The “Things We Don’t Want To Do”

Regardless our role, there are certain aspects of our jobs we don’t like. They are the things we don’t like or want to do. They vary for each of us. For individual contributors, it may be prospecting, admin tasks, researching our customers, managing our pipelines, dealing with all the minutiae of moving deals forward, and on and on For managers, it may be hiring, coaching, dealing with poor performers, understanding performance data, and on and on.

We may simply not do those things, even though they need to be done. Alternatively, we may seek others to do those things we don’t like to do. We find tools/technologies to do the things we don’t want to do. We have become enamored with AI because we can get AI to do the things we don’t want to do.

We try to design our work lives around thing things we love doing, avoiding all those ugly things that intrude on those things we want to spend our time on. Usually, these are the really tough things, often made tougher because of our aversion to doing them.

But what if those things are important to our ability to perform? What if they are important to what we are trying to achieve?

Too often, we offload those things that are critical, because we don’t like doing them. We find someone who does, we find a technology that will take it off our plates and do that work for us. We offload or don’t do these things because we don’t want to think about them. We don’t want to be bothered by these things despite the fact they may be critical to our ability to achieve our goals.

When we outsource them, how do we know they are being done in the right way? How do we know they are maximizing our ability to perform the things we like to do?

Do we know enough about the things we avoid or don’t like to do, to know the people or tools we have put in place are doing what needs to be done?

And this is where so many things break down. We haven’t taken the time to learn the things we don’t like to do, so that we can assess the best solution for having others do them.

Let’s take an imaginary case. Let’s assume that I despise doing demand/lead gen. Imagine that I’ve never done it well, and my email and LI messages are overflowing with people wanting to take it off my hands. The cite tremendous results, great references. Perhaps, I should be engaging a company that leverages AI to send 50K multichannel outreaches a day, to any industry, anywhere in the world, but to VPs only? And they will do this daily to produce the lead gen we need. Or maybe the one that offers Starbucks gift cards, or Yeti cups for a response.

If I didn’t have enough experience, doing something I don’t enjoy doing, how would I know how wrong these approaches are? How would I know how adversely they would impact the things I revel in doing, the things I love spending time on? But we have spent the time on this, we understand the things that are really impactful in our outreach. We’ve found tools to help us to more of these high impact things in less time, enabling us to focus on those things we enjoy.

And there’s something I’ve discovered. By immersing myself in the things I don’t like to do, not only have I learned how to do them better, I’m actually finding myself enjoying them and wanting to spend time doing these things I despised. Lead/demand gen has become a fascinating puzzle to solve, to figure out how to engage others in impactful ways.

I’ve also found, that some of the things I loved doing and was really good at, I don’t have to do myself. I can outsource them or have technologies do them better, despite my enjoyment of them. In fact, it is probably better for me to get other people or resources to do them. As a senior executive, I loved the difficult deals. I was good at them, I enjoyed the messiness of figuring things out. But diving in and doing them, wasn’t providing the development and growth of the people directly accountable for doing them. So instead of doing what I loved, I focused on helping my teams do those things much better. And we produced far better results!

I’m, also, a data nerd, I love drilling into performance data to identify critical issues. There’s something magic about looking at data/numbers and extracting things others have missed. But it takes time, and time that I can use more effectively doing other things–even lead/demand gen. Because I know what I am looking for so well, because I have such comfort in the analysis, I have been able to find tools that I outsource that analysis to. They don’t replace me 100% but they save me all sorts of time.

In addition to helping us better understand and master the “whole job,” doing the work we don’t like to do helps build discipline and resilience. In some ways, we might have a greater sense of accomplishment, in doing these things.

Selling, leadership, building/growing businesses is tough work. We have to do the whole job, even the things we don’t like doing. If we don’t do that work, we fail to achieve our potential.

Growth, more often happens outside our comfort zones!

Afterword: In researching this article, I stumbled on a fantastic piece written by a high school student. Please take the time to read it: Doing Things You Don’t Like Can Be Life Changing!

Afterword Here is the AI discussion of the post! Enjoy!