If your gut is telling you that you are changing hats throughout the workweek too often, most probably you are right. But analyzing how all that hat-switching influences your career should not be left to your stomach.
A hybrid-employee scenario
My social media handle used to be 1KHats. It was inspired by Typeform’s founders, who called me “The Woman of the Thousand Hats” in a company meeting. They explained that I have been the first employee dedicated to the Marketing area, then the first one building the Success department, and that I was to join forces with Jason Harmon (by then Chief Platform Officer, later on CTO) to build the Platform team that would subsequently launch the developer platform, the partner program, and an integrations marketplace.
Across 15 years of career, to date I’ve been a developer and entrepreneur, a professor, a marketer, a customer care leader, a developer relations manager and, currently, a Chief of Staff. I never hopped jobs or disliked my active area of expertise; new opportunities simply opened for me, and many times I was asked to change role or assume new tasks to tackle something that I was the best shot for at that moment, which has been basically the hyper-growth startup way of life for the most recent part of my career. This, combined with a hunger for “catching up” and test myself after years focused on fighting cancer, lured me into accepting all new difficult things proposed.
Knocking on the wrong doors
Halfway this journey, I started trying to steer my career instead of being led by the nose by personal circumstances. Alas, back then getting career advice when you were not yet an executive was quite difficult; mentors were scarce and expensive, an engineering background was not perceived as leadership material and, as I grew my skills as professor, I used to end up on the mentoring end. In an attempt to seek opportunities and understand more my profile, I started using job search as training ground and career thermometer.
In one of those occasions, I was summoned to a recruiting agency’s office so I could be added to their candidates database. After 40 minutes talking with a recruiter specialised in tech profiles, I was asked to stay for a second interview with a recruiter for marketing profiles. By the end of that second session both recruiters looked irritated and confounded, to the point of telling me that I was “strange”. They even recognized that they wouldn’t even know how to register me into their system — which didn’t help to improve their mood. I never got a word back from them afterwards.
A hybrid profile is usually the glue in a team or project, or acts as in-house entrepreneur starting projects that are key to the company but unattainable by specialists. The hybrid employee is the epitome of a complex professional profile, so only seasoned managers know how to put them to good use.
With algorithms is not much different than with humans. The variety and incoherence of roles that professional networks think I can fit in is surreal: business developer for Russian market (I don’t speak Russian), PHP expert passionate about cryptocurrencies (barely touched PHP after graduating), or store manager for a luxury boutique in Dubai (my only experience in retail was selling comics and books when I was a teenager). It was increasingly difficult to find job offers that required my heterogeneous set of skills, and even less some where I could stand a chance of reaching interview stage, considering how bewildered was the average recruiter about my profile.
Into the rabbit hole of hybridness
As I grew more experienced, the challenges did as well (drafting roles for a new cross-functional team, strategizing a budget, carrying out organizational changes…) and, thus, my attributions increased in complexity. However, the job titles grew increasingly disconnected from the reality of those scenarios, being more placeholders for future hires in that area than real definitions of what I was doing — that is, usually laying the foundations and structures for new areas and teams to operationalise them rapidly.
Being a hybrid means performing above average and consistently in a variety of roles and specialties — something like a corporate polymath, so employers rarely let a hybrid settle down in one specialty because is the first person that comes to mind to help with something new, complex and new or highly cross-functional, in the organisation.
The new assignments were interesting and the trust put on me flattering, but also meant that at the very moment whatever I was building reached “v1 version” my superiors would move me to a new challenge and replace me with an expert in that field. As a result, consolidating a career that made sense on a resume seemed hopeless, juggling a colorful variety of responsibilities was taxing and, no matter the size of the achievements, it was difficult to grasp a true sense of accomplishment, because when things started rolling out it was my replacement getting most of the resulting visibility and the opportunity of iterating. These are great ingredients to feed impostor syndrome and increase stress levels.
Fortunately, two things happened:
- I was appointed Chief of Staff for Technology, which is a title that reflects my current responsibilities and how they benefit my employer.
- I built a tool to make sense out of the changing nature of my tasks, while helping my leaders understand both the implications of their varied requests and the impact of my contributions.
