The Penalization Of Initiative

I’ll keep this one short — no need to belabor it. I was just thinking yesterday, in part through a discussion with a friend, that I’ve literally never had a job — like, ever — where initiative was seen as a good thing. In fact, in most jobs I’ve had, initiative gets you slapped (“That’s my responsibility, Tony” “Um, my name is Ted”) and relentless adherence to tasks is the only thing that matters. If you do the tasks well for about 30 months, you might get an Atta-Boy or a few extra dollars every two weeks. If you show initiative and try to take charge of projects and project autonomy, you’re usually fired within those 30 months. And yet paradoxically, the initiative and autonomy and go-getterness are what everyone claims to want during hiring.

I am but one meager man, and this is thus a very small sample size. I’ve probably just worked at the wrong places, and maybe there is some tech nirvana somewhere where a beanbag chair, a nap pod, and some dreams can get you into the stratosphere. Perhaps that does exist and I just haven’t found it. I’m 41 (gasp!) on Sunday, so I’ve aged out of that world for the most part, and may never locate it.

But it is crazy to me some days how much of work is ONLY about control , which we’re drastically seeing play out right now in the “back to work” discussions. Execs are chasing it like dogs in heat — “You cannot build a culture from a bedroom!” — even though, once you return, you’ll see that exec maybe 14 times out of 250 working days in a year. “Well, I mean, during COVID we got a good deal in Hobe Sound. Gotta work on that property!”

The task focus also buries any real attempt at strategy , and when you combine tasks + control, you create Glassdoor reviews where it seems like your 18 months of employment were akin to a 1949 Stanford psychology experiment on just how much people can take.

Maybe we deify the Elon Musk set because it’s so fucking rare for someone to have any initiative or ideas anymore, and we’ve in fact designed our professional existences around not having those and instead focusing on the next item on our Trello board, and only that, to the exclusion of whatever else, whatever big picture we really need to be focusing on.

Final thought: you can see this in how people interact with their colleagues. With a lot of colleagues, if you attempt to be friendly with them, or ask them about their upbringing, or whatever commonalities you’re seeking, they recoil a little bit. They will give you a sliver, but not much more. (Varies by person.) Now … when they need a task from you? They will come at you 15 times in a given hour. I used to work with a woman named Rachel who did this religiously. Ignore, ignore, ignore, no eye contact, etc. As soon as her task list included me, she was hitting me up 18 times per 30 minutes, pretending to be my best friend, etc. Once the task was done, back to complete ignoring and stepping over me on the metaphorical street.

Work is about tasks and control. All the stuff we claim it’s about during hiring and in our on-deadline Forbes articles? Mostly bullshit.