apologize for it. Sew it right into the flag.
-Eric