To measure a thousand hats
When working on things that are wildly varied in nature — and when interfacing with their stakeholders — you need to accept that using time as a preferential metric is going out the window. If you are in a hardcore-hybrid scenario, time will not be a reliable metric to assess your responsibilities, because you don’t work often enough in repetitive tasks, their completion time is difficult to estimate, and time will not necessarily influence the notion of their value.
This doesn’t mean that you can’t measure and weight your work, though.
The not-so-many dimensions of a professional multiverse
In fact, you can — and should — use many metrics that may be quantitative and qualitative. These are the dimensions I used to log tasks and further understand my coverage in 2018:
- Role — the hat I was wearing for a given task, also known as the role that would be usually hired to take care of that task
- Type of task — in a T-shaped skills model, the more skills used for the task belong to the vertical bar the more the role is of specialist nature, and when belonging to the horizontal bar the more managerial on that area of work (if it’s related to connecting both skill families, then we are probably facing an operations task, and the more we have to branch out that T into an M shape the more managerial the task is, independently of the role)
- Destination of such value — team, area, or topic/discipline
A brief debate about time
If you have a close look at the charts above, you will notice that data is plotted by weeks. This was the most comfortable way of enabling a timeline view. Logging number of hours spent per activity would have been time consuming and, as I mentioned before, not meaninful. Instead, I added the week number to each rows and then added the tasks whenever I had the time to catch up, usually my last thing to do almost every day, before putting my laptop to sleep.
When adding any kind of time variable, you will need to consider whether investing effort on it would make a difference in the insights you expect to get from your analysis. Time, per se, is quantitative and tends to make a difference mostly when tracked down in some specific scenarios; for instance, how much time is spent on writing some recurring emails, how much time spent on meetings or 1-on-1s, or some other repetitive or predictable task.
My top goal adding a time dimension to the data was not measuring the amount of time dedicated to each task, but getting insights on weeks focused on certain roles, and detecting trends and patterns across weeks.
Rules of thumb
At this point of tailoring a personal model one may feel enthusiastic about adding some extra metrics, for instance a very appealing rating about the usefulness of each meeting, so this is a good time to remember some basic principles:
- Tracking more than three dimensions is usually both counterproductive and unsustainable
- What’s been left out of the model must be as clearly defined as what’s been included
- Some basics analytics must be designed when shaping the model, so purpose and expectations are crystal clear from the start
Nevertheless, there may be good reasons to add some more dimensions, or just optional variables, for instance:
- OKRs progress
- KPIs related to onboarding into a new role
- Multiple types of work or its purpose (eg workflows and processes, design, analysis, etc.)
Insights and reminders
A well-done board works as a mirror. Use it with honesty because, if built well, it will show you the beautiful and the ugly. Truth may, or may not, make you free, but for sure will make you more informed.
Fighting the impostor syndrome
The first and immediate benefit you get from a tool that tracks down your ever-changing days is that you will be reminded of what you have been doing. It’s too easy to lose track of achievements and forget the amount of effort put on things to make them happen, given the variety of thing done throughout the weeks. Moreover, as many times you are working behind the scenes there may be times that you can’t show off much progress or make announcements, and that adds up to the sensation of not moving forward.
Logging tasks on Fridays is key. You can not only fill in the work done in the last 24 or 48 hours, but also read the whole week you are leaving behind. You are in a better position to make a judgement of your performance with a 1-week perspective, instead of trusting your memory and emotional aftertaste.
The shape of people to come
When you are tracking the nature of tasks while wearing different hats, you are collecting information that will help define job descriptions. Without that data, it’s tempting to draft a new position around aspirations and project ideas, forgetting about the current status and needs of the area and the team involved.
The “type of task” tracking (specialist, operations, and management) is useful to see the level of seniority the new hires must have, and the main focus of their work. Furthermore, you can detect a trend of focus on some of your tasks, so you are able to foresee both their career path and how that role will interact and affect everyone else in the team on short and mid terms.
Show me the money
To detect recurrent value-building activities, you need to have a consistent way of wording tasks. This will help you in terms of pattern detection, as keywords and topics will start to be noticeable in your notes.
