Doing the Work vs. Playing the Game

There are lots of artifacts to the game. Organizational charts, slide decks, policy documents, memos, mission and vision statements, dress codes, conduct codes, HR policies with consequences up to and including termination.

Some of these are necessary — they protect the company within the legal and regulatory environment. They ensure no one can say “but I didn’t know.” They codify what are, or possibly what should be, norms necessary for a group to function in a coordinated and harmonious way.

But some are not. And once we know which ones they are, it can be hard to un-see the distinction. Boxes on a page connected by little lines, someone may tell you that these define your success, and that moving toward the top of the page and having more little interconnected boxes below the one with your name on it somehow means you’re doing more of the work, doing better work, making more of a dent. They might tell you that this is your goal, and that you should do these things. They might send you to a class with colleagues to learn how to be someone whose name is in that place on that page.

Now, these things aren’t bad things. They may mean you’re getting better at the work, and that you’re making more of a dent, but the relationship is a correlative one, not a causative one. And if you find yourself considering at length where your name is on that page, and you find yourself losing sleep over it not being where you think it should be, you may have a problem.

Because that page and many pages like it are part of the game. They’re part of the scaffolding that’s been built around the work to help keep the work moving, to make it easier for people to join the team, to leave the team, to help the organization move across the social fabric by interfacing with familiar structures. Normative behavior. Hierarchies. Class markers. These have very little — maybe nothing at all — to do with the work. They’re just tacked on, a compatibility kit that allows the work to move forward despite the differences in personality, ideology, history between the members of an organization.

…They’re part of the scaffolding that’s been built around the work to help keep the work moving, to make it easier for people to join the team, to leave the team, to help the organization move across the social fabric by interfacing with familiar structures. Normative behavior. Hierarchies. Class markers. These have very little — maybe nothing at all — to do with the work.

But if you can see through them, and if you can see yourself and your colleagues without the lenses society has conditioned into us and radiate a different kind of culture — trust, respect, acceptance, appreciation, humanity — then you may not need them at all. And if you don’t need them at all, then it won’t matter whose name is in what box on that page, and it won’t matter what you’re wearing or what idiosyncratic language markers you carry, and it won’t matter what the nameplate on your desk says or how many people you have in your downline, your reporting structure.

Because once you see the work as distinct from the game, then you can’t un-see it. And if others start to see it too then they can’t un-see it either. And before long, people will either stop playing, or they’ll start to feel ridiculous when they are playing it and they’ll want to stop playing it. The imaginary structures and meaningless artifacts will start to break down and slide away, and all the energy wasted on the game will instead be spent on the work.

And that’s when you’ll make a great big dent.