As I alluded to in a previous blog post, my wife and I often discuss all things career/professional life. On a recent walk, we talked a bit about white collar jobs that focus on output vs. focus on knowledge.
Some background: a few months ago, my wife changed careers from doing marketing work with the power company to being a product strategist for a company that does research and consulting for utilities. The former job had a lot of tasks and output-related work and pretty limited amounts of higher-level stuff… the latter job flipped the ratios.
Our conversation was partly about that change, but how she’s now in a position of getting paid for her knowledge rather than for her output of deliverables, yet has a higher salary than before. It caused us to reflect on our younger days when we felt like we were producing a lot, saw how little some managers produced, and thought it was totally ridiculous. Now that we’ve been in the working world for well over a decade, we can see why that’s the case – knowledge is valuable.
(Now, to be sure, there are some awfully crappy managers out there who don’t have the knowledge nor did they produce, but let’s just gloss over that.)
If nobody had a bird’s-eye view of how everything needs to fit together so that teams can function well, then it’d just be a big ol’ inefficient cluster. No, the goal probably shouldn’t be perfect efficiency because that would most likely be a soul-sucking environment, but the right hand still needs to know what the left hand is doing.
Of course a coach gets paid more than individual players, the conductor is paid more than members of the orchestra, the foreman is paid more than the construction workers, and so on. Speaking from my own experience, it seems that white collar office workers take those situations for granted but don’t apply them to their own careers, even though it makes just as much sense. I’m guilty of this myself, although I feel as though I’ve become wiser and have moved away from that mindset after more than 13 years in the workforce.
Anyway, despite my internal recognition of this, I’d never had an out-loud discussion about it so it hadn’t been quite so clear as during that conversation. I felt kind of… I don’t know, gross?… accepting and defending knowledge/output dichotomy because I know that mid-20s Justin would have been shocked that he’d ever come to that conclusion, siding with The Man so casually.