Being the helper

I enjoy being the helper. The person who makes it possible for other people to do their best work.

I have no dreams of leadership or moving up the corporate ladder.

Doing the work, being made management as a reward

I’ve been thinking about the type of work I enjoy and it is difficult to explain. Yet, it has been persistent throughout my professional career.

Data management

When I first got into marketing, I worked as a data specialist for the products sold online. The company had a parts catalog of 30,000+ SKU’s and I worked to organize, categorize, tag, and define each item for both the backend data management and the frontend information delivery on the website. I found joy in the work by creating a data governance model and meticulously entering in consistent data. I spent hours and hours a day writing product descriptions, thinking about what information a customer could want on the product. I worked diligently on structuring the data so it was easily readable and consistent on every product page.

I did this because I could picture how the information could help our customers do their best work. They could find the right product for the job and maybe even learn something the product could do they didn’t know before. Then they could do their best work.

My reward for this work was being made a manager and asked to build a team to expand the scope of this work into more areas in the company.

I didn’t want this and it took me further away from doing what I thought was meaningful work. I didn’t want to manage people and work the office politics of middle management. However, moving into management was my only way getting a raise.

Product marketing

Later, I moved into the content marketing team. This was another place I loved doing the work. I wrote data dense blogs about complex products.

Again, this was to help other people do their best work. I didn’t stuff my posts full of SEO garbage. I thought deeply about what information the customer needed and how they would want it structured so the posts could be referenced as needed.

My reward for this? I was made manager. Again, not able to do the actual work and instead sitting in meetings and helping my team do the work I wanted to be doing. I took this role because it was the only way to be paid more.

SMB marketing manager

In my next job I worked for a regional business that did not have a marketing department. I was a solo marketer that did all the work. Wrote all the blogs, social media posts, produced videos, website information, etc., etc. I enjoyed it and did some of my best work.

This was for an insurance broker and I used my past experiences to create information to help people. I could be the helper.

My reward? I was asked to become the CMO of the business when they merged with another and then build a small marketing team to do the daily work, while I was in middle management. It was the only way to get a raise as my previous work wasn’t considered as valuable as being a manager.

Being the helper

I know this is counter-intuitive to some folks, but I have no desire to move up the corporate ladder. I neve wanted to be a manager. I enjoy doing the hands-in-the-dirt work, which is what I literally do now.

My brother and I are partners in a landscaping company and I have no desire to run a crew or have a division under my lead. I love to do the prep work so other people can do their best work.

For example, my brother is a great plumber. So, I will spend most of my days making it so he can do his best work. I dig up all the locations to prep for the plumbing work. Big work areas, clean locations, tools and parts organized to streamline the process.

Even though I can be a manager (a pretty good one, too) I enjoy doing what is considered to be the meaningless, tedious work.

I don’t want to be the planner. I don’t want to be the boss. I have no dreams of being a “thought leader”. I’m the person doing the work so others can do their best work.

I think of this work like constructing a building. There are those that want to be the planner, designing the building for the people that could use it. Some want to be in sales, finding the right buyer and building those relationships. Me? I am the person on the jobsite laying thousands of bricks.

I think there’s a lot of people like me and these people need to be rewarded for their work. Yet, we are treated like we have no ambition, no career goals because we don’t want to move up in a company.

But, the reality is, our work is the most important. Devs can’t code if there isn’t someone setting up and managing the infrastructure. That infrastructure can’t be setup if there isn’t someone climbing though the building running CAT cables, laying out the electrical systems, or installing the AC. And that last person is considered to be “unskilled labor”.

- - - - -

Did you like this post? Give it an upvote by clicking on the arrows below! Sending me an upvote is like you and I giving each other a high five.

🙏 😎

If you enjoy the random stuff I write here, post to Mastodon, or watch on YouTube, and are feeling generous, I am open to tips of Ko-fi.