🛠 TREE 147: Be a person who doesn’t need to be managed
Take responsibility for your work. Use your initiative and intelligence to get the tools and resources you need. Own your job. Do it like everything you work on is heading out the door with your name on it in very large letters.
Understand your work. Understand what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, the wider context in which it exists and how it will be used when you complete it.
Do your work. Put your energy into getting your real work done. Don’t waste it on busywork.
Deliver your work. Finish it. Do the horrible, fiddly last 3%. Ship it on time.
Be accountable for your work. Yes, you get the blame when it goes wrong. You also get the glory when it goes right. Best of all, you earn trust, even when it goes wrong sometimes.
If you are settled into your job and
your manager has to do much more than
help you keep your big priorities tracking with the company’s and
help you see where you have potential to grow,
something’s not going right.
I know there’s nothing profound here. I also know how much managers appreciate people who know how to do intelligent, self-directed work. I also also know how much I like autonomy in my work and these are the things I do to get it.
Work like a tree.1
Jeff
The Memory of TREE playlist – every song from every email:
I’m not sure what this means.