Published on October 4, 2024 5:25 PM GMT
In the past couple of years, I’ve found myself roles that are defined by their lack of definition. It’s the kind of role that lets you add value in ways that don’t fit neatly into tech’s boxes, where there’s room for more undirectedness and using your curiosity as a battering ram. Depending on where you’re working, the role will probably come with one of these titles: Chief of Staff (that's me), Entrepreneur in Residence, Founder’s Office, and so on. But I like to think of it agnostic of titles, as an “amoeba” role.
I do want to call out early on that an amoeba role can be confused with a jack of all trades. But the more I explore this role, the more I realise it's something different.
Your garden variety Jack might have surface-level knowledge across many areas, but often lacks the depth to tackle complex challenges in any one area. This versatility is their strength, but can also be their limitation. I think the key difference lies in our ability to not just do many things, but to rapidly dive deep—and fast—into whatever the situation demands. A jack of all trades might have no speciality, but in an amoeba role, being a generalist is your specialty. Not "I can do a bit of everything", but "I can become what the team needs most right now".
Being Frankenstein
The heart of an amoeba role, I think, is the meta skill of deep, rapid adaptation. It’s less about applying known skills to new situations and more about developing entirely new approaches on the fly, often by combining insights from disparate domains. I think that, to really ace that, you have to have an uncanny ability to assess a situation, recognise patterns, identify what it needs, and Frankenstein together the right mix of skills, tools and people to solve it — often within a few days, if not hours.
The longer I inhabit this role, the more I realise just how far it can stretch. When you’re intentionally not boxed in by a rigid job description, you can be doing tactical work like fine-tuning a presentation one day, and strategic work like laying down the roadmap for a new internal product the next. You can find yourself in any meeting room at any time, driven there simply because it was interesting and your leaders thought it needed a boost. Very early on, I found myself helming projects that, on paper, I had no business running. If you’re soft-spoken like me, it’s an intimidating position to be in. I can clearly remember each time I went back to my manager-mentor and said to him: “I don’t think I belong here. What am I even doing?”.
But there’s growth in that intimidation because you realise that this is exactly what you were meant to do in a role like this: step into uncharted territory and bridge gaps others might not even see. The lack of a job description evolves, in your head, into permission to pursue challenges beyond your immediate responsibilities. As my super-boss often jokes: “The worst that can happen is they’ll want to fire you. But the only one who can fire you is me”.
Transitive trust
One of the most fascinating aspects I'm uncovering about this role is how it relies on what I call "transitive trust." Unlike a more defined position where you can tick off accomplishments, I often find myself riding on the coattails of someone else's reputation (usually someone more senior). It’s like the transitive property in maths, but with trust: If A trusts B and B trusts U, then A will trust U.
That’s not to say you don’t need to prove yourself to maintain it — quite the contrary. This transitive trust is only your initial currency, allowing you to operate in spaces where you might otherwise be questioned. From there, you have to quickly and repeatedly demonstrate your value and build direct relationships. The beauty of this process is that as you successfully navigate these situations, you begin to build your own reservoir of trust. People start to seek you out not just because someone else recommended you, but because they've experienced your value firsthand. You develop what I call atomic influence: for the people in your sphere of influence, you appear to be everywhere, all at once, and therefore always top of mind. You become a node in the organisation's trust network, capable of extending that transitive trust to others. Reputational spillover makes the world go brrr.
Cosmic fit
I spent all this while saying that this role has no definition. But as I navigate it a bit more with the help of some very thoughtful mentors, I'm starting to recognize certain behaviours and instincts that seem to make a person well-suited, almost a cosmic fit, for this kind of work.
First, you’re somewhat of an entrepreneur in your approach. Your foremost concern is always creating value for your team and the company. That means you don’t always wait for opportunities to be assigned to you; you’re just as good at finding and addressing them. You’re also adept at finding and leveraging resources that might not be obvious or readily available. You’re comfortable with ambiguity and willing to take calculated risks (with a few safety nets). You're quick to pivot when something isn't working, adjusting your approach based on feedback and results. You know the ripple effects of your actions on different parts of the business. You can create something from nothing.
I also think holding down a role like this is less about having a specific set of technical skills and more about having an almost pathological enthusiasm for figuring things out. You have to need to untangle the yarn, solve the Rubik’s cube, and get your ducks in a row. You do it for the sheer pleasure of it, not necessarily for external validation (which, tbh, doesn’t come along too often). You need to be an excellent operator, and someone who can leave their ego out the door.
It sounds like a lot…
… because it is. Ambiguity is a double-edged sword, and you have to have an outsized amount of faith in the process (and in yourself). I’ve found it exhausting to constantly have to prove myself and expand my skill, especially considering I don’t have a typical hierarchy-indicating role. If you’re relatively early in your career, you might also wonder if taking yourself out of a traditional hierarchy within a specialised function might actually ruin your prospects of a “normal” job. It doesn’t help at all that recruitment pattern-matching is inherently anti-generalist, which means the farther you go, the less you can fit yourself into a box, and the less you’ll even feel like doing that. The best way to continue to find high leverage, high impact jobs becomes building a solid network and being visible, known, for exactly what you want to do more of (hi). That’s a story unto itself.
I think these are extremely valid reasons not to want a role like this. But then there are the benefits I’ve experienced which, like anything high risk, blow everything else out of the water. It’s growth like nothing else, and not just professionally. You can feel yourself pushing against the boundaries of what you think you’re capable of, everyday. You tap into your innate sense of agency everyday, which makes you more assertive and less doormat-ive. You’re privy to incredible conversations with fascinating people who will never make podcasts or write newsletters and are, therefore, chock-full of insights only a handful of people will get to receive. You can catalyse changes in ways that more defined roles objectively can’t match.
I’m definitely still in the early stages of figuring out a role like this, but there’s a lot to be said for roles (and people) that let you do that instead of following a script. So yes, it’s definitely… interesting!
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