Clear or Certain?

On Monday we talked about the concept of "Right versus Rich." Today we will talk about "Certain" versus "Clear."

"Right" people need certainty. It is a psychological signature; you can see it in how they approach people, projects and their work in general. You want to find "certain" people if you are hiring for advanced technical research positions, scientists, financial analysts, compensation specialists or safety inspectors. You want people who display the "certain" signature for any job where getting it wrong costs lives or costs millions of dollars, and where the cost of getting right is always worth it.

"Rich" people live in the world of clarity. They understand that the world is an increasingly complex place, so they make a choice and stick with it as long as they can, even if they start to get data that the choice may not have been correct. Clarity people are needed for leadership, sales, marketing, human resources... pretty much any job other than ones noted above. Business is most commonly a "clarity" exercise more than a "certainty" exercise.

The last thing you ever want to do is put a clarity person in a certainty job, or vice-versa. You can test for whether a position is clarity vs. certainty by understanding where the job stands on the risk / reward scale:

Certainty Jobs: The risks associated with getting it wrong are higher than any potential rewards for getting it right. So if you designing a new drug, you can make millions by getting it right, but you can kill millions if you get it wrong. You need to be as certain as possible that the drug is safe before releasing it.

Clarity Jobs: The costs associated with doing the job wrong are lower than the rewards for doing it right. So if you are software designer in the HR space, you could lose some records and cause some heartache if you build in a bug, but you could make millions if there is acceptance of your product.

Let's look at a specific instance of this. Most software engineering leadership roles are clarity jobs filled by certainty people. As software grows ever more complex we learn that there is no way to make bug free code or perfectly feature rich, yet products fail to ship because the engineers find one more thing to fix or they want to get every last feature in possible. Since the signature of a good engineer is to be a "certainty" or "right" type, it is critical that you hire engineering management that is "clarity" or "rich" type. (I am of course speaking here about most software engineering, not civil, where getting it wrong costs lives.)

And remember, if you are hiring a star they are likely to be a certainty / right person than a clarity / rich person. Once you reach "star" status keeping your status is usually more important than keeping on the track that made you a star in the first place (ironically, the same defect plagues corporations). Make sure you check whether your new star is really willing to do what it takes to make the product ship, even if that means keeping their ego in check.

 

Comments

[Colin Kingsbury]

Jeff,

Last post you said, "It is rarely the case that a 'Right' employee works well for a 'Rich' boss."

This time around, you write, "Since the signature of a good engineer is to be a 'certainty' or 'right' type, it is critical that you hire engineering management that is 'clarity' or 'rich' type."

Does this mean that it's simply the fate of the world to have engineers fighting with their bosses?

;)

[Jeff Hunter]

You caught me Colin. And, yes, this is one reason that many engineering organizations are dysnfunctional, especially as they grow. Right people often don't respect the perspective of rich people, so engineers tend to not work well for people that are more focused on the bottom-line than the elegance of the solution. But I don't know that there is another way to do it.