Work Ethos
I’ve been thinking about work a lot these days, and moreso my place within it.
This led me to experiment with crafting an ideal role from the ground-up. Instead of trying to fit into a predefined JD, invert the traditional job search process.
Work backwards. Plug in: core values, skills, strengths, work style, & culture preferences etc.
Use this to shape an ideal role scope, responsibilities, and even the type of company that could be the best fit.
I’ve started to lay out a few sections that speak to my work ethos and summarised my most important and defining values, with takeaways to shape the profile of the ‘ideal’ role.
The Methodology
I know there are myriad ‘career tests’ and quizzes out there that do this well (many that are scientifically rigourous, and others that ‘harness the power of AI!’) but I feel like these tools fall short when you consider nebulous, nuanced things like your whole career - a quiz result doesn’t sit right for me.
This is deeply personal and purposeful, so I think it requires a lot more introspection. I started by asking myself which of these criteria are most important to me.
This has prompted me to reflect on questions such as:
- What do I actually like to do? What am I good at?
- How do my personal quirks influence my work style and how I work in different team environments?
- What strengths do I bring to a team, and how can they be best utilised?
- What are my core values, and how do they manifest in my work?
- What aspects of company culture resonate most deeply with me? Which are non-negotiable?
- What do I still need to learn and improve on? How does a role or a company fit in my long-term goals?
Now, is there a framework I can use to help me evaluate these competing factors? First, I did a little dive into the available literature, exploring the various existing methodologies and frameworks of motivation (such as Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, Herzberg’s Motivation-Hygiene Theory, Hackman and Oldham’s Job Characteristics Model, and Daniel Pink’s ‘Drive’). This is my preference when I do a bit of soul-searching (which, admittedly, is probably one of said personal quirks).
Ultimately, I Frankenstein’d my own approach, combining the most applicable parts of what I’ve researched. It’s largely guided by the science, but I’ve made tweaks based on what I know about myself and isolating the parts that are more relevant for my highly personal use case.
The intention of this exercise is not clinical or intending to find a narrow solution (and I don’t believe this exists for me, personally). I am not matching this against an exhaustive database of roles or industries so there is no shiny packaged output like in those career quizzes. Instead, I’m hoping that this values-rooted exercise will help with navigation, pointing to a direction of travel.
I will be summarising the outcomes as I build this out, perhaps in future refining this in a more structured way versus a collection of thoughts.
On Caring and Duty
If I had to encapsulate my approach to work in one phrase: I care deeply (and a lot). I care about the work that I do, the people I work with, and ultimately in doing my job well (and better than before). It’s important for me to work in a place where the people around me operate with the same commitment of mutual caring and alignment to producing high-calibre work.
The day people stop caring, that’s when things start to slip, and I’ve seen this wreak havoc on culture. I place a high premium on upholding this value - I’ve found it takes much more for me to ‘crack’ or lose faith in a situation. I am maybe some parts too blindly and persistently optimistic, but it makes me more resilient - often seeing the light where others may have given up.
It’s a difficult ask (and definitely easier said than done) to be ‘on’ all of the time. We all go through ebbs and flows in performance and morale, intentionally or not (and often this is a function of the environment and work situation at present, which is similarly up and down).1 However, I still have an obligation to provide the most value and do the best job I can in my particular circumstance. This is the case regardless of if I disagree with the strategy that was selected, if I’m frustrated or not, or if I am working with someone extremely difficult.2
Do your job, do it right
I often recall the Stoic teaching, “do your job, do it right”. Seeing work as a duty can seem oppressive, but it can also be very powerful – if you put in the work in applying consistency and quality, regardless of the circumstance, it’s a virtuous cycle leading to better outcomes.
Having this value is, to me, the foundation of building and maintaining trust with others, and at the centre of high-performing team culture. You want to be able to rely on your team, and know that they’ll do their best, in any and all situations (yes, even on a sinking ship). And the effects are compounding - open communication, empathy, and so many other positive externalities that make a huge difference in team culture and morale. And then maybe you can turn the ship around. We’ve all heard the ‘one bad apple’ adage. I think it holds a lot of merit.
It’s important for me to look for a company that upholds this standard very highly. You can tell pretty quickly if this is the case - they invest and take care of their employees and they have a culture that rewards merit and dedication. And there’s always reciprocity.
1 Note: I do want to add that there are sometimes more extreme circumstances and larger issues at play, be it work-related or personal, that can make this extremely difficult.
2 Note: We can’t always pick the cards that we’re dealt. “Focus on what you can control” is another Stoic concept, probably its most famous. This is often misinterpreted as being passively accepting of all situations - but it’s really about discerning when it’s worthwhile to make a change, and when to accept your circumstances (and subsequently, doing the best you can do thereafter). The classic ‘choose your battles wisely’.
