Commanding Chaos

Sometimes, the ship has no captain. Sometimes it doesn’t even have a rudder. There’s a storm all about and nothing seems to make sense. You’re pretty sure this ship you’ve found yourself on isn’t going to reach its destination, at least not in one piece. In that situation, what should you do?

Well, the obvious answer is “abandon ship,” but just because it’s obvious doesn’t mean it’s correct. In fact, even in the situation I described, it still might be better to be on the rudderless, captainless ship than on no ship at all in the middle of the ocean.

Most of the time, you’re not going to literally be on a ship. But the analogy tracks for a lot of dysfunctional organizations. When you join a new company, team, school, or other organization, you join it with certain expectations of leadership. You expect your organization to be… well, organized. We picture a natural process of learning the ropes and acclimating to the new structure, then being able to contribute and produce valuable work thanks to that structure and the people in charge of it.

And then sometimes – maybe even often – what we get instead is chaos.

It’s a fact of life that not all organizations are run well. They don’t all have effective leaders. They aren’t all in periods of stability. Some of them are very much like rudderless, captainless ships. The people will create factions and cliques as they scramble to protect what they have – or even what they perceive to have. Some people are opportunists and want to turn that chaos into personal benefit at the cost of organizational harm. No one seems to be in charge, or at least you can’t be certain that who’s in charge today will be in charge tomorrow. It’s hard to do productive work because opinions around you all seem to differ on what “productive work” looks like – opinions that are guided primarily by those individuals’ own plans and schemes, and not what’s best for you.

In the best of times, you should always retain a healthy helping of agency over your own work, since outsourcing all decisions in your career is a great way to tank it. But when the chaos rises, you have to be even stronger. That doesn’t mean you should be like the vultures – opportunists who damage everything around them for short-term personal gain. You should strive for personal gain, yes. But in a way that helps those around you, for as long as they’ll accept it.

Remember: the ship will sink or it won’t. But for most people, the end result of their organization collapsing is the same as if they quit – they’ve lost their own position, and that’s it. If you join a company and it turns out that it’s a disaster, you can quit if you want. But until the paychecks stop cashing, it might be better to stay on and try to both provide and extract some value, the better to position yourself for the next stage.

So okay, practical advice time. You’ve joined an organization and it isn’t what it seemed. Chaos reigns. What should you do?

1. First, create boundaries. You’re going to want to avoid investing all of your time and energy into this new organization, because you need to have enough “you” left over in the week to plan your next steps, network, job hunt a little, etc. So first and foremost, make sure that you’re setting firm boundaries about availability, energy, and so on. Don’t work late, don’t take on extra projects, and definitely don’t let anyone pull you into their personal slice of the political pie.
2. Next, take an hour or so to get calm and ask yourself: “If this was a well-run organization, what would my job look like? What would I be doing to contribute, and what would success look like?” If you have trouble answering that, seek out assistance – network with other people in your position at other companies, or people who lead & manage that position. There are plenty of them, and networking with them is a great idea now, anyway. But stick with this exercise until you have a solid idea of what your role would look like if it was at a better org. Make it ideal – not just neutral. Don’t just picture an “okay” job, craft one you’d be really excited about.
3. Now, do that job. In the absence of anyone filling the void with actual certainty and saying “This is what you can do to contribute, be successful, and be recognized & rewarded,” just act as if someone handed you the role from Step 2. Whenever you don’t know something, make the best guess. Whenever you need approval for something, give it to yourself. Don’t wait for anyone to give you permission to do anything, because you won’t get it. Every day, do this job as if it were exactly what you were hired or recruited to do. But as you do it, pay special attention to Steps 4 and 5.
4. You’ve created the job you’ll do by default, but you aren’t going to die on any hills. The point of this is that 95% of the time, whatever you’re doing will be correct. But occasionally, someone will actually pop up and give you a real reason not to do something you’re doing. Occasionally, some vestige of real leadership will manifest and you’ll get actual feedback and direction. When that happens, be thrilled. Be extremely receptive, be grateful, and as quickly as you can pivot to include that new direction in your work. After all, that’s what you were hoping would happen in the first place! So don’t forget that some level of direction is what you’re seeking, even as you’re acting as if you’ll never get it.
5. You need to make at least 20% of your new job communicating about what you’re doing. This is a good idea anyway even in a well-functioning organization, but in this case, it’s serving two vital purposes: it’s building the value that you intend to take with you, and it’s covering your ass. In terms of building value – you want public visibility for the good work you’re doing because there’s no guarantee that it’s going to get used effectively once you hand it off. And there might not be anyone left to write you a letter or recommendation someday, so the more you communicate, the more your work becomes its own letter of recommendation for the future. And in terms of covering your ass – this should be obvious, but remember the vultures I mentioned earlier? Don’t give them anything. Don’t let them take credit for your work, don’t let them misconstrue your actions, and don’t let them drag you into their politicking. Stay in the sunlight, do everything publicly. Create email chains instead of phone calls, with multiple people on them. Do your work in publicly accessible file-sharing systems. Document frequently. Save things to your own computer. Stay above reproach by always keeping your door open, so to speak.

If you follow that action plan, it won’t fix the organization. But it won’t damage it either – and while you’re there, you’ll actually be contributing to both the org and your own development. In the best-case scenario, the organization gets the leadership it needs, and that leadership has plenty of evidence that you’ve been an awesome team player even during chaotic times. In the worst-case scenario, the organization tanks anyway, but you’ve still got a body of valuable work you’ve contributed and your own personal time wasn’t wasted. You’ll be able to show your next leader what you were capable of as if you were working in a well-functioning organization all along.