There is a version of contracting that most people understand intuitively. You come in, you do the work you were hired to do, you collect your rate, and you go home. Nobody expects more than that. In fact, most organizations are not set up to reward more than that — contractors are scoped, time-limited, and structurally positioned outside the kind of investment that permanent employees are expected to make.
The contractor who works this way is not doing anything wrong. They are reading the environment correctly and responding to it rationally.
But occasionally you get someone who reads it differently.
The Audition Mindset
The contractor on my team is quiet. He does not dominate meetings. He does not make a show of his contributions or narrate his value back to you. His output does the talking.
What I have come to understand, watching him work, is that he has been treating this engagement as an audition.
Not for this job specifically. For the next one. For every future employer who might ask him what he built, what he owned, what he made better. He is using this contract the way a craftsman uses every piece of work — as evidence of what he is capable of, as something he can put his name on.
That reframe — contract as audition rather than contract as transaction — produces completely different behavior. Instead of doing exactly what was asked and stopping there, he surfaces problems nobody assigned him. Instead of waiting for direction, he shows up to every meeting already having thought about the problem. Instead of staying invisible until the scope requires him, he has gradually become someone the team trusts — and because they trust him, they ask for his opinion, and he gives it.
He stayed in his lane. But over time, the lane expanded, because he filled it so completely that people started bringing him into theirs.
What This Taught Me About Ownership
I have spent a lot of time in this newsletter thinking about how to build ownership in engineers. Most of that thinking has been about the conditions — the feedback loops, the outcome targets, the refinement sessions where you hold the silence long enough for initiative to emerge.
What this contractor showed me is that ownership is not only a product of conditions. It is also a product of character.
The conditions matter. An environment that punishes initiative will eventually extinguish it in almost everyone. But some people bring ownership with them, and they find a way to express it regardless of whether the environment was designed to support it. They are not waiting for permission. They are not looking for signals that it is safe to invest. They have decided, somewhere along the way, that the quality of their work is their responsibility — not the organization’s, not the manager’s, not the contract’s.
That decision produces a particular kind of engineer. One who is useful everywhere they go, because they do not require a perfect system to do their best work. One who grows regardless of whether the feedback loop was closed for them, because they are closing it themselves.
The Thing Nobody Talks About With Contractors
Here is what the structure of contracting actually tests, if you pay attention to it: it removes most of the incentives that organizations use to encourage investment.
The contractor does not get promoted. They do not accumulate tenure. They are not building toward a pension or a long-term career track at this institution. The typical levers — recognition, advancement, belonging — are either absent or attenuated.
What is left, when you strip all of that away, is the work itself.
And what you find out, when the external incentives are gone, is who actually cares about the work for its own sake. The contractor who coasts was always going to coast — the conditions just made it easier. The contractor who hunts was always going to hunt — the conditions just made it more visible.
Watching someone show up fully in a situation that does not require it tells you something you cannot learn any other way. It tells you what they actually value.
What I Want to Take With Me
His contract ends in a couple of months. The bank has made a broad decision about contractors, and he is caught in it — not because of anything he did, but because of a category he belongs to.
I have been thinking about what I want to make sure I say before he goes.
Not just thank you, though that. But something more specific: that the way he approached this work is rare. That treating a contract like an audition — not for appearances, but because that is genuinely how he is wired — is the thing that makes the difference between an engineer who is useful and an engineer who is irreplaceable. That wherever he goes next, the people who work with him are going to benefit from something he brings that cannot be installed.
The ownership culture I am trying to build on this team — the one that is under pressure right now from organizational uncertainty — he did not need me to build it for him. He walked in with it.
That is the highest compliment I know how to give an engineer.
And it is the standard I am going to keep holding up for everyone else on the team, long after he is gone. Not as an impossible bar. As a proof of concept.
It is possible to show up fully. Someone did it right here. We all saw it.
Getting Engineers to Give a Damn: A Manager’s Guide to Building Ownership Inside Broken Systems is available now. Get it here →
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I publish every Tuesday at danielholt.substack.com
Top comments (1)
You are unsaveable. You are too deep in.