On Being a Renaissance Woman
I like to understand the ‘why’ behind how things work, to know things deeply, and do them to a high standard. I’m constantly learning and acquiring bits of skills (useful or not), somewhat like an odd magpie collecting tidbits of knowledge. Maybe a more eloquent analogy would be a jack (or jill) of all trades. I often use the term sparingly as it’s associated with being a master of none – I might prefer ‘renaissance woman’.3
But through my varied experiences; and having done a bit of nearly ‘everything’ in marketing and then some, I’ve picked up a diverse range of skills, that I feel help me offer both breadth and depth in the right places. Admittedly, I do have trouble staying in my lane. The flip side of this is I get too involved and stuck in too much sometimes, in which I’m trying to better prioritise what’s important, not just what I want to do.
One such positive externality of this is that I’ve developed a high degree of confidence and agility when facing new and unfamiliar challenges. I trust in my ability to just ‘figure things out’, even when I have little clue what I’m doing.
Looking for ‘generalist’ roles with a scope I can help define
This aligns well with more strategic generalist roles where I’m able to poke my head into a wide range of responsibilities and domains. I look for job specs which state that the responsibilities aren’t rigidly defined, broadly defined, or even better - offer me the flexibility to help define the scope. This is also quite revealing on the company’s approach to fresh ideas and whether they generally value creative problem-solving over rigidity and process. The reality is that in all the roles that I have enjoyed most, they have required me to be nimble and resourceful whilst ‘wearing many hats’, and have required adaptability. These are all elements that have come to make up my personal identity and work style.
Specialist roles, for the long game
Another option I am considering is to take on a slightly more specialist role to sharpen up some more hands-on skills that are often overlooked in broader strategic roles. It’s hard to keep up with everything in marketing (especially at the pace martech is evolving). The market typically rewards management roles with broader scope, wherein you start to lose some of those scrappier skills (and I don’t feel like you truly get it until you’re deep in the tools day-to-day).
It also gets ever more difficult to make that choice as you get more senior. It’s just market dynamics a bit as those jobs don’t pay as well. However, I believe keeping up with and getting great or maybe just ‘good enough’ at as many of these specialised skills as you can is crucial to being a good well-rounded marketer. This can be a ladder to a more advanced strategic role. My career timeline is long, and so I consider that an investment.
Specialist functions of interest to me: martech/ad ops, performance marketing (singular function), research & insights; and I’d love to get more hands-on experience in a true product marketing role or deeper into UX. I imagine I would be a fairly effective product manager, but the discipline is tough to get into. Nowadays, it seems to require either an internal pivot if you are nontechnical, or otherwise to be quite proficient in engineering.
3 Note: A fun and evergrowing collection of terms I’ve seen in JDs to describe generalists: swiss-army-knife; polymath, ninja.
On Learning and Development
I strongly believe in the concept of hiring for slope, not intercept. Does a company have a growth mindset? And do they invest in their employees’ growth and development? I think where a company lie on this philosophy answers this fairly clearly.
This is sometimes less practical for more senior roles, where you need someone to jump in and get the job done right away. However, I see this view pervasive in beliefs about longstanding industry experience, where it is not always as relevant as you may think.
The best people are intellectually curious and are students of life, always learning, always growing. I believe a smart person will learn, and they will be excited to do so, quickly, and with gusto.
On Leading a Team
As I have high expectations for myself, I also have high expectations for my team. I take pride in having strong relationships with my direct team that are built on mutual trust, open communication, agency, and empowerment.
Ultimately, my approach to leadership is quite simple: I want to see those on my team succeed. It’s a positive adage that you can apply to any team setting. If my team is crushing it, and I am also making my manager’s life easier, then that’s the best barometer to me that I’m doing a good job.
On Emotional Intelligence & Empathy
A follow-up on leadership… I read through tons of leadership styles and there was a lot of merit in a lot of them (I feel like most leadership styles are buzzwords anyway) - the most salient for me was ‘adaptable leadership’, which is in some essences a cop out - in that your leadership style changes based on the context. However, if pressed for one thing, I believe the most essential, non-negotiable leadership skill is possessing high emotional intelligence and empathy. I like to consider myself highly empathetic and approachable, and I hope many will echo the same. I make it my business to let people know when they’re doing a great job and to praise openly. In upholding the same theme of empathy and trust, people on my team should feel comfortable to and even encouraged to try and fail and have the psychological safety to do so.
On Autonomy
We win as a team. I don’t want to underscore the importance of teamwork, but I require autonomy to do deep work (and my best work). Similarly I am very intent on championing that same autonomy for my team to allow them space to grow and succeed independently in their own craft. You better put in those 10,000 hours if you want to be a master of your own work. Nobody gets great without practice and a lot of that time spent is time spent alone.
