Seek and Destroy

Seek and destroy is the idea that proactively finding and accomplishing the highest value activities in the company is the primary objective of any employee from the CEO to the most junior person on the team.

First, we need to look at what is highest value

Look at the goals that you have as a company, that the CEO has, or that your boss has, or that your team has, or even better those which are intuitively the highest value.

Is the company running out of money and needs to raise capital or generate more money through revenue? Well, that’s going to trump everything else.

Does the company have tons of money in the bank and has great revenue, but everybody is drowning because you’re not hiring the caliber people you need fast enough? Well, then recruiting is probably the biggest thing to focus on.

Just like this, you can use your common sense and intuition to understand what is most valuable for the business at any moment in time. Of course you have a formal definition of value through the goals that the company sets and how they trickle down hierarchically from the CEO to the teams to your boss and to you. The best people pay attention to this, but ultimately they have their own intuitive understanding of what the company really needs to be doing based on assessing the situation like I described above.

Let’s talk about the value of a employee

For any high-value team member the trajectory up is mostly about; 1) the vision you have to see what’s most valuable, 2) how proactive are you going to be about attacking those things once you identify them, and 3) how much direction can you provide against those things for yourself and for groups. Great leaders can identify activities that occupy not only their own time but the time of an entire team, a group of teams, or – at the level of a CEO – an entire company.

The value of an employee mostly comes down to those three things; your ability to see value, your ability to proactively generate value, and your ability to generate valuable work for ever larger groups.

Doing just enough versus doing more than enough

A lot of people are waiting around to be told what to do, or for the team to decide what to do, or they are their boxing themselves in to a certain number of hours every day. They agree with the team on what they going to do for the day or the week, and then they just do that. A lot of people Self-limiting and it’s mostly related to self-limiting beliefs or laziness. At the end of the day this is going to limit your growth and your career.

Meanwhile, some people are always doing more than enough. They’re so dialed in to what’s valuable and what’s gonna make you win that they’re constantly finding more activities than they need to be every given day. They’re doing things outside their set of responsibilities, they’re doing things proactively, and they are surprisingly productive and working on surprisingly valuable ideas.

There’s an old military saying about being on time; “if you’re early, you’re on time, if you’re on time, you’re late, and if you’re late, you’re wrong. This is how it is for doing enough stuff in your role at an exceptionally well run company; “if you’re doing more than enough, you’re doing enough, if you’re doing enough, you’re doing too little, and if you’re doing less than enough, you’re fired.”

Let’s look at an example. In pipeline oriented functions like fundraising, business development & sales, and recruiting, the team is running through a series of stages, and this can occupy all the effort. There are many other activities that can feed or accelerate the pipeline, like publishing content, hosting events, or planning trips to visit clusters of people in person. You could be having investor dinners or visiting a cluster of investors in a specific city. For business development or recruiting you could host fireside chats that position the company as a leader within your market. Teams might talk about these ideas in meetings but don’t necessarily follow through because running the pipeline absorbs their time. The company needs to hire specific people to do this additional work. An outstanding team supporting fundraising, business development and sales, or recruiting is going to proactively do these kinds of things after it’s been discussed. They’re going to do their normal job of running the pipeline forward and they’re going to collaborate with others in the company to publish content, run events, and plan trips.

A lot of times what you think of as doing enough is actually less than enough. It’s not unusual for outstanding leadership to fire people that are doing the minimum to get by. The reality is doing the basics isn’t really acceptable. If you want outstanding results as a company, then you need outstanding results from individuals that are going above and beyond. No strong leader wants to micromanage team members that are not proactive, just doing what’s assigned to them, or doing what they think is the least they’ve got to do in order to look OK to the team and their boss.

Up or out and bias for action

There’s a model that successful companies use where they have a career ladder that you basically have to advance up or they end up firing you. This ladder progression upwards is similar to what I described earlier; seeing value, proactively attacking value, and being able to generate more and more work that has a ton of value – eventually generating work not just for yourself, but for teams.

