Working in chaos is a superpower
I’m a site leader. Before that I was a community manager and before that - an operations manager. When I tell people my title, they often ask me what it means; what do I actually do?
Well, it’s complicated, and like me I know of a few more people with the same problem — their title is not informative of their jobs and their jobs are not easily explained. Our jobs are not well defined for a reason — we need to be flexible with everything and there’s not much we can say is not our job. But this lack of definition and boundaries leads to fogginess.
Some of you might relate to this article, as I’m sure many people encounter fogginess in their work. So after trying to address this fogginess, this article will talk about why it’s not that bad, why you’re the right person to do those projects and why being able to see those projects’ end is your superpower.
Your toolbox
You know what you’re worth, maybe your references even swear by you. But can you define it?
Take a look at your CV. Actually, let’s take a look at mine: I’m a sociologist. A researcher on honor roll in Ben Gurion University. I also have some background as a teaching assistant and statistics lecturer. To sum — academic.
Each of us presents a toolbox when we apply for a new job where no one knows us. This is the set of skills one presents to their future employer and a big part of what one might call a “profession”. The thing is that your employer is looking for a tool that they know what to do with. As a Social science major, this might be a problem for you.
A skill or a tool needs to be two things. First, it should be defined; your skills should be understood by other people from your line of work. But that’s not the problematic part. The second thing your skills should be, and this is where a lot of us non-tech alumni fail, is measurable. One should be able to scale oneself (or others) on one’s skill and tell if and why they’re good at it. Looking outside your CV, your skills should be able to resolve tasks or problems and you should be able to not only say if you failed or succeeded, but also tell why that outcome happened. If you’re a real pro, you should be able to define measurable indicators for success beforehand. For example — when organizing a meetup, can you tell what will make it successful? Is it the turnout? and if so (although it rarely is) — why? What purpose does this meetup serve? This last question is crucial to your measurements and frankly to everything you do, because a meetup that’s purpose is to strengthen your brand will have different goals than one that’s intended to, say, get recruitment leads. But More on setting targets and defining goals in a future article…
Most organizations define success for you. Mine doesn’t.
This is where it gets to be a very specific case study. My problem with setting goals and defining success is the fact that I suffer from the worst first world problem — I have too much freedom. When I interviewed for Wix, my future manager told me that I have too much academic background and that I might get bored fast as an Operations employee. She was both right and wrong: I would have, if I’d just accept the limits of the job that I was offered. But I had to go and look for adventures, didn’t I?
Lucky for me, my team leader at the time helped and allowed me to navigate this sea of uncertainty, and uncertainty is everywhere when you start working where I started. You’re told all you need to do is hang some shelves, make sure the kitchen is always amazingly stocked and just tend to the office needs. But then, on your first day, you see all these amazing people doing all these amazing things, and you see all these opportunities to do things you want to do. When you tell your manager you want to take on a project that’s unrelated to your pre-defined job, they say — “If it doesn’t hurt your other responsibilities, do whatever you want”.
Do whatever you want. What a liberating yet terrifying thing to say to an employee, first because at Wix you own everything you do — for better or worse. Don’t get me wrong, we allow failures, but when presenting what you did you also need to explain why you did it, which brings me to the second reason this freedom is terrifying — why do I do it?
As an operations employee, I had very short term goals. But as you progress and prove you can do bigger things, your goals become bigger and long term. For example, one of my defined goals as a site leader is to get my site to a certain number of employees. When? As soon as possible. How? Well.. how I see fit. And that’s the thing about being (almost) free of definitions or regulations — you also lack a clear path, even if it’s a long way to go.
Liminality as a superpower
Liminality is a state of ambiguity; it’s being between two states, trying to advance from one to another while being disoriented about the path. This is an anthropological term and mostly addresses the state of mind people are in during a rite of passage. It comes from the Latin word “līmen”, which means — on a threshold.
It might sound like Wix just threw me in the deep water and told me to swim — no. My managers and colleagues made sure I know how to swim first. They made sure I can handle navigating in the fog by myself, and more importantly — recognize when I need help and ask for it.
When I took those extra projects I proved I can advance in rough conditions. When there was no clear path ahead of me and I had an easy option to comfortably stay in place, I chose the harder, more interesting option of moving forward. I excelled operating in this liminality.
If you can relate liminality to your state of mind at work as a whole or working on a project, then you’re a liminal worker. You operate in places where not many things are defined or clear, where other people would have gotten frustrated.
You embrace the liminality. While others work their way from A to B, you find a path between A to 3.14. Your skills let you always be in a superposition. They make you extremely flexible since your project and tasks are subject to so many uncontrolled variables that sometimes some of us just forfeit planning steps towards the goal (If you do that, you should stop). Maybe, like me, many of your days are composed of trying to get ahead of an emergency or simply tending to an employee’s need, because they always, always, come first.
Being able to navigate where no one else can is a very powerful tool. It’s almost a superpower and you need to take pride in it, but you need to develop another skill in order to make this a powerful tool: defining it.
Keep making stuff happen the way you do, while simplifying and presenting defined and measurable indicators for success. In your work process, between pre-set flexible targets and while analyzing your steps, keep being liminal, being neither here nor there, operating with very little definitions and sometimes seeing them as limitations. You thrive in this place, because you know that in this place magic exists and everything is possible.
It’s not that simple
As I said, this liminality is not a common thing. I know very few people outside Wix whose state of mind at work is described “ambiguous”. This is something most corporations see as a problem that they solve through regulations, which may be necessary in a huge organization, but I wouldn’t know because I never worked at one (beside the university, but being a research student is kind of a liminal place).
I wrote this article trying to describe my experience, and as unique as it is — I’m positive a lot of people can relate to some of it, as surely some aspects of your work are ambiguous and vague, but you probably try to hide them. All I’m saying is — should you hide the fact that you can operate in those conditions?
But being liminal does not mean being a free agent. Your work should be planned, analyzed, measured and explained to others, and my future articles will discuss that.
Lastly, if you’re reading this and you and I have never discussed your work’s ambiguity, please tell me about it! I’d love to hear about other people’s experiences with liminality at work, especially if you work in a highly analyzed or measured work environment.
