A lot has been written about the importance of side projects, and creating dedicated time for them. Famously, Google has teams who spend 20% of their time on projects that are unrelated to their day-to-day jobs. The value of this is apparent: both Gmail and Adsense arose from said side projects.
20% free time wouldn’t work at Palantir
I don’t work in a company where taking one day off per week to work on passion projects would work. At Palantir, we intentionally bias towards giving people ownership over a scope of work they are barely prepared for. This means everyone is constantly pushing themselves, trying to grow. Everyone is laser focused on showing up for their customers today.
However, necessity is the mother of invention.
Because everyone is owning a scope of work that requires 110% of their current skillset, people are forced to come up with innovative ways to solve the problem in front of them.
As a leader, you can’t force innovation on your subordinates.
Unless you are going to join the team for a period of time, roll up your sleeves as an individual contributor, and think deeply about a problem for at least 24 hours, you are not going to come up with an innovative solution to a problem. So how could you possibly prescribe a solution to your subordinates?
You might be able to tell them how you’ve solved a similar problem in the past. You might have high-level recommendations for approaches. But your value as a leader is that you are removed from the minute and can see the forest instead of the trees. But that also means that you’ll never find the gold buried beneath the roots of a single tree.
So push decision-making to the edge.
The person who is closest to the content of the work should make the decisions about the work. On my teams, the person doing the work decides the content of the work. This is important for two reasons: (1) they know more about the work than I do, so I’m at an information disadvantage to them; (2) if it’s their idea, they’ll work harder to make their vision become a reality.
Some leaders might say “but what if my subordinates have the wrong idea?”. I say “great”.
If your subordinate has a bad idea or wants to build the wrong thing, you can ask questions about their idea. You can ask why they haven’t considered other approaches. You can point out flaws in their idea. If they still choose to pursue “the wrong thing”, one of two things can happen:
- They’re wrong, and they will learn as a result of this experience – this is an investment worth making, with few exceptions (e.g. where the decision is unalterable/unrecoverable)
- They’re right, and the outcome is superior than what you could have conceived of being true
Some of the most impactful projects that I’ve worked on have been successful because someone disagreed with me, and we chose their idea over mine. This is one of the most beautiful experiences for me at work, because I know I could not have done it myself.
My plea: build a culture where disobedience is expected
As a leader, it is so important to protect peoples’ ability to vote with their feet. If you try to coerce people into obedience, you will not only get less buy-in from team members, you also rob yourself of some of their highest conviction work.
Some of the most impactful products at Palantir were built in the nights and weekends by software engineers trying to solve their own problems.
One of the projects I was on was saved by my friend Edgar, who wanted to build a specific product for our customer. Everyone else on our 8 person team told him that he absolutely could not waste his time on that, we are all working too hard and there’s too much work to do that we need him to own instead. After a few days of lobbying the rest of the team, Edgar gave up. Not on the idea, but on convincing us. So he stopped joining team meetings for a few days, stopped responding to most emails. When he returned, he had finished the product he wanted to build. We were upset, but there was nothing we could do about it. So we decided to show the product to our customer – they loved it. Not only did the customer love it, but that product turned out to be exactly what we needed to save the next phase of our project (and only Edgar had the foresight to see it).
So please: push decisions as far to the edge as possible. Give as much ownership to the people doing the actual work as possible. And make sure that they all know that at lest 5% of their job is doing things that no one else thinks that they should be doing. Because that 5% of work is typically the highest conviction work, and sometimes, it’s the most beautiful thing created that year.
NB: please forgive the use of the word “subordinate”. There’s a whole discourse around the semantics of words like leadership, management, teammate, IC, manager, boss, subordinate, direct report… I don’t want to get into this discussion, so please interpret charitably