At the most junior level, when you just come in from school or from a small amount of experience, you’re going to need a little bit of micromanagement. The team is going to spoon feed them little chunks fo work and they just need to deliver at a solid pace. A lot of people don’t even get enough work done in a short enough time, so they are worth keeping around. This is especially true in the age of AI. A lot of times now it’s faster for a strong leader that knows how to use the AI tools to do something themselves versus asking somebody else to do it if that person is going to require too much coaching and micromanagement and the volume of what they get done per unit of time is too low.

Strong leadership is going to see those people who are first of all going get huge amounts of work done per unit time, so they’re highly productive. Then second of all they’re doing the right work. They see the value and they’re doing the work that generates the most value. Third, they are looking for the ones that are most proactive when you talk about an idea on a call, or you talk about a problem on a call, these folks are going go after it – they’re not just gonna sit around and do the work that’s already on their plate or wait for this stuff to get prioritized in their project management system or whatever. They’re gonna do the work already in their queue, and then they’re also going to proactively attack these other ideas and problems. So organizing content, events, trips or whatever; they’re not going to leave these as ‘brainstorms.’ They’re going to start doing it. They are going to have a bias for action. They’re going to show up with an event or a trip all totally planned out and just get sign off from leadership; yeah we’re down to do this, that’s within budget. I understand it’s going to take some extra time for you in the coming weeks and that’s all good. You just make sure you’re not gonna burn a ton of the company’s time and money or try to use budget that is outside the scope of what can be reasonably authorized. Again, you understand the business context and what makes sense, so you’re going to get sign off for these ideas easily. You’re basically figuring everything out and all you need is some approval and then you just get it done.

Another example would be engineering if there's a huge cleanup or chunk of code that’s always full of bugs in production because it doesn’t really have any tests around it or whatever. You’re doing the type of work that you see as high value. You see it blocking the team, slowing the team down, reducing the quality of the software for the customer. Let’s be honest, it’s not sexy work that engineers are necessarily super excited to attack. You’re just going to proactively dive in and fix these things and you're going to do it on top of your regular work. You’re gonna show up one day at a meeting and be like hey guys I delivered the thing I was working on, and also on top of that I have a PR out for people to take a look at that refactors this part of the code that we keep complaining about, or I also wrote a bunch of tests around this this one real time system that keeps blowing up in production and driving us crazy. Whatever it is, you’ve done your normal thing, and you’ve done this other thing on top of it.

So this is the type of stuff that great people are doing who are going to drive success, get promoted, make a bunch of money, and all that good stuff. To be honest – to be really brutally honest – this is the stuff that you have to do in order to even stick around at a great company. Great companies won’t even keep you around if you’re not doing these kinds of things. You’re actually going to get fired if you’re not doing these kinds of things.

This is the elite performer model, and elite teams are stacked with people like this. You’ve got to learn to behave this way like the rest of the team. Your colleagues are going to do it. You’re just straight up going to get fired and go work at a mediocre organization where the other people are also lazy, can’t see value, and aren’t proactive. Complacent organizations don’t look for people to be as proactive, don’t look for people to contribute as much value, and don’t want anyone to do anything extra. They just want the minimum. These organizations are full of micromanagers that can’t get out of the weeds themselves. Even leadership isn’t able to be proactive, see more value, and generate more work, so they’re watching the team do trivial work like a hawk because they themselves don’t see value and aren’t motivated.

Be the laser guided missile

See the value, proactively figure out how to deliver the value, and go generate a bunch of work for yourself and – as you grow – for others.

I like to use the seek and destroy analogy, which obviously comes from military applications. Laser guided high precision munitions are very difficult to lead off target. It’s locked in on the target, proceeding as fast as it can, and blowing it up. Very simple. It doesn’t get distracted by a whole bunch of other stuff going on because that’s not its job. Its job is to seek and destroy. It is in pursuit of the target as aggressively as possible, to the maximum of its specification, and blowing it up.

Be the laser guided missile. Seek and destroy.