You Get Offered the Work People Think You Do

You fixed the deploy that kept failing, once, about a year ago. Since then every deploy problem in the building has found its way to you. Or you wrote one reporting query in your second month and you are now, permanently and without discussion, the reporting person.

There is a one line version of you circulating in your company. Somebody said it to somebody else in a planning meeting, and it stuck, and now work is routed by it. What you get offered is set by that sentence, and what you get offered decides what you get good at, which decides what you can ask for next. It is one of the most consequential things about your working life and almost nobody goes looking for it.

Two things are worth knowing about that sentence. It was assembled from a very small number of moments, usually the most visible thing you did in a crisis. And it lags reality by about a year, so it describes a person you have already stopped being.

You can change it, but not by announcing it. Labels move through two things: what you say yes to, and what people hear you talk about.

So say what you are moving toward, out loud, in ordinary conversations, more often than feels necessary. Not as an ambition speech. Just the normal sentence, repeated. I have been doing a lot with the data pipeline lately and I would like more of it. People cannot route work to an interest they have never heard you mention.

Then take one piece of work in the new direction and finish it where it can be seen. One finished thing beats a stated preference every time, because it gives somebody a reason to use the new sentence about you.

And plan the handover of the old label, because a label with a queue behind it will hold you still. Write down how the deploy thing actually works and teach one person properly. You are not refusing the work, you are giving the routing somewhere else to go, which is the only version of this that does not make you unpopular.

Monday: ask two colleagues to describe your job in one sentence, and compare what they say with the work you want next year.

– Asael Shinder