On Pursuing Passion… Overrated?
I don’t need to work in an industry I’m passionate about. The bulk of my more traditional hobbies are not easily monetisable (at least in ways that are obvious to me). 80,000 Hours writes extensively on this and their literature is very good.
Few people are passionate about unsexy industries like insurance, or mundane things like laundry detergent (apologies to anyone who works in insurance, or is a laundry detergent). So, to the extent you do have a passion for something mundane, then that is potentially quite rare and valuable, particularly in domains that require specialised forms of knowledge. This is even more salient in certain frontier industries / disciplines where innovative new tech and keeping up with new trends can be highly transformative (or the basis of your job).
With knowledge comes power and confidence. This is especially true early in your career, when you are inexperienced and don’t comprehend the craft as much as the content. Being well-informed or familiar with terms of art and having some background context can help bridge those gaps in understanding. This is where passion is really important and may be a bit underrated.
Passion is less important later in your career
As you progress in your career and the scope of your role becomes more strategic and less structured, you realise that simply having passion doesn’t naturally translate into performance. Let’s not conflate passion for experience and expertise. It takes experience to properly wield your passion into useful outcomes.
It’s true that people usually will do better and spend more time on things they like doing, and are happier as a byproduct. But you can also love making an impact and honing your skill - the sense of achievement of smashing a target, the feedback from a raving customer, the reward and recognition from your boss, collaborating with other great people, and so many other workplace satisfaction drivers that contribute to overall job fulfillment (and as research shows, a heck of a lot more).
Also, to get a bit more personal - how deep is your passion? If we had to empirically rank order ‘intensity of passion’, I’d reckon in many cases, it is probably not that intense that you’d want to do it (or could do it) for 40+ hours a week. And even if you think you do, money often is a passion vampire. It’s an important distinction, but I think a lot more people are more successful at being passionate about their actual job itself and in taking pride in being great at their discipline (like marketing, or data analysis, or programming). It’s not the only case, but just the more likely outcome.
This is a personal example. I spent years in sports betting and casino marketing, despite having a personal aversion to gambling (and that’s definitely not an interest area that you can fake). What drove me was a commitment to learning and applying myself and doing the job well (and doing the marketing well). I’ve found that commitment to excellence – caring, duty, and hard work – often matters more than passion. However, when passion is present – and only if you are truly very passionate, it probably provides that extra edge. And if you are that sweet spot where you have both, then you will be very dangerous.
On Agency and Intentionality
I fell in love with the concept of agency when I first read about it. It’s always been a driving philosophy for how I steer my own actions, and I believe a valuable concept to apply in both work and life.
It starts with the belief that you have freedom of choice and control over your outcomes (through your actions). In discussing agency, it’s a slippery slope to a philosophical debate about free will vs. determinism, but that’s not the main focus here. That notwithstanding, I recognise that I’m lucky to be in a position where I feel like I’m able to significantly influence many aspects of my own fate. I also recognise that not everyone has this ‘privileged’ worldview, potentially not afforded those opportunities that have shaped this view.
At its core, isn’t work (and life) a continuous stream of problem-solving? We’re constantly trying to accomplish goals, sometimes failing, but always pressing forward. This cycle demands agency – the belief that you can influence outcomes and make things happen. If you don’t have the belief that you have this power, how would you even start to tackle this problem?
Consider a scenario: a critical project deadline suddenly moves up, or a key team member falls ill just before an important presentation. Agency empowers you to take swift action – reorganizing priorities, rallying the team, or stepping up to fill the gaps yourself - you know it can be done. You not only solve immediate problems but also build resilience and adaptability. These qualities pay dividends, giving you the confidence that you can do it again and also making you better equipped to tackle the next obstacle. I guess this is what a ‘human’ growth loop is.
Agency in building your career path
I’m also thinking about agency a lot in the way I have approached and mapped out my career. I was fortunate to be in a position with my last couple of roles to have opportunities present themselves to me. It may not have been the path that I imagined, but I also wasn’t exactly sure what the right path was. I just wanted to learn and do different things, and I say yes a lot. That’s why I jumped at the chance to join a start-up in my last role (more impact, more doing, more learning, speed), and from leading a B2C team to a B2B team. I learned a lot. It was hard. I adapted quickly. Adaptability is great, and it will serve me well. But even better is adaptability + intention. It’s just smarter.
So far, despite thinking that I am very much aligned to agency, I haven’t been absolutely intentional about creating those career opportunities. I’ve done a bit here and there, but I know that I can do more. I haven’t been totally goal-focused in this pursuit. And there are always going to be excuses, and things that make me feel uncomfortable doing. In my heart of hearts, I know I can do it.