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Photo by Piotr MusioÅ / Unsplash Donât Put Yourself in a Box Personal Development and Career Growth Apr 26, 2024 Summary Companies need "boxes" (job classifications) to grow and function. This makes hiring, compensation, and career development tractable, and promotes fair treatment of employees. If the boxes are too large, a company can't grow. If the boxes are too small, innovation and ownership are smothered. The size of a company's boxes is directly proportional to the level of trust employees have for management. To get hired, put yourself in the box the company is hiring for. Tailor your resume to highlight those skills and experiences; put yourself out there as a âspecialistâ in the thing theyâre hiring for. If aiming for a promotion, demonstrate how your work embodies the behaviors and impacts of the next-level âboxâ. Don't let those boxes define you. Your value and identity goes far beyond any job description. Hot Take Businesses can't function at scale unless they put people in standardized "boxes"; if you want to be hired and to grow your career, you need to understand that, and understand how to work with those boxes. On the other hand, you can't be reduced to a box, and if you tie your identity to those boxes in your thinking, you'll limit yourself in ways that are unnatural and harmful. This is like the paradox of SchrÃ¶dinger's Cat, both alive and dead at the same time. Like with quantum mechanics and the cat, whether youâre in a box or not depends on whoâs doing the measuring: your employer, or you. My Box Origin Story My introduction to the idea of âboxesâ came in the late 2000s, when I noticed that people at Google were having a hard time getting hired or promoted if they were doing âoperationalâ work that didnât involve much traditional program management. Whether they were being considered for hiring or promotion, they were told, essentially, â Youâve done some great work, but itâs not program management; weâre not sure what role/ladder is a fit for you, but itâs not this one. Next! â This was clearly a problemâeven though they didnât do PERT diagrams and Gantt charts, Googlers did important work in these roles, and roadblocks to hiring and promoting them created both operational and retention issues as jobs went vacant and high-performing employees felt their value wasnât being recognized. As a member of both Program Management hiring and promotion committees at Google I had more visibility to this issue than most others; I spoke to a friend of mine in People Operations (Googleâs HR), who turned out to already be well aware of this problem from repeatedly dealing with upset hiring managers and frustrated promotion candidates. Together, we hatched a plan: to create a new job ladder (job classification) for these âoperationalâ program managers to move to, that was better suited to the type of work they did. We gathered some data, wrote a proposal, and set up a meeting with the SVP responsible for all engineering at Google. The SVP had been in quite a few meetings Iâd presented to before; I knew him to be not only a brilliant and capable leader, but a genuinely nice guy, too, so I had no worries about the meeting. Imagine my shock then, when this âgenuinely nice guyâ started yelling at us, telling my partner and I that we were going to wreck Google culture! I vividly remember what he said: â DONâT PUT PEOPLE IN BOXES! â He told us Google needed some job classifications, but that our culture required those classifications to be both broad and vague so both employees and their managers wouldnât be blocked from doing whatever needed to be done. The worst thing we could do, the SVP told us, was to make the classification âboxesâ so small people could say â thatâs not my job ââwhich is precisely what he saw us proposing to do!

Donât Put Yourself a Box

Don't apply unprepared

Donât Put Yourself a Box

Don't apply unprepared

Donât Put Yourself a Box