As you notice patterns and some topics arise from weeks of data, ask yourself the following questions:
- Regarding acknowledgement of workload: Can those tasks be grouped together? Is it bedrock work (low visibility) or not? How to name that group? The resulting name should be shared with your peers and documented or offered in a useful manner to them, so they can adopt it as any other element in their work environment.
- Regarding recognition: Can you be officially assigned as owner, driver, or stakeholder to some of those tasks? If that’s the case and your leader sanctions it, it should be communicated and “made official” in the organization. When colleagues need to ask around “Do you take care of this? Do you know who does?”, then some internal communications and organizational polishing is due, otherwise your peers will not understand your role and you will be considered an odds and ends person, not an authority in your area.
- Regarding value: What resources do you have available for these tasks? Are you the decision maker? Who are you delivering value to? Is the value perceived as favours or as a real collaboration? How tangible is the value? Can it be shaped into something deliverable?
- Regarding domain: Are you filling in someone else’s shoes for any reason? In what circumstances people reach out to you? What can, or should, you stop taking care of?
Handoffs and takeoffs
Change is as common as air in a hybrid’s career, which means always being ready to hand off tasks or roles to a specialised colleague, or change your role and title completely.
It’s crucial to understand your workload trends and then map them with your own career goals, and easy to deviate as there’s so many different things you can, and will probably be asked to do, so keep in mind what areas you want — and makes sense — to grow your professional muscles in the mid term, and which tasks are deviating your attention and efforts from your goals.
Handoffs: The hybrid as facilitator for team growth
Thanks to the data you collect on your own progress, you will probably be able to easily identify when having you as occasional or part-time collaborator is not enough anymore, and the amount of work, complexity, and variety gets close to unbearable, affecting delivery time of key tasks. Examples of scenarios where this happens are:
- When there’s a periodic cycle on workload increase for a given specialty, and there’s nobody with those skills. Also usually associated with a long-term project, a web property, or a program.
- When there are alarming peaks of workload or long periods of time requiring a certain role and in multiple levels of seniority.
- A trend of increased focus on a role or an identifiable group of tasks, for a quarter or longer.
- There’s an increasing dependancy on you for everyday tasks in a certain role, but you are also requested to take care of operations and management, which is not possible because the lack of available time cripples your authority and capacity of bringing value.
You may have turned into a scarce resource for team members who need someone there on a continuous basis, because you can’t prioritize those tasks on your backlog or because you don’t consider growing into the position any further. And that is great news. It means your implementation of the role, as far as possible, was successful, and there’s enough workload and scope for promoting or hiring someone into that position. Talk with your peers and managers involved with this “hat” you have been wearing and pitch the new hire goal, help them recruit the right person, and then drive the hand off of the responsibilities and workload.
Takeoffs: All that you won’t leave behind
Regarding taking off, be it in the same company to a new position or moving to another organization, you should consider your career path and how you would like to develop it. Every change of role is an investment for a hybrid but also a risk as it will affect how you are perceived as a professional and the selection of skills you will be able to nurture further.
Before going on a new adventure, consider the following questions:
- Is this all you can progress where you currently are? What would be necessary for things to change? What’s the probability of key variables changing soon?
- What skills and specialties you want to grow further?
- What career paths you definitely not want to move forward to?
- Who can lead and mentor you in a new position?
- How wide or narrow the new position is? How much is it shaped for a hybrid?
- How long would you be comfortable in that position? How long would it take for that experience being professionally meaningful?
The hybrid’s dilemma
A hybrid professional’s current role or circumstances are not necessarily a viable career path. There will be times when is possible to focus on certain roles and projects, while other times it’s about bouncing everywhere around an organisation for the sake of things to build. It’s critical to look beyond the noise of everyday activities and the organisation’s needs and understand what direction makes sense for you to go.
There’s a very simple but challenging question you can ask yourself to understand better your career horizon:
What areas, level of seniority, and projects would you be willing to focus on, if you had to spend the next two years in a non-hybrid position?
Remember that being a hybrid is about keeping a delicate balance between building with focus and taking care of a wide and heterogeneous landscape. Be coherent with what you are, and with what you have potential to be.
Thank you for reading! I hope this article was helpful and inspiring. Special thanks to Kees Romkes, Pau Boix, and Daniel Giralt Len.
