I come from a family with a strong tradition of hard work. My mom can outwork pretty much anybody. All of us work hard because of it. It’s a common complaint from my wife and the spouses of siblings that they feel like they just can’t work hard enough to meet the (imagined) expectation to be as great as her.
About a month ago my wife and I decided to go into business doing real estate investing with my parents and one of her siblings. Part of that discussion included the decision that my primary role in the business would be organization and leadership, mostly because I won’t have a ton of time once I’m back in training or operational in the Air Force. It was a little uncomfortable because I was not going to be doing the hands on work.
In The E-Myth, Michael Gerber talks about the different roles that make up a company. The Technician carries out the day-to-day work. The Manager plans and reports. The Entrepreneur (I prefer Executive because Entrepreneur is a super pretentious and loaded term now) organizes and carries the vision. Everyone on the team pointed out that they are really good technicians, with a willingness to be managers, but that I have focused on learning the Executive role for years. OK, that’s fair. I figured I could do that.
But holy smokes I didn’t realize how hard that actually is! My parents came to visit at the beginning of December to help with having a baby and prepare the house to sell when we move. When they showed up, everyone pointed out that this was a great opportunity for me to practice being the executive and guiding their work. Again, I thought this would be easy. I had a newborn baby, an almost-4-year-old, a wife recovering from childbirth, and a dog. On top of that I just finished one of the most grueling years of my life and was pretty burned out from UPT. Altogether, it should be easy to not work and just organize the work to be done.
I did a pretty good job, I really did. I helped where I could, but focused mostly on planning the work to be done and organizing the real estate business. And then at the beginning of this week, my mom started getting stressed about the work to be done this week since they were leaving Monday. I hadn’t slept well, I was somewhat stressed about that as well, and my wife started into a depressive episode. So, my time-honed reflex was to go into “get stuff done” mode and pick up the metaphorical wrench.
Here’s the problem: I wasn’t much of a help. I mostly puttered around not getting much done or, even worse, getting in the way of my parents who were trying to acutally get things done. Thursday I was on the verge of a breakdown as I was stressing about the things we needed to do, this new business, and my relative lack of ability to do any of it. (Yeah, I can do handyman work, but my parents over 30 years more experience than me) My wife stopped me with something along the lines of “you are not supposed to be the technician. Do your own job.”
And she’s right. My job (in this case) isn’t to repair siding, cut down trees, or caulk countertops. My job right now is to help them manage the workload by breaking down the work to be done and assigning it in manageable chunks each day because that’s what they need. My job is to flex the plan when we don’t have time to get everything done in a day. My job is to tell them “no, cutting down the trees and hauling away the branch piles doesn’t need to happen today” so they can focus on the important skilled work that they are good at. I can haul branches and paint walls when they’re gone. I don’t know how to texture a ceiling or repair a water-damaged wall.
Can I learn? Sure. That’s not the point. Right now that’s not my job.
Someone’s got to lead the work. Someone has to organize the people. Because without that, nothing big gets done.