Concrete Engagements: The Currency of Work
One of the things we do at CultivateMe is help professionals better understand their work and their roles. When we start this process, one of our favorite questions to ask is simply, “What do you do all day?”
Take a minute to think about that in the context of your own work. What does your calendar look like? What is on your todo list? Walk me through a typical day. If I was right there next to you, what would I see?
We find most people have difficulty answering this question in a concrete and simple way. They often respond with abstract responsibilities (“I support implementations”) or they talk in terms of large scale projects (“I work on the efficacy initiative”) or generalized roles (“I do a lot of facilitation and training design”). And to be clear, we struggle with this ourselves on a regular basis. Articulating our work in terms of concrete and tangible activities can be difficult.
Why does any of this matter? Well, work moves fast these days. Jobs are fluid and business needs change often. How are we to think about our roles in an environment like this? How are teammates to communicate about their roles? Too many organizations conceive of their work through boilerplate job descriptions that are an outdated bundle of abstract “responsibilities and accountabilities.” These descriptions rarely match up with the reality we experience day-to-day. At the very least, the scale of how we experience our work is different than how we typically describe it.
To punch through these abstractions, we introduce the concept of Concrete Engagements. We think of these as a more human-scale “currency” of the work people do. String together 10 of them and you call it a good day. Put 30 or 40 together and you call it a job.
Here are a few examples of my own Concrete Engagements:
- Write draft blog post. Blogging is an important way to clarify our ideas and build community. To start, I spend about an hour in Google Docs writing a draft of my thoughts. I usually pass this to my partner for review before it’s published. This happens a couple times a month.
- Discuss content strategy. It’s important to look up from our day-to-day work and make sure we are on track to hit our longer term goals. About once a month we take 30 minutes and review a content strategy document. We add new ideas to it, then translate it to projects and goals on our backlog.
- Email prospects. Like any business, we need customers. And the front end of that process is making connections and starting conversations. I’ll usually spend about 30–60 minutes going through my list of leads in Trello, emailing people in my network to connect and suggest a meeting. This happens at least 3 times a week.
- Communicate in Slack. Our team stays coordinated through Slack, so every day I read and write in Slack. I usually do it in 10–15 minute bursts throughout the day, with the occasional quick response from my mobile.
These are often emergent. As we do the work, day in and day out, we notice patterns. We see that we are having the same kinds of meetings, repeating the same kinds of tasks, having the same kinds of interactions. As we notice these things we capture each one as a card in a Trello board. Once captured, we become more conscious of them throughout the day. As a result we think more deeply about them. This leads to insights about how to do them better, which we capture as comments on that Trello card.
A well-written Concrete Engagement has a few key attributes:
- Action-oriented. Each name starts with a verb. If it doesn’t begin with action then it’s an abstraction, which is not what we want in a Concrete Engagement.
- Time-bound. How long does it take. If it happens in more than one sitting then it’s not concrete.
- Frequency. Does it happen every day? Weekly? Monthly?
- Purpose. Why are you doing this? What’s the stimulus to which you’re responding? What’s the outcome you’re hoping to achieve?
- Context. It describes where it happens, with whom it happens, what tools are used, etc.
Concrete Engagements are a new “currency” through which we can coordinate and communicate how the work gets done. They steer away from the abstract babel of a job description towards a lingua franca for on-the-ground productivity.
Here’s a great way to get started: take 15 minutes today and list out all the concrete engagements of your current role(s). Once you have 15–20, start looking for patterns. Which ones involve other people vs solo work? Which ones involve creating vs editing vs consuming material? Which ones involve soft skills vs hard skills? Reflect on these throughout the week and see if it doesn’t change the way you do your work.
CultivateMe is a talent development agency for agencies. We help agencies establish a repeatable, scalable, and sustainable system for growing their people and winning the talent war. To get fresh ideas on how to improve learning at work, sign up for our newsletter.
