Leverage Weekly #67 - Managing contractors
tl;dr - Contractors are separate entities that need the right interface
It is possible to use the analogy of a machine to think about organizations. The organization itself is like a complicated spaceship. The seats in the spaceship are the positions. The different activities performed by people in the different seats are the roles. The seats are then connected together in various ways, sometimes defined explicitly in the form of policy, sometimes implicitly in the form of culture. This constitutes the organization’s structure.
On this model, contractors can be thought of as separate machines, sometimes with a single operator, that glide up next to one’s organization and hook in. Contractors are thus very different from employees. Employees are part of an organization’s culture. Contractors have their own organization and, thus, their own culture. Employees are part of an organization that have a particular mission. Contractors are, or are part of their own organization that inevitably has its own mission.
The independence of contractors is a source of many potential benefits. Rather than simply thinking of “contractor” as a special tax status, one can think about contractors as modular add-ons, meant to enhance the capacity of an organization without requiring changes to the organization’s culture, positions, or internal team dynamic. It thus becomes possible for an organization to quickly gain the capacity to do many things, sometimes unfamiliar things, with very little effort.
The big upsides of contractors — modularity, easy interoperability — are also the source of the biggest downside. If an organization’s values are well-chosen, those values will help equip it to accomplish its mission. Contractors, who have their own, distinct values, are, as a consequence, less optimally suited to pursuing one’s organization’s mission. For this reason, the best tasks for contractors are those that can be separated from the rest of the mission, such as accounting and website implementation.
Thinking of contractors as having their own machine, provides helpful guidance in terms of management. By default, don’t invite contractors to functions that build or depend on culture. Allow them to work on their own. Don’t weave them into the organization’s pre-existing schedule. Adjust the organization, at least to a degree, to match their workflows and schedules. Of course, there should be some give and take on both sides.
This underscores one of the benefits of being flexible as an organization. If one only works from 9 to 5, it may be too difficult to accommodate contractors who work outside regular business hours. One may want contractors to conform themselves to one’s organization’s schedule, and this makes sense to a degree. However, many skilled contractors will have their own idiosyncratic work styles and schedules. Being flexible importantly expands the range of contractors one can work with.
To be a successful contractor, one needs to develop autonomy. One has one’s own organization, so one needs one’s own culture, schedule, budgeting practices, and so forth. This can be quite difficult, which means that contractors who have a track record of success also likely have their own independent system. It is the existence of this system that makes it possible for organizations to work with them; a successful contracting relationship is a handshake between an organization and the contractor’s system, enabling the contractor to do great work.
The biggest challenge in managing contractors, apart from sourcing them and assessing their capacities, is managing expectations about possible employment. If a contractor performs well and has sufficiently overlapping values, they may want to be hired in an ongoing capacity. In that case, what matters is whether the activities of that contractor can be incorporated into the organization’s main work. If so, it may make sense to transition them from contractor to permanent hire.
Contractors are separate entities that need the right interface.
Last week was pretty quiet at Leverage. The main action was around the contractors, Anna and Cliff. Anna is helping the Quantum Biology Institute with fundraising; Geoff has been providing useful context and Oliver helped with pitch deck design. Cliff is helping the Leverage team investigate weak magnetic field effects in biology, which is helping to expand Leverage’s own exploration of quantum biology. Both of these engagements seem to be going really well.
Apart from that, the Leverage team has continued supporting QBI in various ways. This week’s presentation was on the topic of “assessing performance.” Assessing performance can be contentious, especially when many people on a team are experts in different things. Geoff presented a simple framework that helps to make the question of performance at least a little easier to tackle.
Over the past few months, Leverage’s expertise in the hard sciences has been steadily growing. Oliver has spent time examining biology and, more recently, physics. Geoff is doing a deep dive on quantum physics and electromagnetism. This progress has been especially stimulated by interactions with QBI on one hand and Cliff on the other. (Geoff’s work with the Quantum Biology DAO is also a contributor, naturally.) The good news is that the hard sciences, like the soft sciences, seem eminently tractable so far.
Otherwise, Melinda created a cool and professional contractor invoice template and re-budgeted for the year, given the addition of the contractors. Geoff and Oliver are still experiencing time dilation and while there are theories, it’s still pretty unclear why that happens. (For those unfamiliar with the term, “time dilation” is when it seems as though a very large amount of time has passed when only a small amount of calendar time has actually passed.)