Everybody is good at their own job, and at everybody else’s job

We are all good at our own jobs. We had extensive training, education or are autodidacts. Unfortunately, we sometimes are depending on other people – I refuse to call them experts – to do some things for us. This is where it gets frustrating. Since we know what we want, and if everybody around us just did what we asked for we would not have so much discussion. 

I speak from personal experience. In my work, I depend on the work of others for marketing, design, software development, human resource management, legal stuff, recruitment, organizing events, and managing my calendar. And daily, I am astonished how these “experts” can’t grasp the most basic stuff of their work. I have to explain things over and over, and they keep asking me additional questions just to delay or complicate stuff. Many times I wondered: why is this happening? Why does it seem these professionals don’t know how to do their work? It looks like a simple task, but every time they manage to make it more complex and take more time.

“Regardless of our understanding of what is really happening, we assume other people’s jobs are easy.” 

This is what happens to me in practice: I think up a new and innovative idea that needs rapid execution. I have to make sure this happens fast enough, so need to get help from these so-called experts. And this is where it gets tricky. After I asked for their help the simple idea suddenly became a multifaceted challenge with lots of barriers to executing the thing I initially thought out. I will give some real-life examples of this.

Graphic designers

Whenever I need some design done, I just want it now! Just a simple combination of text, colors, and images. And every time I get into a very strange, complex discussion about wireframes, user experience, and color theories. I just want the graphics to be made now. How these professionals are supposedly wasting my precious creative time. Combine text with some images, and that’s it. “Designing stuff is not that hard, we could just sit for an hour, and they can teach me Photoshop, or something like that”. 

Marketing Managers 

My brilliant, new, innovative, and disruptive idea, event, or service offering needs to be communicated as soon as possible. Just push out a press release, some tweets, and a LinkedIn update, and we are in business. Publish “some content” on our website, and we can start selling. However, the moment I get in contact with marketing, I get complex questions about campaign plans, target audience, group distribution, conversion, and social media communication strategy. This is only distracting from the real goal: pushing out this dazzling content. “Why don’t we just sit for 15 minutes and you just show me how Hootsuite and the content management system work. Or something like that.” 

Sales Manager

The idea has been made into a service and, thanks to the help of our marketing team, is visible online. Now we have to sell it. Start contacting known prospects and cold calling. Visit the customers, present the service to the customer. Negotiate a bit about the price and conditions, and make the sale. However, salespeople start with their funnel, sales kit, customers’ approach, building rapport, and getting the customer to feel the pain of not using this service. And all these thoughts just distract from the real stuff, closing the deal. ”Perhaps I’d better read the SPIN selling book this weekend and do it myself. Or just some other sales book.”  

Recruitment Manager

Now we need additional staff. Easy if you ask me. Just search for some keywords on LinkedIn and invite them to a talk. Sell your company, culture, and services, and you are off to go. Go to conferences and select top visitors and speakers to work for your company. Do a short interview and present a contract. Now the recruitment steps complicate and delay the process. They have to estimate the recruitment demand pipeline, create job and competencies profiles, create recruitment communication plans, and a candidate selection process. Suddenly, the process is delayed by senseless reference checking and formal interview questions. And finally, everything has to be registered in a recruitment system. This just frustrates impulsive and creative recruitment ideas. “Just sit down for 10 minutes and explain how Linkedin premium work, and I’ll be off to go. Or something like that.”

And I can list dozens of these examples: Why are these so-called professionals focused on delaying and complicating their own work, rather than just straightforwardly doing their thing? It is really not that hard to do their job, I reckon. 

Everybody is good at their own job, and at everybody else’s job

This is really my day-to-day frustration, mainly driven by my own impatience. We often ignore the expertise of the professionals we work with. These people are professionals, just like me. Just like my own experience and special skills, it probably took these experts extensive training and years of practice to acquire this level of proficiency. I realized to have respect for these professionals. Learned to set aside my selfish needs and to rely on the approach for the work they are delivering. I heavily rely on the experts around me and am very thankful for them since they rescued me several times from near disasters. (These will be the subject of my future posts). 

Professionals are here to help you today!

Respect the professionals you are working with. They are here to help you. Think about the time it took you to acquire your skills. And one day, they are going to ask you for your professional support. To all experts, I say; Next time I start a request with “Why don’t you just do <insert simplified request>, that should not be so hard”, just remind me about this post.