THE LEAFLET
March 06 2025
crumminess in your vocation, beware the floater, the smug sector-switcher
EVEN YOUR CALLING HAS CRUMMY REQUIREMENTS
Even when you are working in your vocation, responding with your labor to a deep calling, your work will include crummy stuff. Stuff that feels different in kind/character from the kind of thing you feel called to do, the thing that drew you to the work you signed up for. In teaching, that gravity might be “building relationships with kids” and the friction might be “lesson planning” or “attending district inservices” or “getting compliance paperwork up to spec”.
What to do with this crummy stuff?
With money, you can outsource it.
With time, you can own more of it (and thereby shape it more to your liking).
With imagination, you can make it fun.
With patience, you can find it less grating.
With ambition (and maybe some AI), you might be able to eliminate it or automate it or solve it or rewrite the rules of it.
At least one of those resources above is available to you. You might have several of them. A couple of postures I see from unhappy people at work, who get less done and enjoy the doing of it less, too:
With resignation, they’re at the mercy of it.
With resentment, they make it even worse for others.
-eric
Read the rest here.
BEWARE THE CREDENTIALED FLOATER
Sometimes there’s a talented experienced person you think will enrich your team just by being around. Their credentials or record or perspective compel you. You want the recipe of your team to include this ingredient. Talent density will increase once they join.
The problem is you don’t have an open role that’s a clear and good fit for them. You have the budget to bring them on but not the bubble in the org chart.
One approach is to make this person a floater. They’re not bound to a particular team or goal. You just want them in the soup, hoping they enrich and brighten and thicken it.
Careful, chef. You can create a confusing mess you have to spend expensive time to clean up later.
Your body needs fat to absorb certain vitamins. The vitamin has to dissolve in something you can digest - otherwise it just runs through you and doesn’t nourish you / strengthen you.
What I’ve seen most often is floaters seeping into and out of an organization like unbound vitamins. The team doesn’t get the benefit of their brilliance. And the floater feels shiftless and superfluous. Time, money, and opportunity are all lost along the way.
To avoid this, put your floater on the hook for something and make them to accountable to someone (or a team of someones). If they’re good enough to hire as a floater, they have a high level of agency and strong work ethic so you don’t need to micromanage them. But they should be brought in to Do a Job or Deliver a Result, even if that job only accounts for a fraction of their time at the start. This might feel arbitrary and artificial, to you and the floater. It’s ok to acknowledge that.
Assigning this will help you explain their place and impact to the rest of the team. It will give the floater a chance to prove their mettle and a sense of purpose. And it sets a floor for what you can get out of the floater - even if you decide this isn’t a long term arrangement, you’ve gotten this job done through their efforts.
-eric
Read the rest here.
THE SMUG SECTOR-SWITCHER
I have been this person and I am telling you to be wary of this person - and prepare them. The sector-switcher comes into your line of work from another line of work. It’s possible that you hired them *because* they have roots in this other sector. You like the perspective, versatility, and grit you see in them and the sector switch itself is evidence of those qualities, in your view. They didn’t get to this rung on the ladder climbing straight up like everyone else - they leapt to this ladder from a whole other one!
Clear expectations in the very early going are critical for these sector-switchers, especially if they are relatively senior. One variety of these folks can over-interpret your appreciation of their switch. Absent clear standards from you, they can make a reasonable but unhelpful assumption that their core contribution, maybe their only necessary contribution, is the perspective they bring from the other sector. The corporate finance person assumes she needs to dispense advice about efficiency and compliance but not embed herself in the culture and community work of the non-profit. The social worker-become-teacher assumes he can say wise things about unmet emotional needs among students … and slide on lesson plans or behavior interventions.
A really valuable person with lots to contribute can end up as an annoying faux consultant that other teammates resent.
Your expectation setting could sound like this:
“I’m excited about the perspective you bring from [other sector]. We need that perspective and I want to hear you voicing it. I also expect you to be/become excellent at [thing/things that are core part of this job that didn’t show up in your other sector]. We need both from you. When you take this job, you’re signing up for both and telling me you’re excited to do both, even - especially - when it requires you to struggle and grow.”
-eric
Read the rest here.
COMPELLING QUOTES
Poet Rainer Maria Rilke on second lives:
And then the knowledge comes to me that I have space within me for a second, timeless, larger life.
Sculptor Louise Bourgeois on memory:
You pile up associations the way you pile up bricks. Memory itself is a form of architecture.
Drinker Kingsley Amis on authenticity:
Never despise a drink because it is easy to make and/or uses commercial mixes. Unquestioning devotion to authenticity is, in any department of life, a mark of the naive—or worse.
Keep going, keep growing,
Ben & Eric